Three Secrets to Keep from Your Spouse

There are some marriage counselors and (worse yet) self-help gurus who say that it's best to be as honest as possible with your spouse. This is generally true, but there are three things that you should absolutely not share. Those three things are: old high school yearbooks, tax returns from before your marriage, and musical compilations of any kind that you put together during high school or college.

First, the high school yearbooks. It can be very tempting to share these. Very tempting. After all, we change a lot as we grow up, and the person we were during high school was just a confused, self-conscious, very different version of us. Sharing that person's peculiarities and embarrassing moments is just funny. It doesn't reflect badly on who we are now.

When we're actually sharing the yearbooks, it might be very funny. But almost every yearbook holds clues to the parts of us that we left behind. We left those things behind for good reason, but they are still part of us. And most damaging of all, somewhere in one of those yearbooks there is probably a note from a boyfriend or girlfriend expressing their love for us. No matter how long ago it was, our spouse does not want to be reminded that someone else once had the right to say those things. Especially the way they were always said in high school.

It's unlikely that we'll suddenly have a similar urge to show our spouse old tax returns, but those can come to light in a different way. We might want to finance something (like a house) and need to provide financial documentation from the past. We might get audited (God forbid) and have to produce our old returns. There are a number of situations in which we might have to pull the old returns out of storage.

If such a situation should arise, it's best to take the returns out, give them to whatever inquisitive third party is demanding them, and keep them the heck away from the prying eyes of our spouse. The past is the past, and in most relationships the financial past is one of the main things that was lied about early on. Especially for men, lies about past earnings (exaggerating or minimizing) are common. What's the point in providing evidence that's just going to reveal the truth behind those lies and sow the seeds of distrust?

Mixed tapes, playlists, and any other kind of musical compilation are another thing that we should just keep to ourselves. Just like the yearbooks, this is something that 's very tempting to share. We might empty an old storage unit or (under strict orders) remove our stuff from our parents' house, and in doing so we might come across an old mixed tape from high school. Those old mixed tapes can bring up all kinds of memories.

Those are fond memories to be kept solidly to ourselves. Because the fact is that no wife really wants to know that her husband rocked out to bad metal, even though every wife intuitively knows that he did. And no husband wants to know that his wife liked music with explicit lyrics when she was fifteen, even though every husband knows that she did. Again, it's best to not be reminded.

High school yearbooks, old tax returns, and musical compilations from high school and college. Avoid those, and you've got a passing chance at having a solid, lasting marriage.