How many people do you know to whom you can tell a secret and know that it will never be told? Some people don’t believe that there is a single soul who can not tell a secret. Benjamin Franklin may have been one of the skeptics when he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
I don’t need to tell you that there are many and various reasons why people keep secrets. Do I? Consider this, if someone tells you a secret about someone else, it is more likely gossip and the person sharing the confidential information is merely – and eagerly – engaging in a crafty variation of The Telephone Game, frequently referred to as the “Pass-It-On” game. Because people love to talk about other people’s lives, the person who originally tells you the secret, for added drama may say, “I am only telling this to you. If I hear it again, I will know who it came from.” That veiled threat is to hold you to confidence, so that the spiller of the secret can continue to tell it to others – before you do.
However, if the secret is about the person who shared it with you, then she obviously expects (while crossing her fingers and toes) that you will keep her secret. Would you? A woman may want to share her secret only with her closet friend, perhaps because she feels the need to discuss it with someone who she believes she can trust to keep it to herself. But we know human nature, and regardless of whether it sounds sexist for me to say what I am about to say I’m saying it – I believe that men keep secrets better than women. A woman HAS to tell someone. After all, what is the point of having a secret if you can’t share? It’s okay, you can agree. Even if a woman shares her personal secret with her best friend, chances are nine to one that her best friend will tell her best friend who will tell someone else and before you can say, “Breaking News” the secret is public knowledge. So the bearer of the secret conceals it like a winning poker hand. Maybe one day she will decide to reveal her secret, but even if she does not, hopefully she will not have killed two other people in order to keep it.