It’s not as complicated as the title suggests.
In a reversal of how it usually works, I wrote a piece for the Frisky that then got picked up at the Good Men Project: What’s the Difference Between Privacy and Secrecy? (Here’s the identical piece, but with a different formatting and comments section, at GMP). Excerpt:
Guarding the other’s solitude is about allowing your partner the right to a private, not a secret life. It’s a recognition that even the most sexually exclusive relationship functions a bit like a Venn diagram, in which the largest portion is a shared intimacy, but in which each partner is left with something that is theirs alone. It means having the trust to expect the truth, but also the respect not to ask questions that invite dishonest responses.
I’ve never asked my wife how many people she slept with before me. I don’t know how often she masturbates, or what she thinks about when she does. I trust her to manage her private sexual life in such a way that it doesn’t rob our shared intimacy of passion and power. And I trust her to be faithful as she trusts me.
We don’t have the right to a hidden life that contradicts our public commitments. But we have the right to a private world – and a private sexuality – that is ours alone.
Note: Obviously, this is not a distinction I invented, though it’s one that doesn’t get discussed often enough. My cousin Tom Bishop gets credit for reminding me to write about it, and Charlie Glickman gets the hat-tip for reminding me that Marty Klein does a nice job of distinguishing privacy and secrecy in his now out-of-print 1989 classic, Your Sexual Secrets.
I agree with you but am a bit surprised. To me it seems your stance in the latest porn post (http://hugoschwyzer.net/2011/07/21/are-you-a-controlling-shrew-if-you-dont-want-your-partner-using-porn/#more-4283) is a different one. For instance compare those 2 parts:
“But when we come into any kind of sexual relationship, as so many of us will do or would like to do , we have to balance our own desires with those of another. We don’t get to do whatever we want.”
And
“We don’t have the right to a hidden life that contradicts our public commitments. But we have the right to a private world – and a private sexuality – that is ours alone.”
Couldn’t one say that porn can be part of a private sexuality that is ours alone (leaving extreme cases aside).
From what I have read from the comments of the other posts it seems to me that the difference opinions with you and some of the posters reflect what you have said in those two posts. The “pro-porn” group views it as a private sexuality the “anti-porn” as part of a intimate relationship that should be talked about.
That is what I gather from it….did I get you?
I wrote these almost as companion pieces, because they capture a contradiction at the heart of relationships. We don’t have the right to lie to a partner.
Where does porn fit in on the private/secret scale? That depends on the relationship. In the previous post, I was making the case that for those for whom porn is a dealbreaker, they’re not wrong to say “I don’t want porn as part of your private life because it won’t stay private.” And their partners aren’t wrong to say, “ah, but I do want it as part of my private life.” I was arguing for the equivalency of those two positions rather than privileging the latter.
But leaving porn aside, there is always, always something we get to keep as our own. To use the Venn diagram image, every monogamous relationship has three circles — yours, mine, ours. How big the “ours” is will fluctuate over the course of the relationship, and what goes in the “yours” and “mine” isn’t about immutable truth but about individual differences that get negotiated. But there must always still be a “yours” and a “mine”, no matter how intimate we are.
This piece is weak, Hugo. I went back and reread it a couple of times and still can’t find the content. It reminds me of an essay, by an author I forget, that said it’s wrong to leave a spouse who wants to stay married unless the spouse committed a “betrayal.” That word just punts the dilemma. Private = stuff I don’t have to share with my partner. Secret = stuff I do have to share with him. How do I know which is which?
Also, you say there *always* has to be both private and secret stuff, kept separate. That’s true for most people but I don’t see why it’s an axiom. I was once in a relationship with a man who insisted he would keep no secrets, nothing private, from me. His Venn diagram completely overlapped. Or so he said.
The closest you come to saying something substantive is “We don’t have the right to a hidden life that contradicts our public commitments.” But that’s going to cover only a tiny fraction, if anything, in a person’s life. And “public commitments” applies to secrets kept from everyone, not just from a partner.
Mrs Miniver’s problem!
It’s a math puzzle, unsolved for a long time, about making the area of where two circles overlap equal to the total area of the non-overlapping parts. But it was inspired by exactly this notion about a relationship: that the people involved should, pairwise, have as much in common as separate.
I think this is generally a good article. I do have a quibble with this paragraph, though:
“Even in the most devoted of monogamous relationships, you’re likely to find yourself having wild fantasies that don’t involve your partner. Is it secretive and dishonest not to tell, or is having a separate fantasy world (with or without masturbation) part of a reasonable expectation of privacy? People disagree intensely. One way to discern the right answer is to ask yourself how troubled you’d be if you learned your partner was doing the same thing you were doing. Like everything around sex, this is largely subjective: what for one person falls within a reasonable expectation of privacy is another person’s inappropriate secret.”
First you’re telling people how to discern the “right answer.” Then you’re saying that it’s largely subjective. How can there be a right answer for something that’s subjective? And if people have varying stances on what’s private and what’s secret, what good does it do to ask myself how troubled I’D BE if my partner was doing the same thing I was doing when his stance may very well be quite different from mine? So, for me, there is some logic missing from that paragraph. But overall, I think it’s a good post and the distinction between private and secret is good food for thought.