Marital Secrets We Just Don’t Keep

“Don’t soul-search and come to life-changing conclusions without mentioning the investigation to your partner!”   

~Juliet Janvrin & Lucy Selleck.  

We all have our plans, inner motives and selfish desires.  Besides these, we trust our partners with all sorts of ‘news’ often asking them their views.

It’s therefore almost unconscionable that we might come to some landmark position and not share it with them.  This has the hallmarks of betrayal all over it, for to forget to tell them is rank ill-consideration, but to hide the fact is tantamount to relational treason.

Still, some revelations do come at awkward times.

Trusting Our Partners with All Our Important Thoughts

Relational discernment is known in many ways, not least by sharing with our partners everything that reaches the threshold of the important.

We teeter between trust and betrayal on this entire subject.

Reliably inform our partners of the secret weavings and innovations of our minds and, though we risk their rejection of our ideas, we’ve ‘promoted’ them to a place that’s appropriate.  In this we find the basis of relationships is kempt in the moment.

Isn’t it fascinating that despite of our commitments—particularly as they pertain to marriage—what speaks louder than all are our actions and inactions.  The spoken commitment lasts only as long as both remember it and give meaning to it.

Sometimes it takes a great deal of courage to trust our partners with particular revelations.  Might they laugh or sneer or worse?  The partner who thinks like that might not deserve to hear it, but we should still bring it to them.

Still Room in the Heart for One Type of Secret

Space in life is a grand prospect—nobody can subsist in a cramped environment for long.

It’s important, then, that there is sufficient room for God to speak with and to us, that we may keep that sonnet of love, cherished it is for the special rapport extant between God and ourselves.  God allows such secrets—those things we’d be uncomfortable telling another soul (though commonly extroverted people do not have such inhibitions).

The difference between those things we choose to keep to ourselves and those secrets that ought to be divulged relates to both importance and potential affect.

Any secret with the potential to hurt another human being—above all others, our partners—should be confessed in safety for all.  After all, the domain of sin is set upon relational misdemeanours.

Let’s be careful what secrets we keep to ourselves.

© 2011, 2012 S. J. Wickham.