This post has been inspired by a number of current and recent active posts and about relationships and friendships (both explicitly related and more broadly) which have left me thinking. I
've noticed a pattern on here where when someone posts about talking to a friend or family member about something that happened in their relationship, or even just venting on this forum, they're quite frequently met with "we're adults, we don't discuss our relationship with other people", "talking to anyone outside the relationship is a betrayal", "that's childish/immature", "you're airing your dirty laundry." And then there's the flip side which I find equally frustrating, women who express concern about what they're witnessing in a friend's relationship get told to keep it to themselves, stay out of it, it's not your place. I do get why people say that, we've all seen friendships fall apart because someone said something about a partner, things got patched up between the couple and the friend who spoke up is suddenly the problem. But I think we should sit with how depressing that actually is rather than nodding it through as good advice, because in practice it means watching a friend be treated badly and saying nothing, it means women being quietly trained to disengage from each other and treat their friendships as spaces where real honesty isn't on the table.
It also assumes that talking between partners will actually lead somewhere useful, and that just isn't true for everyone. People are not all built the same way emotionally or psychologically, and some people (and yes I will say particularly many men, many through no fault of their own rather because of socialisation and norms and perhaps even a nature element - caveat 'not all men', some women too etc before that comments made ... ) genuinely do not have the tools to recognise when their behaviour has been a problem, which means that conversation can go nowhere no matter how many times you have it. And even setting that aside, if someone is a confident communicator who tends to reframe things in their favour, sitting alone with them to hash something out is not a level playing field. I've seen it with my own friends, yes from talking about their relationships. You go in feeling completely clear about what happened and somehow come out convinced your reaction was the unreasonable part. That isn't resolution, that's just whoever argues better or whoever is more worn down losing. Having someone outside that say "no, that does sound off" is how people stay grounded in their own reality. And it works the other way too, sometimes the person who's behaved badly can only clock it through an outside perspective, their partner saying it isn't reaching them but a friend reflecting the same thing back does. Obviously sometimes couples talk things through and it works fine, but that can't be assumed as a given for everyone and telling people it's the only acceptable route ignores a lot of reality.
This all has such clear patriarchal roots to me and I don't think that's accidental. The whole thing is very "good wives keep things behind closed doors" and that idea just gets passed around as though it's obvious relationship advice without anyone really examining it. At the most serious end, coercive control almost always involves cutting someone off from outside perspective and support, and abusive partners frame any outside discussion as betrayal because outside perspectives threaten their ability to define reality for their partner. When wider culture casually repeats that same message it does that work for them. But even outside of abusive relationships, the idea that the romantic partnership should be the only real place for emotional intimacy keeps women emotionally dependent on their partners and quietly devalues female friendship, frames women talking honestly to each other as gossip or disloyalty. There are threads on here where the assumption is that anything a woman tells a female friend will automatically be passed on to her husband, like female friendship is just a staging post for information that really belongs to the men involved. Women who have strong friendships and actually talk to each other are harder to isolate, and making women feel that talking is disloyal keeps them from realising how much their experiences overlap and from building the kinds of relationships that would actually support them.
I'm not saying everyone needs to dissect every argument with their friendship group or that privacy is wrong (very explicitly because i fear people will get caught up in that accusation) People vary, comfort levels vary, some people are just more private and that's fine. But there's a big difference between choosing not to discuss your relationship and telling other people they're childish or disloyal for doing so. Treating "we keep it between us" as the gold standard of a mature adult relationship does harm, from making people feel guilty for having a normal conversation with a friend all the way through to keeping people in genuinely dangerous situations, and I think it's worth examining where that idea comes from and who it serves before repeating it as though it's just common sense.
AIBU?