Married TiBBers: is a close friend essentially confiding in your spouse as well?
 

Do you tell each-other literally everything (including friends’ secrets) or is the principle of confidentiality too unwaveringly strong for you to bend it for your other half’s sake?

We have ZERO secrets , a shared bank account , never had a night apart and never gone to bed on an argument ..

We have been together 46 years !!


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She is a bloody good liar 😂

Not really, I tell him most things but I wouldn't tell him something a friend told me that might be embarrassing for her if Gav knew or she just didnt want me to tell him. Honestly he doesn't want to know all my friends secrets either (not that there's too many)

Define everything :laugh:

It's a physical impossibility to share every minutiae of each others "external" experiences . All anyone can do is make an objective summary that your partner will find engaging

You don’t need to tell your partner personal things to do with other people just because they might find it engaging.

A retired nurse told me once that the doctor he was working for let him do the operation on a patient instead of the doctor doing it

What ?


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Agreed


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I’m just playing with you.

I'm not married obviously.

But if I was, then it would depend on what it was that the friend had told me, because if it's something that's going to negatively impact my Wife, then I would have to tell her.

well, i do :laugh:

I pity the people who choose to confide in you. The people whose confidential records you access at work. Disgusting.

You have no idea mate.

There is a difference between sharing information from a friend that has no legal standing and documents with a legal security classification. If I did the latter i would have been in jail. I actually dealt with such things in my distant past and I know the law

…similar to this…he wouldn’t really expect or want to know confidences and the same with his friends, for any confidences that he holds with them… but the same also in that there aren’t that many things or situations with friends that I could recall specifically not to tell him as many friends talk to him as much as they talk to me about some personal stuff….if a friend said to me ‘don’t tell…’…there would be a very good and specific reason for saying that so I obviously wouldn’t tell…

So information has to have legal standing before you acknowledge its integrity and the integrity of the teller?

The thing is people will not only share secrets but will use them to hurt others and take advantage of what they have been told

Some people use what they have been told to make themselves seem a better person to others

We have all heard the saying
I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them

.

In general then no I wouldn’t.
If it is something the kids ask me not to tell their dad then that’s different, I will tell him whatever it is IFhe needs to know, on condition he never mentions it to them.

It depends. We have no secrets, it'd have to be a pretty big secret from a very close friend who'd asked me specifically not to tell him. I can't see a close friend putting me in that position, though.

Did this really warrant a whole new thread Redway :joker:.

This is all an offshoot of another thread we've been having a disagreement on regarding these things, Redway from what I can tell is really struggling to grasp the difference between a sharing of minds in a close, long-term relationship with vast levels of trust... and "gossip-sharing with a friend".

And also appears to not know that professionals of all kinds absolutely DO share vast amounts of other people's personal experience (with identifying personal details redacted) for education & training purposes.

If it helps at all Redway, I did have a ponder with my wife about the discussion in the other thread, and we mutually agreed that if it was something very personal told in confidence we wouldn't share it IF there was no clear reason to share it (e.g. concern for the person's wellbeing) AND it was a mutual friend or someone we both had a personal connection with.

The example given was, if a friend of mine told me something that would affect his relationship in some way, and my wife was also friends with said-friend's wife, we'd keep that to ourselves because sharing it would put the other person in the awkward position (in this scenario, it would mean my wife would have to keep information from her friend that they would want to know, so it would be better if she just didn't know it).

And as I said in the other thread we'd never share anything that's legally confidential without "identifying details redacted".

So there are exceptions but for the mostpart I stand with what I said before... we discuss things, all sorts of things, that we've encountered independently out in the world, all the time. I don't know why that concept angers/frustrates you as much as it does.

Ok here's another hypothetical scenario for you, what if a friend of yours had a very personal "male" issue that he wanted advice on from a close male friend but clearly he wouldn't want your wife knowing about it, would you tell her?

if a friend shares something with you and asks you not to share that with your partner, they are placing an unreasonable expectation on you. If they don't want the information to spread, don't share it

Yes. It’s not all about you.

You seem to have a poor understanding of confidentiality anyway. Your argument for breaching it in bed is that your OH may find it engaging.

No they're not, not unless it's something that could effect you or your partner in some way. If it's something personal to that friend and about their life, it's not at all unreasonable to ask a close friend to keep it to themselves. I would never expect Gav to break a confidence like that with his own friends just to tell me something about their life that doesn't effect me at all, and vice versa. There's not a lot of instances where something like that actually even happens but I really don't see any issue with this at all. The girlfriend bond is sacred too imo

Let’s make sure BOTS doesn’t volunteer for Samaritans or have a catalogue of friends who put their trust in them:

Honestly the Samaritans stuff I tend to agree with them on actually, as long as you're not revealing names I don't think it's wrong to discuss tough cases with your OH, they don't know them anyway (and you probably don't either) but I'd imagine as a volunteer for an organisation like that, you yourself probably need to talk about very difficult cases so you don't end up feeling depressed yourself

The argument and policy is that you talk about it in-branch with other Samaritans and never take individual cases home but Soldier Boy’s argument is that he trusts his wife more than trainee volunteers and that you never really do know what people discuss in the privacy of their bedrooms. There’s no way to monitor that. And to be fair there isn’t.

i don't need smarmy put downs from you, i have a different opinion to you, learn to accept that as a reality and you will find life a lot easier to deal with

I agree with him :laugh: I don't see the harm unless you're giving out identifying information about the person involved

Well, you’re gonna get them anyway.

Team Leaders exist for that very reason. There’s so much in-branch support that you don’t really need to be going home to tell your OH details. That’s an intentional choice and a policy-breach, even without identifying details.

Good job I don't work for Samaritans then :laugh:

…I do understand what Redway is saying in that …(…unlike sharing anything said with a colleague/team leader would be in terms of advice/support etc to help etc…maybe for themselves and that would be what the Samaritans offered to them…for them to talk about things they were finding difficult or just needed to talk about…?…but they may still speak to their partner as well without giving specifics because they’re the person who they place the highest trust in themselves…

There are a few key issues here Redway.

1) You keep demonstrating that while you know a lot about the Samaritans, you don't really demonstrate much understanding of what a very close long term relationship looks like. My impression is that you have no idea what we're talking about, which is fine, and maybe I'm wrong, but you're taking a very authoritarian stance on something that's entirely alien to you if that's the case.

2) You have this bizarre notion that the Samaritans are angels beyond reproach which is flat out false, which is something I'm aware of both personally and professionally, I have had plenty of interaction with Samaritans. Many are absolutely great people but to suggest it's an organisation without flaw is simply untrue and I would reiterate - NOT a particularly safe insistence, as it invalidates anyone who has had a bad experience with Samaritans, and also sets unrealistic expectations of what people can expect when they contact these sorts of support lines.

3) Associated with the above, the idea that anyone and everyone has any desire whatsoever to train for Samaritans :think:. It's again fine that you, personally, love it but using "good thing you're not a Samaritan" as an insult is bizarre.


My final thought really is that this has the potential to be a genuinely interesting and thought provoking discussion, but you're not in it for an open-minded good faith discussion... you seem to have made the thread to confirm your outrage that spouses tend to share more with each other than they would with anyone else, and to get further annoyed and incredulous if anyone disagrees. It's all a bit odd, and not a conversation... I'm not sure anyone is here to get a telling off for chatting with their partner from a ticked-off Samaritan who dogmatically believes that they shouldn't.

…to be fair, I don’t think Redway is incorrect either in that some who volunteer to be Samaritans won’t ever share anything shared with them outside of the organisation and team leader etc…but I just don’t think that it’s one of those things which can be an ‘all’ situation to include all Samaritan volunteers, or in this case that no volunteer would speak to a person of trust in a vague sense…because like most things, it’s down to individuals and how they themselves approach their own stresses etc…

I take absolutely no issue with different people doing things differently or dealing with things differently, or even respectful differences in opinion on correct conduct: we all have our thoughts on things. I'm certainly not saying, for example, that people SHOULD feel compelled to share openly with a partner, or that a relationship is lesser if people aren't doing that. Every relationship is different and operates differently, individuals are different and have different ways of doing things.

I do draw a line at the clear condemnation and pointed judgement though, and I find the piousness about Samaritans to be misplaced - although I appreciate there may be a personal loyalty there.

You never answered my hypothetical situation question :idc: