“What Secret Did Your Spouse Keep From You Until After You Were Married?” (42 Answers)
Some things we tend to keep to ourselves. In fact, we don’t tell some secrets even to those closest to us. One recent poll showed that almost one in four (22%) Americans keep at least one secret from their partner with whom they live together. Another survey shows that 60% of people in relationships have kept a personal secret.
One netizen approached them from a different angle. They wanted to know what things people kept from their significant others before saying “I do”. They asked: “What secret did your spouse keep from you until after you were married?”
From wholesome secrets like saving up for your husband’s motorcycle to more sinister ones like personal debt, people delivered all sorts of secrets that have been kept from them from their current and ex-spouses.
That she set up a separate account and started throwing money into it. She started saving the day I proposed and kept saving until after we’d been married for 3 years.
She saved up the same amount of cash I spent on her engagement ring and surprised me with my dream motorcycle. Dream bike, dream wife, dream life.
My wife was actually 7 years older than she claimed to be. I was mildly surprised when I found out; that was about it.
Edit: Surprised how many questions this generated.
(1)Some people said it should be easy to tell..But she’s asian and tiny (About 4’10”) and looks young for her age.
(2) Yes, I still would have married her. Difference between 28 and 35 didn’t worry me a whole lot. I was 44 myself. However, *if* the difference had moved her into menopause…for example, from 40 to 47 …. then no, I probably wouldn’t have. I actually wanted to have children.
(3) The topic never really came up. It wasn’t until we were doing some paperwork for the children that the discrepancy came to light.
Having secrets isn’t as black and white as it may seem. We might be quick to judge others who keep secrets from their significant others and don’t fess up until marriage. But there might be reasons why they’re keeping a thing or two from their prospective spouse. Here are some possible explanations why a partner would keep secrets:
- They don’t want to hurt your feelings. Maybe they’re afraid the secret might hurt you and think that not telling you is the better choice.
- Shame and fear of being judged. Perhaps the secret is so big and personal that they’re only willing to share it with someone with whom they’re spending the rest of their life: a spouse, for example.
Fairly minor, but my wife can’t watch sitcoms. Not because she thinks they’re stupid, or just not funny, but because she gets embarrassed by the situations in the shows. Situations that actors are acting out as fictional people, and she gfs embarrassed. It’s weird. So I can’t watch Scrubs, the Office, or Futurama unless she’s out and I’m at home.
EDIT: Yes, Scott’s Tots is awful. Even I can’t watch it. I’ve heard Curb Your Enthusiasm is awful, as well. I would like to watch it, but I’m fairly certain it would k**l my wife. I’ll be ignoring all the suggestions about what to get her to watch, sorry. Although I will probably check them out at some point.
- Avoidance. Some people just can’t deal with difficult conversations. They hope a conflict will resolve on its own or until the secret comes to light on its own.
- Trust issues. Although we’re supposed to trust our spouses with our lives (in sickness and in health, right?), some people have trouble being an open book.
- Fear of breaking up. In some cases, people keep secrets because they’re afraid that the truth might mean the end of a relationship. Infidelity is often an example of this.
I’ve been married for almost 12 years, together more than 16, and found out roughly three years ago that my wife has/still suffers from bulimia. It was so bad a few years ago that she had a nervous breakdown and we sent her to a program to cope with the disease. While there are relapses and I expect she will deal with this the rest of our lives together, she’s doing great. She’s been dealing with this disease since high school, and mostly because she dealt with many insecurities as a result of my mother-in-law’s inability to give positive feedback. She hid this from me for years, and while many may think that bulimics do this for the sake of vanity, I assure you it is not. My wife, while beautiful on the inside and out, still deals with this daily….even a few days ago. We have three children and overwhelm them with praise about inner/outer beauty to ensure the same mistake isn’t made again.
That his mother was alive. He gave me a sob story about losing his mother to a heart attack in a grocery store, and of course I was all about comforting him. We dated and eventually married, but what could he say — “I liked about my mother dying?” So he just kept her a secret. I later found a card from her, to him, for his birthday, in the garage, wedged in some books. I was horrified to find out I had a mother in law, and, hadn’t invited her to our wedding.
We divorced after 3 years. She was a lovely woman and treated me very kindly, knowing I had no idea and believing I was horrified by the circumstances. She wasn’t surprised at his duplicity and later regretted not warning me about her son, but, she had hoped I’d be a “fix” for him. I wasn’t.
That she was a closeted nerd.
We met in high school and married in college, been together for 22 years. An odd couple, I was (am) very much the social introvert and science geek, she was (is) the extreme extrovert, the popular girl, a former cheerleader! How in the world did we click? But we did and two decades, two kids, a mortgage and a minivan later we’re still going strong.
But… over the years she started to let slip some things she never revealed during our courtship. Initially she didn’t care for my nerdy movies or TV shows but over time she’d pause more and more while walking through the room with STTNG playing, or would go “we don’t hafta see the latest Meg Ryan movie, lets go see your sci-fi action flick”. At first I thought it was just her humoring me, maybe even my building up her tolerance to something she previously didn’t care for, but over time it became clear she was covering up something that was always there – she loved Star Wars, she loved ET, she loved Back to the Future, but she kept it hidden because the 80s were a different time for nerds, they hadn’t taken over the culture like they have now and she was fitting in with her crowd.
Now, she has a bigger collection of Darth Vader memorabilia than any of my nerd brethren proudly displayed in our house. I still poke her about her coming out of the nerd closet, and now I understand a bit better why we clicked as well as we did.
People may need time to share big, serious secrets like childhood trauma, even with their spouses. But when we keep smaller, more trivial secrets in a marriage, they add up with time and can erode trust and intimacy between spouses.
Relationship expert Judith Sill, PhD, claims that every petty lie and secret alienates us from our partners. “However trivial the distortion, every time you mask yourself to avoid conflict, you take a small step away from your partner,” she explains. “Emotional distance does not foster great love,” she concludes.
However, Sill also notes that sharing every thought that comes into your head can do more damage than good. There’s a balance between knowing what to share and what to keep quiet about. Sill believes in “shielding your mate from the parts of yourself that he or she finds most difficult to love.” As relationship expert Sheri Stritof puts it, only share secrets that are “kind, helpful, honest, and necessary.”
That he likes to wear womens clothing. Not always in a sexual way either.
I just came home one day and there he was sitting in my favorite pair of panties and my silk robe just playing video games.
Now we sit around together playing video games in our panties. It’s actually really great.
Gender disphoria.
I think things would’ve gone a lot better if my husband hasn’t been hiding from *her*self through almost two decades of married life and two babies. Being left because I represented her old life to much really sucked, but I’m a hell of a lot better off now and my kids just go off with a strange aunt-like person every other weekend or so.
My wife told me she was on the autistic spectrum with high level/high functioning aspergers (sorry if I’ve got the term wrong). Look up the points list of female aspergers syndrome “symptoms” and it’s a list of everything she’s struggled with like understanding people’s faces and emotions, to hand flapping in stressful situations and getting obsessed with jigsaws and puzzles to the point she blocks out the world around her -to name the most obvious ones to me, she can get emotionally overwhelmed and if there’s too much going on at once (e.g. Tv on, dryer going in the next room, me talking, our baby throwing her toys about) it can overwhelm her mentally because she can’t filter any of it into the background like most people, this is why some aspies seem emotionally distant or uncaring, but actually if anything they feel things too strongly it can overwhelm everything else and kind of paralyse her until we get in quiet surroundings. There are other symptoms but that’s all I can remember off the top of my head, and she’s good at avoiding overstimulating her brain in day to day life. She’s very literal minded too. She told me she used to be a lot “worse” when she was younger and can have a good guess at facial expressions and really tries hard to socialise and get out of her comfort zone now, and with me, close family and friends she’ll outright ask if she can’t interpret someone’s tone of voice or expression. I never noticed other than to think she was a little socially awkward. This is also in combination with quite strong dyslexia and dyspraxia which is apparently quite a common thing. She’s my wife and she’s the most loving caring woman I could have wished to meet, and I’m always so proud of her not letting those difficulties stop her day to day, and she’s an amazing mum to our 1yo girl 🙂
Edit: spelling.
That he was cheating on me with a friend I thought was a lesbian. He invited her to the wedding.
She showed up with her latest girlfriend (who was uninvited). It was arranged seating and I’d stick her next to a group of mutual friends. Turned out she had slept with nearly every person at that table (men and women), and they all found out about it. Her girlfriend and her got into a fist fight and then left.
Nearly two years later and I’m still married to that a*****e. We separated (for the second time) a week ago after I found his latest Tinder account and the dates he’d been planning with random women for when I’d be at work.
My husband led me to believe he already has his Master’s degree and was working at a University, when in reality there was a hold up with his degree and his role as an educator was limited to that of a grad student… He did receive his MA but it was three years into our marriage.
That he was a binge drinker and high functioning alcoholic. He would hide the empty beer cans in the basement. When I found all the can stashes, 1 month after our wedding, they filled two large garbage bags. Like he drank a case of beer a night!
How weird he really was. I knew he was off but not that bad. On our 11 hour trip home after the wedding he thought I was asleep and proceeded to talk to him self for hours. He would laugh at himself and ribbit too.
Edit – by hours I meant around 2 hours while I tried to sleep not the whole drive and this is just an example. He’s weird 100% of the time now. Right now he’s holding the youngest kid going “bluoop” and sticking his tongue out over and over and over again. He’s a good dad.
Ex wife (now) purposefully tried to get herself pregnant with our daughter before we were married because she knew that her mom couldn’t pay for her health insurance anymore and she didn’t want to go work, but she knew that a baby could get her qualified for the state’s-health care system.
Also, she told her sister that she only married me because she knew I’d be a stable provider and father, not because she loved me.
Yeah… That hurt
I’ve got more too!
I promise you this is legit. My wife just revealed to me she is terrified of Baha Men’s “Who Let The Dogs Out”. She says they sound very angry and it makes her very upset. I wouldn’t say she HID this from me….but it’s an interesting development.
My husband and his friend came up with a plan to catch his friend’s wife cheating. My husband slept with his friends wife and friend ‘caught’ them. She got pregnant and during the divorce found out the baby was my husband’s. Found this out after 7 years and 3 kids.
My husband hid the secret that he wasn’t actually taking his antipsychotics until our honeymoon. Innocent 18-yo me didn’t understand how bad that truly was, or that it would lead to a slow build-up to a really horrible psychotic break where I would have to call the police. Good news is he takes them religiously now!
That she is near totally incontinent.
We dated for 5 years before we were married, and during the first year of our marriage, I found a stash of incontinence pants in her cupboard when I was hanging her clothes up. I asked her about it, expecting to hear that she has occasional accidents, as I knew her bladder was weak, but I never expected the extent of it. She burst into tears and confessed.
She was 16 when I met her, and he had been mixing regular underwear with incontinence pants for years. She would wear them when we were together, but change into regular underwear when we would sleep together.
She always carried a bag with her, quite a large one, and she would take it everywhere with her. I was never allowed near it, as she didn’t want me finding her change of clothes in there.
On our wedding day, she had her sister keep a bag with her. She was wearing incontinence pants during the ceremony, for the full day, and she would go with her sister to the toilet to change occasionally. At night, she changed into regular underwear.
There was a few times when she either ran out of her incontinence pants and peed through her regular panties, or couldn’t change in time and overflowed. Once in my car she peed in her already full pants and they overflowed onto the seat. Another time she ran out of her incontinence pants while on holiday, and would occassionally run back to the hotel with pee running down her leg. I found out later this was because she was wearing regular underwear.
I was not bothered at all. I still love her, and I understand her not telling me, as she was embarrassed by it. It’s her little quirk and I love her for it.
My now-ex husband hid from me that he had six maxed out credit cards and had been dodging child support for a year for the child he had from his previous marriage.
Don’t marry someone who is bad with money.
She told me she was Bi … didn’t find out till later she meant Polar.
I’m the uptight one in the relationship. This is going to sound really petty and like it shouldn’t be a big deal.
A few years after we got married (together about 6-8 years maybe?) I found out he can’t stand it when someone opens a bag of chips upside down. I do this on purpose because then all the crumbs disperse equally throughout and you don’t get that pile of chip glitter at the end. He conceded that this worked perfectly, but insisted that we keep the chip bags upside down so that when you open it right side up, it works the same.
He was really bothered by this as if I was violating the laws of common decency. I think he would have been less disturbed if I s**t on the floor next to the toilet instead of in it.
Was just shocking to find he had such passionate view over something so mundane when typically I am the more rigid one. And yes, I still open bags upside down and make sure I draw his attention to it. He’s my little freak.
That he slept with one of my bridesmaids (who was his friend) years before we met. I wanted to bring it up to her and ask her how she thought he was in bed as a joke but decided it would probably make her too uncomfortable and lose the intended humor.
When I first started a relationship with my boyfriend (now husband) he had a lot of money. Suddenly, around the two month mark he claimed he was really, really broke. I asked him why and he just said he’d spent a lot more than he should have.. I later found out that his psychotic ex-girlfriend (who had an affair on my SO whilst his dad was fighting cancer) tried to sue him for not paying rent on their previous tenancy (he wasn’t paying rent on the books but was giving her cash for his fair share).
She threatened to sue him and instead settled for a single payment of £4k, which she proceeded to use as deposit money on a house with the guy she’d been having the affair with.
My SO made her sign a form saying she won’t have anything to do with him ever again, yet she still feels the needs to attempt to add me on facebook on fake accounts, regardless of me blocking her.
Oh, and to make matters worse, she’s a f*****g police officer!
NUTS.. just feel bad on my hubby for losing out to such a c**t.
That she was a man hating narcissist. She needed a man with whom she could have children, I fit the bill. As soon as she had them, I was no longer needed. She made my life miserable for 20 more years. We divorced and I’m finally happy again.
She told me about her first meeting with my mom. My mom brought out all the baby patterns for jumpers and jackets and said “I am going to make these for your babies one day”
I can’t believe she did not run away.
