What's the Harm in Keeping a Betrayal a Secret?

Spoiler alert: secret-keeping exacts a cost.

Last year, I wrote a piece that appeared in The Washington Post about making hard decisions in relationships. In the article, I pointed to a variety of difficult relationship choices: Should you move in together? How should you discuss waning sexual attraction? Should you speak up about your fury that no one else changes out the empty toilet paper roll?

Many tough choices exist in relationships. But for all the variety of difficult relationship decisions, one very specific choice caught readers’ attention: The decision of whether or not to reveal an extramarital affair.¹

Our intuitions about secret-keeping.

People didn’t just find the question of whether or not to reveal an affair interesting—they had powerful gut instincts about “right” and “wrong.” And they had intense judgements about those who might choose the “wrong” way.

Some readers felt certain that a choice to disclose an affair could only be driven by selfish desires to offload guilt onto the person who didn’t cheat.

Other readers felt that not disclosing was the clear selfish choice, representing an unwillingness to own up and amend for transgressions.

A trove of research shows that people are often intensely confident about their moral instincts. Whether it’s about engaging in a major relationship transgression or keeping secrets, we our moral compasses seem to offer clear, wise guidance. This means that we tend to view those who would make different choices as immoral, ignorant, and most certainly wrong.

Yet studies show that the moral beliefs guiding our judgment of “right” and “wrong” are intuitively and emotionally guided and that we do a lot of post hoc justification of what we went in feeling was the correct judgment. That is, we judge first and collect evidence later more often than we collect evidence and then form a judgement.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that people land in beliefs about “right” and “wrong” and then believe they are indisputably correct, even when the other side has done and feels the same. Moral judgments are this not entirely reliable—which is why we need science to offer a more reliable answer as to whether secret-keeping is a wise or unwise choice.

A cost-benefit analysis of secret-keeping.

So, what does keeping secrets do for you? What does it do to you? Does it protect or harm relationships? And would any negative effects of secret-keeping be eliminated if you really could be assured that your betrayal would remain a secret?

These are fascinating questions that research has attempted to answer.

First, consider the throwaway line people often use about the “weight of a secret.” It turns out this comment reflects people’s actual experiences. For instance, across four experiments conducted by researchers at Tufts, Columbia, and Stanford Universities, secret keepers viewed hills as being steeper, distances as being further, and common physical tasks as being more burdensome. As a result of feeling burdened, participants were also less likely to be helpful to others.

Image by Susanne Stöckli from Pixabay

Secrets weigh us down, and there’s good reason for that. Concealing information (like sexual orientation, for example) takes effort. We need to continually monitor ourselves to avoid doing something that might be revealing. Sometimes, that means changing what we say. Other times, it can mean worrying about how we say it—as in suspicious eye contact aversion or your voice becoming higher in pitch. When keeping a secret, we have to remind ourselves to be careful about continuing the charade. All that effort to prevent the exposing of a secret causes what researchers call “self-regulatory depletion.”

What’s more, the bigger the secret, the more our efforts are likely to deplete us. That’s why secret keepers find that their intellectual sharpness, interpersonal closeness, and physical endurance get exhausted.

Some might argue, however, that the weight of secret-keeping results from the fear of being discovered. So, it makes sense to wonder if the costs of secret-keeping would evaporate if people could be assured no one would ever discover their secret. A recent study titled “Does Hoodwinking Others Pay?” explored this possibility.

Curious about whether undetected secrets might make the benefits of keeping the secret outweigh the costs, researchers placed participants into buyer-seller negotiations. Then, they gave participants opportunities to be deceitful and assurances that the secret would never be revealed. But regardless of condition (high or low financial stakes, strong or weak moral character, or if participants lied on behalf of others or for themselves), secret-keeping caused secret-keepers to experience interactions as less pleasant. The discomfort was significant enough that compared to participants without a secret, participants who had secrets were more likely to opt out of future interactions with the person they were keeping a secret from. Even undetected secret-keeping harms both the secret-keeper as well as their relationships.

Let’s bring these ideas out of the laboratory and into the real world. After all, somebody who has cheated on their partner may well believe that the costs of keeping the secret would still outweigh the costs of disclosing. But, as one example, infidelity may be a symptom of much larger, more long-standing problems. In this context, keeping the secret of infidelity becomes yet one more hit to an ailing relationship because relationships cannot heal if the broken parts aren’t attended to.

Of course, it’s also true that revealing betrayal can mean the end of the relationship. But as research shows (and as I discussed in an earlier newsletter), people can overcome affairs. That we can overcome betrayal, though, doesn’t necessarily mean we should.²

And, if a person still isn’t ready to reveal the secret to their partner, there is benefit in finding a different trusted person to disclose to, whether that’s a therapist, good friend, or family member.

To keep a secret, or not to keep a secret.

Over time, secrets weigh us down. They exhaust us, make us less happy inside our bodies, and take a toll on our ability to engage authentically in relationships. While disclosing secrets is scary and painful, doing so can be problematic for relationships.

Disclosing secrets can, without question, cause substantial harm to relationships. But doing so can simultaneously offer a powerful opportunity to heal what has gone wrong and create opportunities to rebuild a relationship that is healthier and more satisfying for both people. And it can mitigate the toll that secret-keeping takes on the person carrying the secret and on the relationship.

There is a lot more to say on the topic of secret-keeping and its costs and benefits, so if it’s something you’re interested in digging into more deeply, I highly recommend checking out secret-keeping researcher Michael Slepian’s book, The Secret Life of Secrets. Or you can also check out my podcast conversation with him here.

[Betrayals of all kinds erode relationships of all kinds. What kinds of betrayals would you want to read science-backed advice on? Betrayals at work, in family relationships, those that result when you act against your own moral code? Leave a comment or message me privately.]

---

What I’m listening to, and you should, too!

I’m newly obsessed with the

Love Factually Podcast

, and I imagine many readers here will love it, too. It’s two brilliant psychology professors, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, discussing romantic comedies and the science of romance. I mean, check out their blurb:

We're just two professors standing in front of a rom-com, asking it to be the subject of our podcast.

Eli J Finkel

and

Paul Eastwick

explain what your favorite romantic films get right -- and wrong -- about the science of romance because it's time for scientists to take Ryan Gosling as seriously as you do.

Rom-coms and relationship science? Yes, please!

1. This article led to another Washington Post article—this one about the decision of whether to disclose an affair, which had an even more intense response, including a public lambasting by a woman whose blog is dedicated to the victims of cheating. This seems like proof of how very strongly people feel there is a “right” and “wrong” answer to these kinds of questions. And this, my friends, is something we need science to help guide us through since a trove of evidence suggests that what we feel to be true isn’t always actually true.

2. That we can overcome significant relationship betrayal does not mean we should. This is an incredibly complicated question to answer. Studies do, however, reveal that forgiveness tends to be good for our well-being and our relationships under particular circumstances: when someone who has harmed us commits themselves to behaviors that will make us safe and feel valued going forward.