Theo Hartley — The Human PLAYBOOK
Relationships & Attraction

Should your partner know all your secrets?

Let me save you the scroll. The short answer is: "No, but..."

For the long answer, you'll have to read.

People searching for love and people searching for a relationship (two different groups, by the way) often miss the meaning of the word "intimacy."

People feel that if they told the person they just slept with some "personal" things, they've built intimacy with them.

It doesn't work like that.

Intimacy is the ease of being yourself in the presence of another person — and that feeling takes a very long time to settle in.

Your secrets are part of it, but your secrets are also the bricks of your private world, and part of that world must remain yours and yours alone.

Only you know what you did in the past — and more importantly, what led to it and what the circumstances were.

Only you can judge your own past fully and fairly. Only you know, in your bones, that you are not the same person you were half a year ago, or five years ago.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't share personal things. It matters enormously that your partner feels they know you more deeply than anyone else in the world. But nobody has released you from that dry, vital little word: proportion.

And I promised the long answer, so here it is:

Your partner does not need to know all your secrets. But they should know more of your secrets than any other human in the universe — except you.

Capisce?

finally, one for the road:
remember, your true secrets will be reflected not in your biography, but in your day to day behavior