13 People Share the Things They’ve Been Hiding From Their Partners for Years

Even the happiest couples have shadows they never talk about. Behind trust and shared memories, some secrets stay locked away: too risky, too painful, or too shameful to confess. Here are 13 people who live with the one truth their partner will never know.

• When my husband and I first started dating, I knew he was dating other women as well. He was honest with me and said he had just gotten divorced a little over a year before and wasn’t looking for anything serious yet. However, we really clicked, and I just knew he was the one. Every second he was out with someone else was pure agony for me, but I tried not to let it show.
  
  Finally, after months of that, I wanted to give him a taste of how I was feeling, so I just made up a fictional guy (an “old friend”) I was beginning to spend time with. My husband would ask me out, and I would occasionally tell him I’d already made plans with the other guy. Anyway, after a few weeks of that, he said he was no longer comfortable with us dating other people, we became exclusive, and have now been happily married for 22 years... but I’ve always felt so ashamed of my dishonesty. © Flashy-Payment-2309 / Reddit

• I really didn’t enjoy our wedding. I love my wife, but our actual wedding just seemed anticlimactic and stressful (not to mention expensive), and in hindsight, just doesn’t seem like it was worth the trouble. But I’ve never admitted it so as not to temper her memories of a day I hope she loved.
  © jakeor94eqi / Reddit

• I can’t stand my wife’s family. Seriously. Not one single person that she’s blood-related to. They’re all a bunch of blood sucking parasites who offer nothing to anyone, and only contact us when they have a crisis and need something from us. © ThrashMetalH*****n / Reddit

• One time when we were having a fight and hanging out with people in separate states, I watched the first ~6 episodes of a new season of a TV show we really liked without her. I then watched all of those episodes again with her as though I’d never seen them before. Telling her would help no one. © BuckleUpItsThe / Reddit
  

• The novel that she wrote and is trying to get published is extremely mediocre. She wrote it in Spanish and translated it into English. It is fine. Not terrible, but not great either. Maybe it’s better in Spanish? My Spanish isn’t good enough to really judge that, though. I keep encouraging her to write because she has a lot of interesting things to say. She can only get better! Plus, it makes her happy. I just don’t see this novel getting published in English in the US. © okWriter4215 / Reddit

• I was passing notes between a classmate, “now wife,” in high school, and I told her I liked this girl in class. It was a different girl that I actually had a crush on, and she proceeded to ask if I was talking about her. So I packed and, not to hurt her feelings, I said yes. She then proceeded to tell me she liked me as well. Long story short, we have 5 kids and have been together for 16 years and married for 13 years. I will take that secret to my grave. © Ill_Intention8358 / Reddit

• My wife’s sister made a pass at me while my wife was at work. And even though I turned her down, she threatened to tell my wife that I took her up on the offer. © Unknown author / Reddit

• Even though I pretend not to like him being clingy and goofy, I absolutely love and adore it. But the more I “seem” not to like it, the more he does it to annoy me while turning into a teenager-like. But I secretly pretend so he can do it more lol 😂 Also, I like the sound of his snores. It became my calming sound during sleep lol. © 5kids1Latte / Reddit

• If you ask my spouse who said “I love you” first, my spouse will proudly say that I did. Except I did not say I love you first. My spouse very much misheard me during a moment of affection and responded, “I love you too”. We were 18/19 years old at the time (college sweethearts), so I felt awkward correcting them and just went with it from that day on. It worked out obviously (actually falling in love), so no harm done. © tobias_fuunke / Reddit

• I knew about the surprise birthday party he threw for me because a co-worker left their email up at work, and I saw the invitation in their email. He would find this story funny, knowing which co-worker it was, but he went through so much trouble to keep this a surprise that I want him to have that win. © deeds530 / Reddit

• On our first date, the pie crust was store-bought, and the key lime filling was made with a mix. Nothing was from scratch. I literally had to learn how to make pies to cover this mistake.
  © Ok-Ad-2605 / Reddit

• His mother once told me she didn’t think he was good enough for me. She (and his whole family) have chronically underappreciated him and treated him poorly. He’s a quiet, but steadfast and loyal person that I’m eternally grateful for, and I wish he could set better boundaries with these people who seem to have never taken the time to see him. But I don’t want to hurt him.
  © lolalovesme13 / Reddit

• I met my in-laws for the first time after I proposed to my now-wife. They invited me over for a big family dinner. Her dad greeted me first, her mom was running late from work. When she finally showed up and walked into the room, I completely froze. My future MIL was a woman I’d had a fling with about seven years earlier. Way before I met my wife.
  
  She’s actually my wife’s stepmom, and she’s only two years older than me. She recognized me right away, and I knew she did. We just exchanged that awkward “oh no” look and pretended we were meeting for the first time. I’ve never told my wife about my little “past connection,” but let’s just say I’ve been keeping a safe distance from my MIL ever since.

Behind every gentle smile hides a force stronger than fists. These true-life stories show how kindness, often dismissed as softness, is actually a quiet kind of heroism. Ordinary people, through compassion and courage, reveal that true strength doesn’t roar, it whispers.