Can a True Confession Help or Harm Your Relationship?

For far too long, you’ve held onto something from your past that you’ve never told your partner. Perhaps in the early days of your relationships you lied about a small indiscretion involving you and a coworker while on a business trip. You led your partner to believe that you and the coworker kept everything on a professional level while, in reality, on one of those nights away, a dinner conversation took a romantic tone. Although you didn’t officially “cheat,” the situation could easily have gone in that direction with just one more glass of wine.

You regard yourself as a reasonably honest person, and also one who values loyalty to your partner. Memories of that evening occasionally slip into your awareness and, to rid yourself of them requires a great deal of mental effort. In fact, if you’re currently working from home and therefore with your partner on a nonstop basis, it’s hard for you to distract yourself by turning your thoughts to something in the outside world. Should you tell all? Would confessing the truth serve to rid you of your guilt at the cost of causing a rift in an otherwise good relationship?

According to Columbia University’s Rachel McDonald and colleagues (2020), there is indeed a mental cost involved with keeping secrets when revealing that secret would reflect negatively on your reputation. In the first two of a series of 3 studies, McDonald et al. established that when you’re keeping a secret to protect your reputation, such as not wanting your friends to know who you voted for, your mind continuously wanders towards that secret even when you’re not with those people. As you do so, you experience feelings of inauthenticity because you know your behavior doesn’t match what you claim to be your beliefs (namely, that you would agree with your friends).

To make this study's method more concrete, the measure of authenticity asked the study participants to rate themselves on two questions: “I am 100% fully and completely presenting the ‘real me’ to them” and “I am being 100% fully and completely authentic with them.” Think now about yourself in those situations when you’ve covered up a secret or lie. Do your own feelings of authenticity take a slight hit?

At the same time, you might regret having lied to your partner about the secret that you’re holding so closely. To tap into such feelings, the Columbia University authors asked participants to rate the degree to which they regret the fact about themselves that they’re hiding from others.

If it’s true that hiding a secret that you believe would lead to harm in your reputation, then what about the harm it can do to your relationship? How much can feelings of regret invade your feelings about your relationship? In the third of the series of investigations involving close relationships, the authors tested an intervention in which they presented participants with a thought experiment in which they imagined that revealing all would help, not harm, the relationship. Specifically, participants read the following instructions: “If your partner were to learn the secret, they might be surprised or even hurt. And even if it would be hard to work through the secret together—what would help in that process is their feelings toward and respect for you” (p. 69).

As you can see, the intervention prompt was designed to minimize the impact participants believed the confession would have on the way their partners thought about them. The 305 study participants averaged 35 years of age (60% female), and all were in a committed relationship. On the morning of the study, participants were asked to recall a secret that they were keeping from their partner about which they felt badly. Having done so, participants then estimated both how many times in the previous day they thought about that secret when not with their partner, and how many times they had to conceal the secret when interacting with their partner.

After providing this baseline information, participants in the experimental group read the intervention instructions and those in the control group simply went on to complete the next set of measures. All were followed up in the evening and once again on the following day. At each time point, they indicated how often their mind wandered to the secret and how many times they had to keep it from their partner while together. Additionally, all participants completed a coping secrecy measure that tapped how much they felt they could cope with the secret, how much control they felt they had over the situation, and how well they believed they were handling the secret.

Again, think about how you would respond to these coping measures. Do you believe you’re doing a good job or not in suppressing the truth from your partner? Do you think you’ll be able to manage your feelings about the secret in the future? Perhaps you’re worried that the secret will slip out if you’re not careful. This low sense of coping efficacy can only cause further strain when you’re together with your partner as you struggle to keep your secret under wraps.

Coping efficacy indeed became an important factor in the study’s findings. As in the previous studies within the investigation, the researchers were able to draw a pathway from reputation as a motivation for secrecy to greater mind wandering which led, ultimately, to lower feelings of authenticity and a higher sense of regret. The intervention appeared to have the effect of helping participants feel more capable in coping with the secret. Indeed, as the authors note, “a rigid tendency to conceal information about the self is associated with a host of harms, given such behavior corresponds with other poor maladaptive coping strategies” (p. 72).

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It would appear, then, that the harm to a relationship comes not from concealing the secret itself, but from the internal pressure that worries about how to handle the secret can create. When you’re trying to protect your reputation by keeping the truth hidden, the secret is more likely to weigh upon your mind, lowering your own faith in yourself. Once you lift yourself of the burden of protecting your reputation with the secret, you can move forward with greater confidence and less regret. The secret remains a secret, a fact about yourself you’d rather not reveal.

To sum up, think about why you’re keeping a secret from your partner. Is it because you want to seem loyal or honest, as in the example with the coworker, or because you fear the secret will damage your relationship? Focusing on your partner and not yourself can allow you to make a decision based on what is truly going to be the best for the long-term fulfillment of both of you.

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