Can you keep a secret? More importantly, do you want to?

Have you ever been sworn to secrecy only to be told the exact same thing by someone else as gossip only minutes later, apparently with the full permission of the secret holder? I have. OK, it probably took longer than a minute, but it got me thinking; once told, is anything really secret? The best way for people not to know your business is not to tell them, so what is the purpose of telling someone something you don’t want anyone else to know? Is it a truly liberating experience, or are secrets given as a gift to the keeper of the secret to demonstrate trust? Or are secrets simply a way of sharing more about ourselves, a sort of subconscious currency to be traded; you tell me yours and I will share mine.

If you say something is secret to one person but then go and tell it freely as an anecdote elsewhere it confuses the issue further. I mean if the person with the secret isn’t keeping it a secret anymore, do you have to? What is the etiquette? At what point does something become so much in the public domain that it is no longer secret. In the workplace I know the rules. It is crystal clear and has been reinforced over so many years that I understand professional confidentiality and my professional boundaries the same way I know my own name. At work all promises to keep things confidential come with a caveat, a big ‘BUT’ which allows us to break that confidence if we think harm or danger could be caused or sustained. But when you individually swear members of the same social group to secrecy over something, is it really a test to see who can keep their mouth shut the longest? In fact, is there any thought for the person to whom the burden of a secret is being passed?

This is especially true of the secrets that you just don't want to know. You know the kind I mean, where somebody tells you something that puts you in a quandary as to whether you should pass it on or not, for example finding out that your best friend is sleeping with another friends partner. To tell or not to tell, that is the question. If you keep the secret are you being a good friend, or a bad one? Applying the workplace rules means that you should definitely tell, after all someone is at risk of harm by not knowing. However, you are likely to lose both friends in the process – no one likes a snitch or the bearer of bad news, right? But is it fair to put the burden of a secret onto someone without giving a warning first?

So perhaps in future we should devise some way of telling people when we are about to tell a secret, a ‘secret alert’ so that the person on the receiving end has the chance to say ‘no thanks’. Perhaps a grading system would work; number one this is a high-priority secret I don't want told, number two this is a secret I expect you to tell a few people and number three, this is not really a secret and I want you to tell others. It would certainly make it easier for the holder of the secret to understand what they are signing up for.

Finally, just in case you are wondering, I'm very good at keeping secrets. If a friend tells me something in confidence they can be assured it will stay that way. However do I want to keep everybody’s secrets? The answer to that is probably no, not if I am honest. There have been times when I have felt anxious, stressed and wrong-footed by the knowledge I hold in the name of friendship.  So maybe we need a culture shift away from bestowing secrets randomly on our unsuspecting friends towards a better way of filtering the personal information that we want people to know.