The Best Way to Keep a Secret

Do I need to keep a secret?

Is it important to keep a secret? I’ve sat on more secrets the past year than I’ve had to in a long time. Keeping secrets is an honor, and a must. I’ve squirmed in my seat trying to keep the cat in the bag, but wanting to tell something I knew. I’ve almost popped some buttons trying to remember not to say anything that takes me down the “spilling-the-beans”road.

The best way to keep a secret is probably the hardest. That’s because women love secrets, and they love telling them! We love letting others know that we know something they can’t know! We should also learn to relish keeping a secret.

Women, especially, find delight in comradery. We love to tell what’s happening in our lives. It’s fun to share and have others exclaim with us over a happening or upcoming event. Sharing something others don’t know makes us feel important and “in the know”.  Before we know it, we’ve told more than we should, and sometimes more than we’ve bargained for.

A father described his young daughter as a child who could not keep a secret. He said, “She thinks a secret is something you tell to a person one at a time.” Unfortunately, that’s how some of us handle secrets. We don’t tell everybody. We just tell one person at a time.

It’s funny and it might be cute when it’s a child. It’s not so funny when a confidence has been betrayed and someone is left hurting and forlorn.

What works for me

This is what I do. Not only do I not tell someone what I know; I don’t even tell them that I know.

If I don’t tell others that I know something, then I can’t be pressured or persuaded to tell. Nobody can weasel it out of me if they don’t know there’s anything to weasel. During my pregnancies, Dave and I chose not to learn the sex of our children. However, with our fifth child, we learned that we were having another girl. You know how we kept from telling anybody (including our own kids) the sex of this child? We didn’t tell people that we knew. They couldn’t ask or badger us because they didn’t know that we knew.

It’s like having a graveyard that’s unmarked. You can’t find the graveyard because there is no fence marking the boundaries, and no stones marking the graves. People walk right on top of it and have no idea they’re treading over buried bodies.

That’s what it’s like when you hide a secret and nobody knows you’re hiding it. Folks can walk all around the subject, but they don’t even know they’re walking around it because nobody has told them there’s a buried secret there.

Do I always succeed? Nope. The times I have failed are the times I have let it be known that I knew something others didn’t know.

The times I have succeeded in not letting a secret slip are the times nobody knew I had a secret. That is the best way, I’ve found to keep a secret. It works, every time.

Attribution for photos belongs to Pixabay. Credit for the photo with the word “secret” belongs to Fathromi Ramdlon and Pixabay.