Being in a relationship with someone usually means being upfront and honest with them—usually. Sometimes, there are couples who, for whatever reason, choose to keep things to themselves in certain situations and topics. While some couples feel that everything should be up front and in the open, there are others who feel there are certain things that should be left unsaid. Maybe it’s something in their past, or, maybe it’s something that they feel will do nothing but piss their partner off—so, they keep it quiet. From the big to the small, people are sharing that one secret they keep from their significant other and, why they decide to do it.
1.
I hate her homemade spaghetti sauce. It’s been 14 years, why tell her now?
2.
My wife’s dad passed away less than a week after a hip replacement.
I visited with him the day he got home from the procedure and he told me everything was going well but he was scared about the blood thinner injections he would have to give himself over the next four days.
When we were cleaning out his house I found the four unused blood thinner syringes and threw them away without saying anything.
3.
I inherited a few million from my mother who died when I was a child. I’ve mostly left it alone because there wasn’t anything I wanted that I couldn’t just get with some elbow grease.
Once my SO and I are at the cusp of doing the house-and-kids thing I will let him know so he can stop worrying about earning enough to put a down payment on a new home.
4.
About eight years ago I discovered my wife’s sister’s reddit account accidentally. It was a variation of a username she’d used for AIM before, but with different numbers and no underscore (the numbers were a significant date to her though). There were too many coincidences in her posts for it not to be her.
She was posting on the relationship advice subreddit. Her (now ex-) husband was abusive. We’d known something was off about him, but couldn’t really put our finger on it. I created another account that I only accessed from incognito mode to send her encouragement to leave, and to ask her family or friends (but kinda steered her towards us) for help. She didn’t want to impose or be a burden on any of them (we’d just had a kid, and I make a bunch of money but we live well within our means so you wouldn’t think this based on appearances, so it was an understandable concern). I slowly, over several weeks and several different posts she made, convinced her that it’s possible her family realizes something isn’t quite right and would not consider it a burden to help her out.
After their divorce I deleted that account. Nobody will ever know that the random internet stranger who was weirdly persistent in encouraging my SIL to reach out to her family for help and leave her abusive marriage was actually me.
5.
That raccoon you hit with the mower wasn’t fine. I beat it to death a shovel to put it out if its misery.
She was in her 3rd trimester and was very emotional. I couldn’t tell her she’d basically cut its rear legs off.
6.
When going to the store one day my SO asked me last second to take our 3 Y/O daughter. I was already in the car so my SO strapped her in. She was oddly quiet the whole car ride and i acvidentally went in the store without her because of it. I remembered after being in the store only about 45 seconds but immedietly left the store to get her. I was so embarrased someone would notice so i went to a completely different store. Now it scares the shit out of me and even when i KNOW i dont have one of my kids i always check behind me before getting out of the car. One of the worst feelings ive ever had and even now i get sick to my stomach thinking about it.
7.
Sometimes when I make his favorite homemade chicken tenders.. I use mayo in the dredge before I flour it…….. He would literally keel over and die if I told him this. It would ruin his favorite dinner. We both fucking hate mayo but damn if it doesn’t make a good dredge.
8.
My wife doesn’t know how deathly afraid of being alone I am. Like…it really, truly scares me to my core. Not being alone like having alone time…that doesn’t bother me…but the idea of spending my life alone is terrifying to me. I sometimes feel like I put up with things I shouldn’t, because I love her and worry so much about being alone or having her leave me. I’ve spent nights pretending to sleep so that she won’t know that thinking about it keeps me up at night.
9.
That I was kicked out of the army. All she and her family know is that at one point in my life, I was in the army. She’s seen my beret so I guess that’s enough proof for her.
I can’t imagine it would destroy us but I don’t just drop information like that on people.
10.
I have a lot of really, REALLY unusual kinks/fetishes that I will never tell my wife about. She likes to think of herself as “kinky,” because she’s into moderate BDSM, while she thinks I’m more into plain vanilla sex. She’s expressed disgust and disdain when various, more unusual sexual kinks have been brought up online, in movies or on various TV shows, and I’ve never clued her in that I share some of them.
11.
I have a brother that’s a registered sex offender in another state. From that brother I have 7 nieces and nephews. I don’t mention it because I have no reason to be in contact with that part of my family.
12.
My SO’s father used to always give her quarters growing up (he has since passed) and now every time someone in the family finds a quarter they think of him looking down on them… it’s sweet.
Before we moved into our first home, I snuck in and hid quarters in obscure places all over the house. She’s still finding them and she likes to leave them in the spot she found them as a reminder. It always makes her smile and I’ll never tell.
13.
I knew my girlfriend bought me slippers for christmas a few weeks in advance, and instead of telling her I just talked more about how much I needed some slippers. It made her extra excited for me to open something that I wanted/needed so much, I wouldn’t want to ruin that memory for her.
14.
One night I decided I wanted to take a sick day the next day and play some Doom, I had been freshly dating my then SO, current Fiancee and didnt want her to think I was lazy, so I told her I had an upset stomach too.
At the time, the company I worked for sick leave policy was that you rang up, spoke to a registered nurse, they gave some advice and logged your absence, it was pretty good to be honest.
Well as you can imagine, I wanted to sell the lie. So I rang, told them I wasn’t well and specifically had a stomach ache, she asked some questions like “which side is it on, how bad is it out of 10” etc.
I answered COINCIDENTALLY with whatever side my appendix was on, you might be able to get this going.
They said I should monitor it and call back in an hour and let them know how I’m feeling, so I did this. I rang back, said I still wasn’t well and the pain had increased. This lead to a shocked nurse who i happened to have on speaker phone at the time tell me to go to the hospital, my appendix was playing up. My SO heard and insisted she take me to the hospital. I didnt want to tell her I was lying so, off we go to the hospital.
We get to the hospital and she does most of the talking whilst I play it cool, telling them its no biggy.
They rush me in through emergency, take some blood tests and tell me that they’ll prep me for surgery.
At this point I started to question myself and realised I should’ve come clean at home, but now? Now its too late. I’m in too deep. Strap in Michaelscarnshrute, we’re going for surgery.
I stay overnight, get healthy dose of pain killers and watch The Shield all night, then the next day the cut me op[en.
I remember asking the surgeon as he talks me through whats about to happen if theres a chance of me dying. He says probably not, but the chance is never 0.
Fast forward to the next day, I dont have an appendix and my adventure to get 1 day off work results in me getting a week off work.
My partner and I have been together for 4 years and she will NEVER know.
15.
I shut down internet whenever my SO is talking trash on CoD. Not because I mind, but because he does it in such an obnoxious way. He can go on for minutes at a time. Then he comes over to me very calmly and asks; ‘Is the internet down for you too?’
16.
He thinks I’m allergic to salmon.
I just don’t like salmon… he wanted to make it for me on our first “cooking date” and I didn’t want to come off as ungrateful or picky so I said I was allergic.
It’s been 4 years and he still tells waiters I’m allergic so there isn’t cross contamination. Sigh.
17.
I really didn’t like our wedding.
He loved our wedding and often brags about how close to perfect it was, better than he ever thought, etc. He cherishes that memory, but I had a pretty terrible time. Part of it was because I had to put so much of it together, me and my friends, and he just showed up and enjoyed the party. I ran every decision by him, of course – like what to eat or what kind of officiant to get, but when it came to ordering the food and finding and hiring the officiant, it was all me. I couldn’t really enjoy it the same way because I felt so responsible for everything going OK and people enjoying it.
But the biggest part of the issue is that I just remember it as a lonely experience. It was very small as we wanted it, with just each of us having our four closest friends. But all my friends were locals I see all the time, and they were mostly preoccupied with entertaining their kids and otherwise enjoying themselves at just another event I hosted. He had his friends come in from all over the country, even one from Europe, and it was such a big happy reunion for him.
As I remember it, almost nobody talked to me at the wedding. Although I am sure there was more than I remember, I know nobody gave any toasts. I don’t recall anyone even saying something as simple and acknowledging as “congratulations” or “what a lovely ceremony.” And I definitely remember at one point the officiant (who stuck around for part of the reception), whom we barely knew, looked over at me alone and broke away from his conversations to come over to me just to make some idle conversation and keep me company. I also remember standing there looking at my phone, checking some sports scores, just to keep myself entertained and look like I had something to do.
I would have loved it if we could have had a wedding that was an order of magnitude bigger. So I could have my friends and relatives who I haven’t seen in ages and only get to see when we have excuses for events like that. I bragged about our $200 food bill for the whole event, having a friend take all the pictures, and my $50 dress, but I hate the thought now of how cheap and throw away our wedding kind of was.
What really drove it home for me was that a couple who came to our wedding got married about a year later with a very similar affair (though bigger). She even wore a dress similar to mine, and she said our wedding was an inspiration for her. That made me feel better about our wedding. I knew they were having another wedding later in the year where she lived, for her friends and relatives, and I assumed that would be a smaller event just to include those folks. Later, I saw on Facebook that it was a real-deal beautiful wedding, with dancing, attendants, professional photographs, her looking utterly stunning in a gorgeous full-length gown, and dozens of amazing pictures. So, our wedding was the template for their “forget about it” wedding. She didn’t even post any pictures of the smaller wedding at all. It made me so sad.
I know people love small, inexpensive weddings here, and the idea is that anything else cheapens the love the event is meant to celebrate. But maybe, for some people, something can be too simple, too small, and maybe even too “intimate.” I wanted to celebrate with my extended family and friends – not every single bloody one of them, but maybe 20 of them. I reduced the whole thing so much to its essence that it didn’t feel like much of anything at all.
I don’t want to spoil the wonderful memory for my husband, particularly since I labored so hard to make exactly that for him.
18.
Hmm, I did live with a man for a year – had a bit of a gay phase.
I’ve told her I was bisexual (had some man crushes, can see the appeal of Connor Mcgreggor, Jake Gillenhaal, Tom Hiddelsdon, Chris Pratt, Robert Downey Jr) but I said I’d never really gone the whole way and wasn’t thatinterested in it.
Also I was sexually assaulted and I once got an std, and I can’t taste her cooking because I did too much coke and lost my sense of smell.
19.
She knows I spent time in a local mental institution as a child, but not why. The truth is because I don’t know either, I have a fragmented memory of my childhood before the age of 11 and basically nothing before the age of 7. I’m fairly sure I was under the care of the institution between the age of 7-9 but I only recall the name of the guy who ran the place and a day trip we had once to go bowling.
As a guess I suffered from some form of psychosis, but I’d rather not dive too deep into it and she would probably pressure me into finding out what happened. My parents never speak of it so that tells me all I need to know.
20.
That I absolutely hate her coworker. He’s a good friend to her when they are at work and they don’t see each other outside of work, except for a couple times every few months. He likes to make suggestive comments to her though, and she plays it off as a joke. After talking to a couple of her other coworkers I know he’s not joking. I trust her 100% that’s why I haven’t said anything, but I would love to smack that dude upside his head.
h/t: AskReddit.