You are having coffee with your best friend and suddenly she drops the bombshell that she has been unfaithful to her boyfriend over the weekend. She doesn’t know how to handle this situation and she had to tell someone about it, mostly so she wouldn’t carry the weight of infidelity alone. You promise her that no one will ever find out about her affair and that her secret is safe with you because you are a person of the utmost confidence as well as discreet. And best of all, you believe it; You are convinced that you will keep your friend’s secret, and yet that same night you tell your sister. Don’t you know how to keep a secret?
Women can’t keep a secret
- It seems that women cannot keep a secret for more than two days, at least that is what a study carried out in the United Kingdom states, in which the duration of a secret is established at 47 hours and 15 minutes. That is the time that our sealed lips last.
- The survey also states that the secrets that are most in danger of being revealed are intimate affairs, love affairs and shopping. And that the first person to whom we tell a secret that they have entrusted to us is our partner, followed by friends and family.
- What the survey does not explain are the reasons that lead us to break our promise of silence, ceasing to be trustworthy people to become authentic gossips. And it is that we do not even feel guilty of revealing the secret to a third person.
Why don’t we keep a secret?
- Of course, not all women behave in the same way and there are issues that we take great care of so that they do not come to light. But it is true that women have a certain verbal incontinence, accentuated, if necessary, by alcohol, which pushes us to tell our intimacies and those of others, yes, in the strictest confidence.
- And it’s not malice, or lack of ethics, but that the weight of someone else’s secret is too much to bear alone. So we usually share it with another person, making sure that we don’t harm the person who has placed their trust in us. After all, if you tell your sister about your best friend’s slip, the secret is still safe and in the family, right?
- It is probably because of this need that we have to communicate with others and share our problems to feel better, which is why we are incapable of keeping a secret. And as for the feeling of guilt, it is normal that it does not appear in this situation; everyone knows that a secret stops being a secret as soon as you tell it to a person.
