Are you keeping a secret?

When I was working, someone (adult or child) sometimes confided something so dark they begged me to keep it secret.

Some secrets cannot be kept. They are the worst kind.

No, I was brought up among secrets, so no.

If anyone is interested, there's a website called PostSecret, where people send their secrets anonymously.

Talking to a very 'proper' friend I referred to something another friend had done. I thought it was common knowledge and it was foolish rather than bad.
She was horrified and dropped us both.

sweetpotatopie

If anyone is interested, there's a website called PostSecret, where people send their secrets anonymously.

Good gosh!

Not a chance.

I've kept the secret of my old friend's affair for over 30 years .
I'm good at keeping secrets .

I have had to keep a lot of secrets in my work and some in private. It amuses me when something later becomes common knowledge and someone says to me " Did you know about this" and I reply yes and they say "but you are so chatty" They cannot understand the concept of being able to be chatty about everyday things but never speak about the secret things. It actually works well , because peoples assumption that I would talk about something, means that they rarely ask me a question about the secret things so can be quite easy to say nothing in those cases.

I think families have always had secrets especially when there was shame and laws relating to incest, abortions, homosexuality.
There is an interesting book, Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets by Clair Wills. She is a British academic who found her own Irish family as a source for considering secrets. It's very readable.

I have a couple of secrets about my life that will go to the grave with me. And yes, I know a friend's secret too. It's been difficult to keep that to myself but I have succeeded.

Yes I hold many secrets, some of which I wished I didn't know, but my lips are sealed.

Yes. I know too much about my [deceased] step father which would upset my half sister and half brother [his children].

So I keep it to myself for their benefit not mine - because I resent him for having to have this in my head.

Ditto: I lost a dear friend as what I knew would have hurt her badly. I had to let the friendship drift and I keep it to myself.

Most of the things I do not mention to other people refer to me and I have no desire to tell them to anyone. Does that make them secrets? Perhaps not, as calling something a secret suggests that it is something you would talk about if you could.

Once in the heat of the moment I did tell a good friend something that proved in the longer term to be trivial. I was un able to forget it, because she had the knowledge I had given her and thought it important to me. I was stuck, because if I said anything, even to tell her the event was trivial, The fact that I needed to tell her that would only emphasise its importance.

I was deeply distressed wen she died suddenmt a few years later, but gave a sigh of relief that a piece of trivial information could be disposed of.

Firstly, yes I do have secrets that I will take to my grave.

Having said that, in my extended family, the identity of the father of a pregnancy from a youthful love affair was never spoken about or known, a big secret - until one day at dinner my MIL who by then had advanced Alzheimer’s said “I know who XXX’s real father is!” with a cheeky smile, and she then promptly said the full name out loud. She was completely unaware of having caused the consternation it caused.

My last sentence should be …having caused the subsequent consternation.

My brother was very good at keeping certain secrets. We found out after his death that he had lent out thousands of pounds to so called friends and getting some of that money back was very difficult. So many others concerning other people.

I know that the son of a family friend ( no longer in contact so I can mention it here) has a different biological parent to the one he believes is the parent.

A fair few of my own

Yes - two. One of which I’ve never divulge to prevent hurt. The secret/incident didn’t directly involve me. The other one (which did involve me directly) I did tell my husband of 4 or 5 years ago and some friends I have told since (this secret was 50+ years ago!).

I have my own secrets which I would always keep to myself, unless dementia causes me to let them out.
I'm not so good at keeping other peoples' secrets, people have wormed things out of me in the past. Some secrets are so trivial that I can't understand why they are secrets at all.

I've had people tell me all kinds of things over the years, from the basic to the very serious, and not once have I ever told anyone else, no matter what the secret is, even after they've died and they have no family or friends to spread things.

Honey rose.
Same here.
I only told my husband 50 years after the incident. His reaction was typical male. I wish I hadn’t bothered.

If someone tells me something in confidence I wouldn't even tell my husband.

My incident was from my life experience. Not pleasant either. I told not a sole until recently just got on with my life.

I never tell, and sometimes I will hear what it is and still say nothing. I have a couple of secrets, if you can call them secrets of my own which relate to my past, which really is no one else's business.

Everyone has secrets.

I have secrets. My own and other people's. They go no further than me.