Dear LPG,

I feel the need to start my message today with a question, ‘Can you keep a secret?’

I was browsing on line when I found a list of the most common secrets that people are asked to keep.  I think that a secret can really weigh on your mind.  How many times have you been left in a position where you have been asked to keep a secret by a friend or family member who tells the facts first, and then tells that it is a secret and that you are the only person that they would trust with it?  In my experience many of the secrets I have been asked to keep often, offer little notoriety, even though they are a real issue for the secret-teller, and I suppose which makes them relatively easy to keep. Perhaps younger people trust us oldies with their secrets because they think we have seen it all and done it all so we will not see it as being as shocking as a younger person might. But then again there are the ones that youngsters tell you and that you feel the need to share for the good of the person who shared it with you.

We humans are a species that have an instinct to ‘share’ that started long before that term found the significance that users of the internet put upon it but, in general, did you know that according to what I have read on the subject, women are more sharing than their male counterparts.  Does that mean that it is safer to share a secret with a man?

I am female and during my lifetime I have often found myself with a friend whispering something in my ear which they need to share with at least one person, but that they really want to hide from others and, in my experience, age does not make life any less complicated; the secrets just keep materialising if you let them.

So, there are two questions to be considered really and the other one is, if you had a secret that you needed to share, who is the one person you would trust with it?

My son thinks that I am the worst person to tell any secret to, while I have a small circle of friends who all feel that we can share anything in the knowledge that it will stay within our circle.

Perhaps there is a two-part answer to my two-part question.  If you find yourself in possession of someone else’s secret that you feel that you have to share, share it with someone from a different part of your life; someone who will never come into contact with anyone who is part of the secret.  And secondly, most secrets start small and grow.  There are so few secrets that have not been secrets for at least one other person in history before they became yours.  If you have to share it share it when it is at the beginning of its existence, before it becomes a really big and complicated.     

CK, Penge.

CK shares the facts that inspired her message…

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…why not try this online aptitude test to find out how good a secret keeper you are…

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