ON FUN ~ Damaging Secrets...

Image courtesy stevendepolo via Flickr

At the age of 45, writer Regina Brett wrote a column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer listing 45 lessons that life had taught her thus far. As a breast cancer survivor, many of those lessons were learned the hard way. Five years later she added five more lessons rounding her list up to 50 and turned her popular list into a book called God Never Blinks. I found her list to be entertaining, inspiring and thought provoking. I thought I would go through each of her lessons learned and write about how that lesson has or has not come up in my own life, now that I am 40 and feel old enough to have finally learned something.

"If a relationship has to be kept a secret, you shouldn't be in it."

~ LESSON #14

Secret loves. Secret friends. Secret jobs. Secret lives. They can all be damaging and not worth all of that exhilarating effort to keep them under wraps. I have withheld the existence of certain relationships in the beginning from certain parties. Usually to make sure it is going somewhere worth sharing. But the intent is not to keep something from them because I don't want them to know - I just want things to be at a certain point before I share the news. Such as when venturing into a new online writing project. I want to get my feet underneath me before sharing my public work with family. Or developing a bond with a new person. I may hang out with them a few times before I mention a new friendship to my existing circle. It isn't a secret. It isn't harmful if they find out before I've gotten around to telling them.

What is harmful is turning that original temporary delay of information into an extended period of hidden facts. This happened to me once and I still regret the way I handled things. I had begun to date someone new in college. I kept this relationship a secret from one of my closest friends, because I knew that he would be jealous and have his feelings hurt. I was too chicken to break the news to him so I just avoided the issue altogether. I juggled two sets of friends and did what I could to keep them from interacting and spilling the beans. I felt like I was having a sordid affair. And although it was exciting, in the end my friend found out from someone other than me. Which hurt his feelings even more than that difficult but honest conversation would have done had I been adult enough to have it.

The new boyfriend didn't last very long. My friendship with my disgruntled pal did. He is a good friend and important part of who I am to this day. Luckily for me, he forgave my secret and let his pride take a back seat to the bond we have.

If you are keeping relationships a secret, it is best to decide which side is more important to you - the one you are secretly with or the one you are hiding it from. Because eventually those worlds will collide and you'll have to pick a side when things are exposed. And they will be exposed. At the most inconvenient times. If your existing relationships are are strong as you need them to be, they just might be able to survive whatever involvement you have been hiding. If the secret is a better option than what you've had all along, you had better make sure that secret is in it for the long haul and then go all in, cutting bait honestly with your prior world.

Secrets torment the soul. Keeping things out in the open is the easiest way to go. But humans like to make life more difficult for themselves. Hopefully the secret relationships you have don't go on too long before you learn things the hard way and live to regret them.