Shankar Vedantam

Leslie, what strikes me in Philip's story is that he was incentivized to keep his secret by his faith community.

And this is true in a lot of settings, not just religious ones.

Talk about the difficulty of fighting not just our own feelings of shame and remorse about a secret, but going against the norms and expectations of the communities to which we belong.

I mean, I believe his spouse was part of that same faith community.

So in some ways, you know, talking about what was going on in his mind would have been a challenge to the faith community and to her.

Right.

I mean, he talks about this almost burning desire he had to come clean, to get the secret off his chest.

And it's almost like we have these competing forces within us, Leslie, where a house divided when we have a secret, because we have this desire to hide and this desire to reveal.

We also heard from some listeners who argued that it's not necessarily a bad thing to keep your cards close to your chest.

Listener David writes, sometimes we need to recognize that we don't need to know everything about a person to enjoy their company.

And sometimes we need to respect that not everyone is comfortable sharing their secrets with us.

While your guests may feel that we should share more, I would argue that we should be more tolerant of each other and that tolerance will lead to more trust and that trust will lead to more disclosure.

What do you think of David's point here, Leslie, that we should focus more on tolerance and building trust rather than feeling pressure to disclose our secrets or demand that others tell us their secrets?

A listener named Tracy called in to share that she thinks keeping a secret can be pleasurable.

At the end of the day, I don't keep secrets, but I love secrets.

I love listening to secrets.

I love having secrets.

When I got married, my husband said to me, you know, you love secrets.

I just wonder, where does the love of secrets come from?

And is that normal?