When it comes to honesty in relationships, there are a lot of reasons why I prefer full disclosure to being on a need-to-know basis. There’s a difference between privacy and keeping someone in the dark. I don’t like being in the dark and I don’t like being condescended to in that, “The less she knows, the less upset she’ll be” kind of way. As Darci Ratliff said on The Black Table:
“...if you apply the rules of the game to a woman who's not playing the game, she's going to be very, very upset. Like, insanely upset. Like, mad as fucking hell, alright? We're all adults here. We know what we've gotten ourselves into and we don't need you to fucking hold our hands and tell us some bullshit lie. It's totally unnecessary and extremely condescending…”
To me, total honesty means you confront problems when they arise instead of pretending they don’t exist or, even worse, pretending they’re not that big a deal even though the other person is clearly upset.
Over Christmas, my mother was bugging me about why I wasn’t planning for the future more. “If you like being on your own too much,” she had the nerve to say, “You might get to be alone more than you think.”
I prefer to focus on the present and make sure that a strong foundation exists so that, if and when what I want for the future happens, I/we will be ready for it. If you spend all your time with your head in the clouds, where everything is perfect and rosy and romantic, that’s when problems come up and get ignored. There are things that are appropriate in the context of friendship and things that are not, especially if you’re in a serious relationship with someone else.
When I first starting dating J, my boyfriend back in the late 1990s, he was getting extremely come-hither emails from the girl he dated before me. She clearly wanted to get back in his pants. I was not a happy camper. But he handled it well. Once he got past the intoxicating ego massage part of being hit on by someone who wanted him to rock her world just one more time, he saw how uncool it was and told her to back off. He held the line and she stopped with the flirty flirty. We were good after that.
J and I were talking about this over lunch today. He helped me draw some lines where I was having trouble seeing straight enough to draw them myself. Some situations have less to do with trust—he was never going to run off and nail that girl again—and more to do with comfort. How important is your partner’s comfort to you? At what point does that comfort level come before the demands of the ego?
“If I’d kept you in the dark and didn’t discourage her very strongly from sending those emails, you would have been well within your rights to dump my sorry ass,” he said. And he was right. Because he called her off early and decisively, I never worried about whether he needed that kind of excitement outside the relationship, or whether the behavior was indicative of something that might pop up again in the long term.
It comes back to full disclosure. I want to know what I’m getting into before I go too far. That way I can figure out what I’m comfortable with and whether I want to move forward.
I’m trying to decide.
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2 comments:
totally. you have to stick to your boundaries. if someone who says they care about you keeps doing something that makes you uncomfortable, how much respect is there?
"When it comes to honesty in relationships, there are a lot of reasons why I prefer full disclosure to being on a need-to-know basis." I share your preferences. But not everyone does. And whoever we might be talking about here might have a history of relationships with people who didn't favor full disclosure.
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