"I shouldn't tell you this,
but ..."
Have you ever heard those words?
Have you ever said those words?
I've been around 40-something years and I have never heard a woman
not say those words � or some variation. Sad to say, they've slipped through my lips a few times, too, and once nearly cost me a very dear friendship.
Women can't keep secrets, or so I've heard. We are the ones who love gossip, the juicier the better � even (maybe especially) if it involves a close friend.
Why? According to Susan Shapiro Barash, professor of gender studies at Marymount Manhattan College and author of "Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry" �
Tripping the Prom Queen � women are in such rivalry with each other � over everything from men to jobs to the illusion of perfect children and families � that we revel in the failure of other women, and gossiping helps spread that bad news.
I don't see that among my friends, the rivalry part that is, but we do talk about each other when the gal isn't there � mostly to check in with the other gals about whatever said gal's going through. And even the time I had a mouth slip, it wasn't a malicious "wait till you hear this," but a belief that my split-second decision to divulge would help diffuse a potentially hurtful situation. You can figure out how
that went. My friend was angry (rightfully so), I apologized sincerely and we are pretty close to being back to the way we were. Still, I have secrets within me that I have kept for years, and will continue to do so, so I know I'm very capable of doing that.
Yet research has shown that gossip isn't all that bad � in fact, we may even be genetically predisposed to it.
http://www.sirc.org/publik/gossip.shtmlWhat exactly is a secret? Any piece of information you work to keep people from knowing, according to Anita Kelly, a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of "The Psychology of Secrets" (Plenum, 2002). That could be sexual, mental health-related or failure-related, she says.
But then why do so many of us feel a need to tell someone?
A secret begs to be outed, according to an article in
O Oprah magazine although I'm not sure it wants to be outed to
everyone � maybe just the person we're telling it to.
Regardless of what we say is secret or not, it seems that for some reason, we all like to tell all
Do You Have a Secret? , thus the rise of Web sites like PostSecret.com
Anonymous Internet catharsis (free therapy?), I suppose.
When you tell a girlfriend a "secret,"
why do you tell her?
How do you know that she'll keep it a secret?
Do you tell it to several friends, who each believe she's the only one entrusted with that (at this point, so-called) secret?
When you confide in a friend, do you expect she'll tell her husband/lover, too?
And if someone outs your secret, is the friendship a goner?
