the safe space spontaneous couple confession
03 Aug 2017so here’s a thing i’ve noticed that’s pretty hilarious. many of my friends are coupled. for some of these couples, i have independently relationships with each person. for others, i only know one of them through the other. i often hang out with these couple friends when they’re together, either as me plus them or in larger groups of couples and single people.
regardless of how well i know one or both of them, there seems to be this phenomenon of one person in the couple saying or sharing something to me or the entire group that their partner didn’t know. i call this the safe space spontaneous couple confession (ok, it needs a better name, but i’m working on it… if you have a suggestion, lmk!).
even in the last two months i can count something like five or six times where this has happened. some of the langauge sounds like:
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“what?! i didn’t know you thought that!”
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“we have never talked about that!”
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“so i haven’t told [insert partner name] yet, but __.”
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“[partner name] is probably gonna hate me for saying this out loud, but __.”
i have one wonder about this which is why it seems so common? my current hypotheses are:
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it feels safer to share some risky things in a group space because the group dynamic is different and can be safer
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it’s nice to have other people in your community know what’s going on with you and your partner
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people don’t actually have good communication patterns with their partners and want/need the support of friends to share heavy/difficult things
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sometimes it’s easier to share difficult things in a joking manner with a group of friends and then have the hard convos 1on1 with your partner later
whether one or multiple of those things are true or if this happens because of something i don’t understand yet, it doesn’t seem like that problematic of a practice. at this point, i’ve come to enjoy when it happens. it’s usually funny and also helps me be supportive of my couple friends (am i sliding into monk territory?).
we’ll see if my relationship to this phenomenon changes as i learn more about it, though…
words / writing / post-processing
375w / 13min / 5min