We have to keep a lot of things private most of the time in order to avoid offending and hurting people. We can't divulge much about ourselves; keeping secrets is simply the price we must pay in order to be loved. Then imagine meeting someone wonderful and falling in love with them. What makes them unique is that you don't have to lie around them anymore. You'll be rewarded for exposing your deepest self if you can admit to critical realities. The stranger the secret, the better; nothing appears to be too shocking or overt.
You can say that you find a common acquaintance arrogant or cruel, or that you find a claimed masterpiece of a book to be extremely uninteresting. You may say that you enjoy pulling hair during sex or that ropes have always piqued your interest. Love arises from a new possibility for honesty, but this sharing of secrets establishes in our thoughts and in our collective culture a powerful and potentially problematic ideal: the belief that if two people truly love one other, they must constantly tell each other the truth about everything. However, there will always be things that we feel have the power to harm and gravely offend individuals we love in the long run.
This raises a fundamental paradox in our modern understanding of love: concealing secrets appears to be a betrayal of a partnership, yet the entire truth, if given, would put a relationship in fatal peril. We are maybe so aware of the negative reasons for concealing information that we haven't given enough thought to the noble reasons why true loyalty may sometimes drive one to speak far less than the complete truth. We're so taken with honesty that we overlook the advantages of politeness, which doesn't have to imply a cynical concealing of vital information, but rather a commitment to avoid rubbing someone up against the full and more damaging sides of our personalities.
Repression a certain amount of restraint and a commitment to editing one's utterances belong to love just as much as a capacity for full confession. The person who cannot tolerate secrets and, in the name of being honest, must always divulge any information that is so painful that it cannot be forgotten, is not a lover's friend.
Furthermore, if we suspect, and we should if the relationship is good, that our partner is lying a little about what they're thinking about, how they judge our work, or where they were last night, it's perhaps best not to lay into them like a sharp inquisitor, no matter how much we want to.
If we suspect, and we should if the relationship is healthy, that our spouse is lying a little about what they're thinking about, how they rate our work, or where they were last night, it's probably better not to interrogate them like a keen inquisitor.