Keeping secrets from your partner is a good thing

I have a friend who has been with her boyfriend for two years and she has never passed a bodily fluid or noise in front of him. To me, the patron saint of pooing with the door open, this concept is a mystery. But since I’m so shit at keeping boyfriends, maybe it’s the secret to a happy relationship.

When keeping secrets from your other half, the tricky thing is learning where the line is. As a rule of thumb, I’d say the more vague you are in the beginning stages of a relationship, the better. This keeps the mystique about you, regardless of whether or not they’ll find out in a few months time your most prized possession is a signed BoyZone album or that your farts smell like rotting roadkill which has been stuck under your car wheels for two weeks.

She probably doesn’t need to know how bad your farts smell yet

However, some secrets aren’t good to keep to yourself early on. For the first few weeks of seeing my (now) boyfriend, he seemed super shady. I’d suggest we have drinks or watch a film at his house, and he’d suddenly break out in a cold sweat and mild rash. Something was up. I was essentially offering myself up for Netflix and chill, sacrificing myself at the altar of the pretend-watching-Better-Call-Saul gods, and this dude was turning me down. Turns out, he lived with his ex-girlfriend. The fact didn’t put me off, but him doing the sort of not-lying-but-not-really-truthing? That did. So guys, if you live with someone you’ve banged, it’s probably best to admit it from the outset.

Disclosing how many people you’ve slept with on the first date is never a great idea. I’m not one to slut shame, it’s just that among the debate over fino sides and spicy rice, it doesn’t make for great first-date Nandos chat. Plus, if a guy talks about how good he is at sex or brags about how many girls he’s slept with, it means he has a semi-inverted chode and cries after intercourse.

Some secrets are good to keep for the entirety of the relationship. A big reason many partnerships break up is boredom. Things aren’t as fun when the other person isn’t wearing their fancy underwear or washing their balls as thoroughly anymore. After all, the grass seems greener when it has fresh smelling genitalia and doesn’t get angry at you for using the last of the milk. So, keep putting effort into your relationship, and don’t let your partner know you pick out ingrown pubes with tweezers and paint over your layers of toe nail polish instead of re-doing it. They never need to know how secretly gross you are.

Sharing absolutely everything with your boy or girl is weird and unnecessary. They don’t need to know you’re a disgusting feral animal when you’re left alone, or how many people you’ve p-in-v’d. They probably don’t need to know your really weird kinks either, though if you met each other at a hentai convention I guess it means you can be weird together. All that said, I’m bad at relationships so maybe do the opposite and you’ll be fine? I mean, I once sent a boy I was chirpsing a picture of my sick in a pint glass, so don’t take my advice.