Note: This story contains spoilers for The Drama.
As a child of divorce, I’ve never thought of marriage as some alchemic, all-consuming bond that inherently changes every molecule of who you are. I’ve also never believed that you have to tell your spouse absolutely everything that’s ever affected you over the course of your life. (You’re still an independent person! Or you should be, anyway!) But when three of my friends and I left an evening showing of Kristoffer Borgli’s new film The Drama on Sunday night and repaired to our local dive bar for wine, hot dogs, and a spirited discussion of the movie we’d just seen, I was surprised to discover just how varied our reactions were. It wasn’t The Drama itself that divided us—we mutually granted it a three-star Letterboxd rating—but the question of how honest you need to be with the person you plan to marry.
Honesty is perhaps the central theme of The Drama, with Zendaya’s character, Emma, drunkenly admitting to her fiancé, Charlie (Robert Pattinson), and his friends just a few days before their wedding that she planned and almost executed a highly disturbing crime during her maladjusted adolescence. Charlie and his friends’ reactions to Emma’s confession form the bulk of the movie’s titular drama—but what my friends and I were more focused on was why on earth Emma told them about it in the first place.
It’s admirable to want to be forthright about the worst parts of your past—and, hey, spontaneous, tipsy unburdenings certainly happen in real life—but are there some secrets too dramatic, too character-defining, too potentially dangerous to reasonably expect your partner to take in stride?
“In my personal opinion, a secret becomes ‘too big’ to keep in a marriage when it has the power to directly affect your partner’s emotional, physical, or financial well-being,” marriage and family therapist Dr. Tarra Bates-Duford tells Vogue. “This is associated with the secret’s ability to limit or negatively influence the other partner’s ability to make informed choices about the relationship, i.e., whether or not they want to continue in the relationship. If keeping the secret leads to changing the reality of the relationship in a meaningful way; leads to emotional, physical, or financial harm if they learned of the secret; or takes away the agency in the relationship to decide if they would be okay with whatever is disclosed, then this secret should not be maintained.”
Obviously, most marital secrets aren’t quite on the level of the one that Emma lobs at Charlie. According to Psychology Today, the most common secrets that people keep from their spouses revolve around trauma, infidelity, sexual orientation, gender identity, finances, and mental health struggles. None of these categories seem like they should be inherently insurmountable, and research has shown that people hold an average of 13 secrets at any given time. Most of us aren’t guarding one major, life-altering secret that would alter the fate of our relationships, but rather a compendium of smaller things we’d rather not share about ourselves (even with our closest and most intimate partners). But over time, it’s easy to imagine that kind of secret-keeping driving a wedge between us and the people we profess to hold closest.
If you want to prioritize a more honest relationship with your spouse or partner, but don’t know how or where to start, Bates-Duford—who specializes in family dysfunction and trauma—notes that the way you choose to disclose your secrets to your partner matters as much as the choice to do so in the first place. “I have observed that clients tend to communicate high-impact secrets more effectively when they prioritize the timing of disclosure, take ownership, and emotional responsibility,” she says. “Prior to disclosure, it is important that the partner with the secret chooses a setting that allows for privacy, time to process, and provides both space and opportunity to answer questions that the other partner may have. Secret disclosures should not be rushed, disclosed during a heated exchange, or disclosed in passing.” In other words, maybe don’t take a cue from Zendaya in The Drama and offer up your most closely held confidence over one too many glasses of skin-contact wine at your wedding menu tasting.
