AIBU to think telling your partner something I told you in confidence makes you a bad friend?

@Ifiwere my husband is my closest friend, so yes, I would tell him. But I would also trust him not to embarrass you by mentioning it.

Exactly, no good the friend helping you bury a body if they go home and tell their DH.

No if a friend tells me something in confidence it’s in confidence between the two of us. I do tell my DP some things, more as a support for me, never gossiping. But never a really private thing.

I’ve had some serious past traumas and sadly over the years I discovered my best friend I confided in told people. Her DH and via a bizarre conversation once when I realised another close friend of my friend was trying to be supportive (failing miserably) on a private matter they should not have known about.

id be ok if a friend said to DH oh she’s got a few family problems at the moment, or oh it’s personal stuff from her past or oh it’s a private medical thing. But not all of the details.

It's been really interesting to see. I think there's a middle ground between telling your SO everything and never telling them a thing, but there's been a lot of very intense, derogatory comments about women's marriages, declarations that their husbands don't care what they're saying, that their husbands are lying to them, schadenfreude at stories of a husband lying to a wife who told him everything, name calling, and other very high emotions.

There's even people saying that a husband should collude to keep another man's affair secret, and not tell his wife about it, even if she's good friends with the wife who's being cheated on.

So the husband should lie to his wife, cover up for his friend doing something unethical, and allow an innocent woman to be exposed to STIs, and morally if not legally be raped by her husband because she doesn't have the information to give informed consent? Honestly, I'd be disgusted in my husband if he did that, and valued his loyalty to his awful friend over his loyalty to me, and the morally right thing to do.

I'm surprised to see pp defending a husband doing that.

There is an old saying that goes "a good friend will help you bury the body". The same with keeping a confidence.

I recently discovered a friend was going home and telling her husband personal things I’d been discussing with her. I’ve since stopped telling her anything. My other friends and I know that what is said between us remains only between us.

Oh be honest with yourself. This thread has nothing to do with women being honest with their husbands, it's all about women giving themselves a free pass to gossip about their friend's intimate details to their husbands.

I'm wondering if the people who share everything with their partners have different conversations with friends to I have. I can't imagine coming home from a coffee date with a friend and telling him all about Sue's infected pore in her groin due to an ingrowing hair in her bikini line or that Alice has decided to try the coil as she bled for 6 weeks on the pill.

There's the mundane too - my partner doesn't want to know that Natalie was feeling a bit bleugh as she didn't sleep great the night before and woke up with a massive spot on her chin that morning and had an important meeting that morning looking like a teenager.

There's also the big and the scary, the waiting for mammogram results, going to a memory clinic with a parent, the waiting for ADHD assessments, the wondering how they are going to keep affording for them to not work and not knowing how they could work for various reasons. There are things I hear and see that I stay quiet about, I've noticed boxes of medication in people's recycling before and have enough understanding about what they are used for.

Yanbu.
I wouldn't tell my dp something a friend told me in confidence. It's none of his business.
I don't 'do' gossiping, which is what it would feel like if I repeated private information about my friends.

My friends know I care about them by making g sure that anything they say to me in confidence is kept just like that. If the partner of the cheating spouse came to me then I would show her the support my friend asked for, I don’t need to blab to my own husband to do that. That would just be gossiping. My husband is the same. My husband is a grown man with his own emotional intelligence. He doesn’t need me to tell him how best to ‘approach a situation’ and since a situation that involved a friend having it away with someone else would have nothing at all to do with either of us, he would t need to approach anything.

Different people and all that - if my close friend told me something in confidence I wouldn't share with the OH. But there are things I tell my OH that I know are not told in confidence.

But at the same time if I tell my close friend something and I'd rather not have their OH know, I'd categorically ask that it is not shared with OH, which translates as strictest confidence.

It really depends what it was. If it was something very very personal (something sexual/medical) wouldn’t tell a single person. However, if it was just a bit of guess what such and such said about her work friends I probably would. If explicitly told not to tell anyone (even DH) I wouldn’t.

Massively depends.

If you havent specifically asked me to keep something secret, it wouldnt occur to me not to tell DP

If you tell me a secret it becomes my burden too. And if It was something I needed to talk about - maybe if I was worried about you id tell DP.

That said i defo wouldn't gossip or joke about it. I just dont keep secrets from DP as a general rule

You are probably right.

Sadly it is. They simply dont care about others people's right to choose who their private information is shared with.

I love all the casual misogyny on this thread.

Women who share most things with their husbands are these deluded little wives who are desperate to encourage a truthful relationship with their husbands who are all running around behind their backs concealing secret affairs and the like.

Some people on here have very fertile imaginations. The truth is much more boring.

Im allowed to tell my husband about my mate Jane's sti because courts dont make spouses testify in court.

🤣🤣🤣

Spousal privilege is about the likelihood of unreliable testimony - fear of family/financial harm.

Not an excuse to gossip!

Spousal privilege in a courtroom has genuinely nothing to do with this. That's about not being compelled to testify against your spouse in a criminal trial, it's not some general principle that married couples are entitled to know everything about everyone in each other's lives. Completely different thing.
And it's not about "ranking" a friend above a spouse either, nobody's saying that. It's about whose information it actually was to begin with. It was the OP's. Not her friend's, not her friend's husband's. Her friend was told something in confidence, as a friend, and passed it on anyway. That's not the same as your example of discussing your own reaction to a conversation, that's about your own feelings, this was someone else's personal information, being handed over without her knowledge or say in it.
You can be each other's sounding board and closest confidante and still not be entitled to information that was never yours to share in the first place.

This 👆 telling your husband and telling him it’s confidential sounds normal to me.

No one comes between husband and wife. They can't even be made to testify against each other. Its regarded as on a parr with incriminating yourself. They are joined as one in law. I never assume anything would be kept secret from someone's spouse and wouldn't ever presume to encroach on that or expect to be ranked higher than the spouse in anything including what they choose to talk about. You might for example discuss with your spouse how you responded to a conversation with a. n. other, that they weren't present for, by way of exploring if you responded well. Your spouse is your sounding board and chief confidante. I don't think she's done anything wrong.

So so weird

Or the secret family he has on the side. MN threads are full of women that thought their marriages were made in heaven until they discover he's been messaging another woman/man or he's been boffing the twenty year old office temp.

I can't decide whether these women who believe they are one with their husbands and he tells them everything are completely delusional or just say that crap to excuse themselves being interminable gossips.

In which case why wouldn't he ask for confirmation from his friend that is okay to share his friends private concerns?

She has no shame. I value her as a friend, not a confidante.
I really don't think some people can be trusted with keeping things to themselves....as this thread proves.