We can't reveal very much about who we really are.

Keeping secrets is just the price we have to pay in order to be liked.

Then imagine the day you meet a very special person and fall in love.

What makes them special is that at last you no longer have to lie around them.

You can admit two important truths.

You'll be rewarded for sharing your deepest self.

The weirder the secret, the better.

Nothing seems too shocking or explicit.

You can explain that you find a mutual acquaintance arrogant or mean, or that you think some supposed masterpiece of a book is actually very boring.

You can explain that you like pulling hair during sex or have always been excited by ropes.

Love is born out of a new possibility for honesty. But this sharing of secrets sets up, in our minds and in our collective culture, a powerful and potentially very problematic ideal.

The notion that if two people properly love one another, then they must always tell each other the truth about everything.

Yet over the long term, there are always going to be things we feel, have a power to hurt and deeply offend those we love.

This brings us up against a fundamental paradox within the modern understanding of love.

Keeping secrets seems like a betrayal of a relationship.

At the same time, the complete truth will, if shared, place a union in mortal danger.

We are perhaps so conscious of the bad reasons for hiding things that we haven't paid enough attention to the noble reasons why, from time to time, true loyalty may lead one to say very much less than the whole truth.

We're so impressed by honesty, we forget the virtues of politeness, which doesn't have to mean a cynical withholding of important information, just a dedication to not robbing someone up against the full and more hurtful aspects of our natures.

It's ultimately no great sign of kindness to insist on showing someone else our entire selves at all times.

Repression, a certain degree of restraint and a dedication to editing one's pronouncements belong to love as much as a capacity for explicit confession.

The person, who cannot tolerate secrets, who, in the name of being honest, always has to share everything, information so wounding it cannot be forgotten,

that person is no friend of love.

Furthermore, if we suspect, and we should rather regularly, if the relationship is a good one. if we suspect that our partner might be lying a bit as well, maybe about what they're thinking about or how they judge our work or about where they were last night, well, then it's perhaps best not to lay into them like a sharp inquisitor.

However intensely we yearn to do just that.

It may be kinder, wiser and perhaps more in the true spirit of love to pretend we simply didn't notice.

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