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

You don't know that for certain! See my oost re my BIL. My Sister is completely in the dark and you could be too!

Or course not, no man would be! That's why I told her "in confidence", I was hoping she could offer me advice. I was horrified when I realised she had told her "best friend". I told her about him making passes and suggesting we meet up and she brushed it off saying, "That's just his sense of humour."

My fingers hovered over the voting bar for quite some time, the results reflect that and the first 2 opposing posts nail exactly why .
It's a toughy , but my answer depends on whether they are all part of the same friendship group .

Agreed. Keeping a friend’s confidence is not keeping secrets from your husband. It’s not YOUR secret.

Shows how many gossips there are. I find you can pick them pretty easily as the same type also tell others.

A good friend of mine confided in me when she had an abortion over 20 years ago. She is now a good friend of my husband too. To this day I have not told a soul. It is nobody’s business but hers.

I think it would be horrible to do anything else.

So you'll happily betray your partner's trust by sharing private, embarrassing information you know he'd be horrified to have anyone else know about...and yet you're horrified when she betrays your trust, by telling her partner?
That really doesn’t make sense.

Although her partner is clearly a perv and more fool her for putting up with him. Gross!

So your partner was fine with your sister knowing he was impotent?

In your OP title you say you told your friend “in confidence” but then in the post you say you told them something that “was clearly personal”.

For me these are different. For me, in confidence means you’ve explicitly said don’t tell anyone. I would respect that including my DH.

But if you’ve told me “something personal” without saying it’s confidential, then I might well tell DH - there was no request to keep it secret and I would trust him not to spread it further.

It also does depend what it is IMO, something “clearly personal” could cover a whole scale of things, at one end of the scale it could be that you’d been raped or abused say which I absolutely wouldn’t share. Or it could mean that you are having joint pain issues or are at risk of redundancy, say, which are also personal but I wouldn’t see as to be kept strictly to myself (ie telling DH would be ok).

I hate when people tell their spouses something told to them in confidence - and I have to say it is usually women who do that, men generally tend to keep quiet. I think it is called, "Pillow talk". I would never betray a confidence and, quite honestly, I don't think my husband would have been sufficiently interested anyway.

Yes, she is a bad friend. Unless you'd confided something like you'd committed murder, nobody should have been told.

I guess it depends on the context. For instance mutual friends separated, initiated by the wife. She told me certain things and over time watching the marriage implode there’s been anomalies in what she says to what he says, so it’s been discussed between DH and I.

but I certainly didn’t go running to him repeating the conversations either..

Secrets between each other, but disclosing a secret someone else has toldyou in confidence DOES NOT NEED TO BE SHARED TO YOUR PARTNER , its not your secret to share.

If a female friend told you about a gynaecological issue that she was undergoing medical treatment for, would you automatically tell your husband, even if she had told you in confidence?

Why would your husband need (or even want) to know that she had fibroids or endometriosis or heavy periods?

I'd be proud that I'd married a man who could keep his f*ng mouth shut and not betray a friend's confidence.

That he wasn't some wet blanket who felt he had to share his f*ng feelings all the time.

Women think - as evidenced here- they want a man who is like them (half of women here have no concept of confidentiality to a friend it seems) but they don't. Not really as such men are the types who don't step up in a crisis as the ability to keep a secret often goes with stoicism.

A man who has no duty to his friends has no duty to anybody else - including his own family.

OP I agree with you, but there are some odd people who think that they have to tell DH everything.

I wouldn’t keep a secret from DH that concerned him
in some way, my loyalty is with him. But the idea that I have to tell him private business of close friends that has nothing at all to do with him is plain odd.

I know years ago a friend had told me she was pregnant in confidence (early days), she bumped into DH and seemed to assume he would know. DH was understandably baffled as to what she was on about. Interestingly we got closer friends after that.

And the award for the most batshit post of the year goes to...
😂
Nothing comes between husband and wife.
That's the funniest thing I've read all year.

You put it far more politely than I could. I was too busy 😂.

You'd be proud that your husband colluded in another man lying to his wife (your close friend), cheating on her, exposing her to STIs, and raping her by deception? You think that your DH telling you about your friend being cheated on, so you can discuss how best to handle it - whether you inform her, or he tells her husband to come clean - is him being a wet blanket?

Well, to each their own, I suppose. Personally, I'd expect my DH to have more of a moral code than that. I would certainly expect him to tell me, as if nothing else, wouldn't want anything to do with her cheating prick of a husband anymore.
I wouldn't expect my DH to put 'bros before hos' as the misogynistic saying goes.

I don't understand the 'I tell my husband everything because I trust him' thing; your friend trusted you not to tell anybody but you did! It's a not very fetching mix of betrayal and naivety, and while you may have a weird fundamentalist view that a married couple are literally one entity that's certainly not how everybody sees it. If you've been told something in confidence then (barring extreme situations where disclosure is necessary to avoid serious harm), you keep your noise hole shut.

I'd be pissed off OP. I've kept secrets for my friends, because my husband doesn't need to know everything that's going on in someone else's life.

That's because you don't seem to understand that male loyalty to each other wins wars and protects the social tribe.
It is thus encouraged in places where it matters like the armed forces.

50% of women here have no understanding of this.

I get it on an instinctual level. I just know it.

I tell my husband everything unless I've been specifically asked not to tell anyone. In which case I don't and he understands that. If I havent been told not to tell anyone, I still don't tell anyone else, apart from my husband.

Ahh, so this is some weird sexist thing on your part, where you think all men must be stoic, macho, silent types, or else they're incapable pansy wimps? As if there's no reasonable middle ground?

Actually, male loyalty to each other results in patriarchy, gang-rapes they do together to bond with each other, other rapes and sexual assaults being covered up, general gang criminality, and women being treated as sexual objects by men who have more respect for each other than they do their wives (ETA: or any of the women in their lives).

It's not a good thing.

Yep. I'd be proud of him.
Though I think your 'rape' comment is ridiculous. Not only that but legally untrue.

It also suggests that you'd be happy for anybody-male or female-to be locked up for cheating.
Another ridiculous comment on this thread on a par with a husband and wife are a borg-like like entity with no autonomy of their own.

I mean, this is just really odd. You think male loyalty wins wars...that males start? You think male loyalty...protects the social tribe? Erm...

I'm not sure how a man covering up for his friend cheating on his wife (who is your good friend) does either of those things?

Then you say 50% of women have no understanding of this - when the question in the OP wasn't about male loyalty, but just whether women might share a friend's private news with their spouses?

And then you say you 'get it' on an instinctual level - get what? What do you just 'know'? That men need to prioritise their friends over their wives lest...society fall apart if they don't? It's a little bizarre.

I said morally rape, not legally. As in, if a person knows someone wouldn't consent if they knew the truth (that the person was cheating on them) and they hide the truth in order to have sex with them, it's morally rape. Any person who cheats on their partner, and then goes home to have sex with them, is morally (not legally) having non-consensual sex.

I'm sorry that you have such a misogynistic worship of male bonding above all else, and a disdain for women, and moral integrity. That's very sad.

Not telling your spouse something you’ve been told in confidence isn’t a question of priority. If my bloke’s friend is cheating I don’t need to know. It’s nothing to do with me.