3.7 Context #2: Secrets among Family and Friends

When it comes to personal relationships, there is the inevitable question of secrets. Some people say there should be no secrets in healthy relationships, but given how prevalent secrets are, this seems unrealistic. As Carly Simon wrote in her 1972 song “We Have No Secrets,” “Sometimes I wish / often I wish / that I never, never knew some of those secrets of yours” — suggesting that perhaps having a few secrets in relationships is a healthy thing. There is a lot of scholarly research about the difference between healthy secrets and toxic ones, but the ethical issue to consider here is not about the nature of the secret, but about the telling. Is it okay to reveal other people’s secrets?

Sandra Petronio’s model of secrets (called Privacy Management Theory) starts with the metaphor that a secret is like a piece of property: it is something that a person owns, and because they own it, they have the option to give it away to others. But there is a crucial difference between a secret and another kind of “property”: secrets can be told and retold (unlike a car that can’t just magically multiply until there are thousands of copies of it).

Say you went to a casino alone and had a particularly lucky day, bringing home $18,000. One option is not to tell anyone, keeping that secret to yourself. Another is to tell a “confidant,” a person to whom you decide to entrust that secret. Some people want to be a confidant and invite others to share secrets; others are more reluctant; their friend might say “There’s something I have to tell you” before they can stop them. Imagine a Loop of Secrecy, and now there’s one other person inside that loop with you. You might explicitly command the confidant, “You can’t tell anyone else!”; you might negotiate with them (if they ask, “Am I allowed to tell my boyfriend?” you might say, “Okay, as long as he doesn’t spread it to anyone else”), or you might just assume that the confidant knows they’re not supposed to spread the secret. Human nature seems to lean toward the last option; people often assume that other people know that they’re not supposed to repeat the news, even if no rules are discussed.

Let’s call the lucky gambler Sydney. Sydney decides to tell Terri about her winnings, but she says “Don’t tell anyone about it.” Terri decides to tell her boyfriend, Josh, about it, as long as he makes sure to follow the rule. So she tells Josh, “Hey, I’ve got to tell you a secret: Sydney won $18,000 at the casino last week — but don’t blab about that to everyone.” Now Josh is inside the Loop of Secrecy, but Sydney doesn’t know this. Then Josh thinks, “Terri told me not to blab to everyone, but I’ll just tell Pete; that should be safe.” The number of people in the Loop keeps growing, unbeknownst to Sydney. A few weeks later, Sydney attends a party, where she meets Pete, whose first words to her are, “Oh, you’re Sydney? The one who won $18,000? Cool!” Meanwhile, Pete posts the news on social media because he would want to tell the world if he won that much at a casino. This is what Petronio calls “boundary turbulence,” and Sydney realizes it’s time for a little chat with Terri and Josh and Pete — but it’s too late, the secret is out, and the Loop of Secrecy has thousands of people in it.

Why did Terri violate Sydney’s command and tell Josh? She thought it was safe because it was still “contained,” not realizing that it would continue to spread. But some people have other reasons for spreading people’s secrets:

1. They’re unclear about the rules and don’t see any harm in it (like Pete); \
2. It takes too much emotional or cognitive energy to “hold it in,” and they can’t stand the pressure or aren’t very competent at keeping a secret (think of Hagrid in the Harry Potter universe, and his famous line “I should not have said that!”);
3. It’s fun to spread secrets, and might feel to some people like it increases their status in the social realm;
4. They are vicious and deliberately want to hurt the secret-holder.

Of course, if your motives fall into categories 3 or 4, you would do well to remember that if you go around telling other people’s secrets, they will catch on eventually and stop telling them to you.

There’s one other legitimate reason to consider as well: they can see that keeping the secret is doing more harm than good, and feel an ethical obligation to tell someone. Imagine that instead of “She won $18,000,” the secret was “She’s addicted to opioids” or “She has a sexually transmitted disease that she hasn’t told her partner about.” Some secrets serve to preserve toxic situations, and the secret is the thing that prevents the person from getting the help they need. If this is the case and you are the confidant, do you have a duty to tell someone else even though your friend commanded you not to? Petronio calls this the “confidant dilemma,” and it is not an easy position to be in.

As a descriptive model, Privacy Management Theory does a great job depicting all the ways that secret keeping and revealing can go wrong, but it doesn’t provide clear guidelines for what to do. If you tell someone your secret, should you always explicitly discuss what the rules are about passing that secret on? If someone tells you a secret, should you never mention it to anyone else? It’s too easy for me to imagine scenarios where the answer is yes and other scenarios where it’s no. Still, the model does suggest ethical questions that are worth asking:

• If you are the secret-holder, is keeping that secret preventing you from getting help that could get you out of that situation? Would loved ones want you to get that help?
• If you want to tell a secret to a confidant, are they okay with it? Does it put them in a difficult position?
• If you are a confidant, what would honor the secret-holder’s wishes and be best for them? If you feel the urge to spread their secret for your own benefit, will it hurt you in the end by making people mistrust you with future secrets? Even if they told you not to tell anyone else (especially someone in authority), would it be the right thing to do anyway?
• If you heard the secret through a third party, do you have the right to pass it along to others?