The Secrets Women Keep and Why We Should Tell On Ourselves

I won’t pretend to know what it feels like to pull at the thread of a decades-long marriage. I do know the fear of revealing what I’m really thinking and how it might disrupt the lives of others.

I was sitting poolside with a friend when she asked if she could share something she hadn’t told anyone. I locked eyes with her and knew instantly that what she was about to tell me was something she hadn’t shared with a soul. I gave her my full attention and listened as she poured her heart and tears out — her yearning for something more, her uncertainty about her marriage, the options she was considering for the first time, and the most difficult feeling of all: pressure.

Pressure to make the right decision for everyone around her.

Before I continue, it’s important you know that when I say “friend,” I mean someone I see once or twice a year and speak with occasionally. I am not “in” this person’s life. And yet she was the third woman that month, under that same definition of friend, who had confessed to me something she hadn’t been able to say to anyone else.

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The Weight of Everyone Else

For centuries, women have been taught to carry our emotional lives like secrets. We learn to smile through the pain, shoulder the burden of everyone else’s comfort, and make ourselves smaller. We are conditioned to believe that our struggles, our doubts, our desires, our yearning for more, are selfish, inappropriate, or simply too much for the world to handle.

I won’t pretend to know what it feels like to pull at the thread of a decades-long marriage. But I do know the fear of revealing what I’m really thinking, of what others will think and how it might disrupt their lives.

At 21, I had my first child and was married to a man nearly twenty years older than me. Not long after the wedding, my dad called one afternoon and said (paraphrased):

“Ash, now that you’re married, there’s something you need to understand. You can’t come to me with your problems about your husband because when you make up with him, I’ll still hold it against him. For the sake of the family, it’s better you don’t tell me. It just causes a rift between everyone.”

In his defense, my dad had been married twice and knew how complicated it could get when in-laws were involved. But at 21, I didn’t have the maturity to distinguish between don’t involve your parents in every argument and don’t tell anyone when you’re struggling.

So I didn’t.

Photo by Polina Lavor on Unsplash

I kept my relationship struggles to myself. The combination of those secrets, the fear of disappointing my family, and the pressure not to fail at marriage left me throwing up my food and obsessively working out after every meal. I didn’t know what to do with the rising tension in my body and mind.

It was that behavior that landed me in a therapist’s office, but when she asked about my marriage I felt a wave of heat rush through me and froze. “We’re good, I told her, I’m here because I have an eating disorder.”

By the time I was 25, I was asking for a divorce, and everyone around me was shocked. Everyone but my mom and my therapist.

Apparently, while I was on painkillers after a boob job, all my usual defenses had dropped. I was crouched on the floor of my car drinking a McDonald’s chocolate milkshake when I confessed to my mom that I wasn’t in love with my husband, didn’t know who I was, and didn’t know what to do.

When I told her I was leaving, she reminded me of what I had told her that day.

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You’re Only as Sick as Your Secrets

What strikes me most about these confessions, mine, my friends’, and so many women’s is how shocked people are when they finally learn the truth.

“I had no idea.”
“You seemed so happy together.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I can’t believe you walked away from all of that.”

Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the last time I kept my pain and secrets close to the vest, leaning on something outside myself until everything eventually came to the surface. Over time, the target shifted from my parents, then my kids, then my community. But the pattern was the same: don’t let them know.

I became a pressure cooker, holding it all in until the lid blew off.

What I’ve learned is that denying emotions doesn’t make them go away, it makes them heavier. When shared with a trusted confidant, even hearing the words out loud shows that action doesn’t have to come right away. It’s enough to simply acknowledge the feeling and accept that this is where you are right now.

What often keeps us quiet is fear. Fear that if we say something out loud, we’ll be held to it, that we’ll have to make a decision right away.

But there is so much power in allowing space and time to simply let the words and ideas exist without action. To let them breathe.

And I think that’s what those women intuitively knew. The ones who confided in me that week weren’t looking for solutions. They wanted a witness. Someone who could hold their truth without trying to fix it or judge it. They chose me not because I’m particularly wise or qualified, but because I exist slightly outside their daily lives: close enough to care, far enough away to feel safe.

Sometimes the act of telling on ourselves is what brings the relief we’ve been looking for — no solutions, no quick fixes, just the freedom of finally saying it.

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What secrets have you been carrying that feel too heavy to share?

When was the last time you felt the relief of simply naming what's true for you, even without knowing what to do about it?

What would become possible in your life if you gave yourself permission to speak your truth without needing immediate solutions or perfect answers?