But I don’t want you to have any secrets from me…

Dear the Modern. There’s a problem with the way you do things sometimes. You FORCE people to LIE to you. “I don’t want you to have any secrets from me,” you may coo. He tells you: “I actually have a daughter with a married woman.” “I don’t want to hear that! EWWW!” You have to decide whether you want the truth or to be lied to. You have no other options in the matter. If you think you love someone with warts and all, you better be prepared to hear about the warts. If you wind up realizing that the warts were bigger than what you expected, you have to let them go.

Then again, some of you will think that the bigger the secret you share, the more it obligates the hearing party to stay faithful to you. Sometimes you lot even push a secret on unwiling or unprepared ears and expect them to be faitful to you as a consequence. That’s very unfair.

You may mean “I don’t want you to have any secrets from me” as “I don’t want you to play around on me.” Fine. But give them the option to refuse. You cannot control another person who doesn’t want to be accountable to you to be honest and faithful against their will. You must give them the option to refuse, with an option to change their mind later, maybe, but for as long as a person doesn’t want to be with you, they’re not really yours, no matter how much you want them to be or manage to control their surface behaviour around you.

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