"Well of course I was going to tell BF"

[WarwickDavisAsPlates]

I originally wrote quite a long post detailing the entire situation and how this came up but it got too long.

So basically what I want to know is: if a friend told you something and said "but please don't tell anyone" would you think that included your OH?

And I've been to Denmark as well.

kinder I'm confused. Did your sister ask you not to tell anyone but you told your good friend anyway because she wasn't 'anyone' but then she did the same thing but that was wrong?

I think people need to get their heads around the fact that many people (I would say most) have people that they don't class as 'anyone'. Could be a partner, sister, brother, parent, grandparent, aunt or close friend. Even just a friend that lives so far away they don't think it'll be a problem or indeed on mumsnet. It only becomes a problem when assumptions are at odds and events collide and those assumptions are laid bare.

No, my friend knew I had been invited round because they had "news." We had speculated the "news" could have been a pregnancy or marriage.

When I got home I confirmed it was pregnancy because it would have felt odd to say, "I can't tell you what the news was." What I should have said, in hindsight (as I said above) was, "I can't tell you what the news was, but it is good," thereby leaving her to come to her own conclusions, but not breaking the confidence.

Having explained why it was sensitive information I assumed that saying "please don't tell anyone" was enough without adding caveats or explanations.

I told her because she half knew anyway and I was wrong to do that. She told someone who didn't know anything.

kinder I'm sorry but I think your splitting hairs there. You weren't supposed to tell, you justified it at the time because you'd already speculated about what the news could be and that she was a trusted friend.

Your friend might have felt that her mother was trustworthy, that the news had a degree of separation and quite honestly second hand confidences aren't as strong.

I'm not having a go at you. I just think you've drawn a completely arbitrary line in the sand.

I'm saying I was wrong to break the confidence in the first place.

I'm using this as an example of how not everyone will have had the conversation during the lifetime of their friendship regarding just who "anyone" includes, which some posters have suggested will/should have been had.

I had assumed (wrongly) that "anyone" meant just that, not "anyone except for..."

As it happens I did say, "please don't mention this to anyone as our siblings have friendship groups that overlap," so I had specified, but clearly not enough.

If you do not want anyone to know something, simply don't tell anyone at all.

Those that will gossip to you, will gossip about you.

IMO you should never ask someone to keep a secret from the person they love/share intimacy with/are the partner, husband, wife of etc. Relationships work on trust and keeping secrets can undermine trust however trivial they seem.

So we should never confide in our friends?

"So we should never confide in our friends?"

Not if we don't want to be responsible for destroying out friends' relationships, no. Apparently.

So we should never confide in our friends?

No, not if we want to keep something secret. Other people don't respect or value our own secrets, so it would be unfair to expect them to do so, no matter what they may promise. Not to accept that is a triumph of hope over experience IMO.

Someone paid to keep things confidential like a therapist would be a different matter.

For the five millionth time, not telling your partner gossip about people they don't even know is not some melodramatic act of "secret keeping" that will tear the relationship apart. It's just "not gossiping," and something any mature adult would do automatically without thinking.

The idea that human beings need to live in a box and never ever share anything about their lives bar to paid therapists is weird and deeply disturbing. Humans are innately social animals.

I tell my friends everything about me and I never have to worry they'll turn my personal problems into gossip because I trust them and know them to be decent, mature human beings.

My marriage was destroyed because my friend told me something deeply personal and extraordinarily sensitive and I failed to tell my partner.

Said no woman ever.

With you there Dixie.
If your relationship cant handle you keeping your friends confidence then you have a relationship issue.
(Then again, I always feel a bit suspicious of the 'we share passwords, check phones, emails, tell each other everything because we trust each other so much and have nothing to hide' view. The cynic in me thinks theres limited trust there.)

@WarwickDavisAsPlates

I originally wrote quite a long post detailing the entire situation and how this came up but it got too long.

So basically what I want to know is: if a friend told you something and said "but please don't tell anyone" would you think that included your OH?

Wow, this thread is four years old! Never mind, it is topical.

If someone told me something personal in confidence I would not tell my husband. I'm sure my husband would be grateful for that too! They generally don't want to hear tittle tattle.

If I confide something to someone I generally assume they will tell their husband or partner.

If I don’t want even them to know I will specify that, for example, “Please don’t tell anyone, including your DP/DH”

@ThornAmongstRoses

If I confide something to someone I generally assume they will tell their husband or partner.

If I don’t want even them to know I will specify that, for example, “Please don’t tell anyone, including your DP/DH”

Confidential means confidential to me. Why on earth would a husband/partner want to know anyway?

If it was something that involved violence/abuse obviously I would tell police or Social Services but I am not talking about that sort of thing; confidences are usually about personal problems. We have to be able to trust our friends.

I'm always dying to download the entirety of my day onto DH, so I always ask whether or not I can tell him. My default would be assuming I can't (and finding that really frustrating!) but sometimes people say I can as long as it doesn't go any further.

a lot of people (especially those of the more traditional type) think that culture dictates that anything told to one half of a spouse couple automatically includes the other half of the spouse couple (ie if you tell the wife then the husband will automatically find out and vice versa).
Not saying this is right or wrong just my observation.

Obviously that includes your husband.

I wouldn't tell anyone something I didn't want to risk eventually becoming public knowledge. People talk.

I am up front with people that I'm shite with keeping secrets, and if you don't want DP to know, please don't tell me.