Sometimes friendships can be a bit complicated. Secretiveness is a common issue that can occur in all types of friendships. You might have a very close friend, who you speak to everyday but who still remains secretive about her life. You may have a friend who you have known for years, spend quite a bit of time with but doesn’t ever divulge much of his personal life or thoughts to you. Being secretive can mean different things to everyone. If you are naturally a very open person, you may be bothered that a friend is not being as open as you even after years of friendship. Sometimes the secretiveness can involve not knowing that your friend has been dating someone or never meeting any friends or family that your friend has.
Before you allow yourself to get too upset about the situation, refer to some of the common reasons that your friend may seem secretive.
- Your friend doesn’t realize he is being secretive. Some people may feel like they don’t want to bother their friends with personal information about their life. Your friend may feel details about his life are boring and simply not worth sharing. A friend may feel you may not be specifically interested in certain aspects of his life. For instance, maybe your friend regularly plays sports but doesn’t tell you because he feels you aren’t into sports and don’t really care. Other people may be dealing with personal issues that they feel genuinely don’t need to be shared. For instance, you may tell people if a parent is battling through a health issue but your friend may feel that is information only the family needs to be privy to. Your friend may feel guilty sharing information such as the fact he just got a job while he knows you have been unsuccessfully searching for jobs for months.
- Your friend may not trust you. Realizing that your friend doesn’t trust you can be hard to swallow, especially if you have given no concerns to be untrustworthy or have given your trust to this friend rather easily. Some people have a hard time trusting others or feel that you need to prove you are trustworthy before they open up.
- Your friend may struggle with social anxiety. Opening up may be natural to you but very uncomfortable to your friend. He may worry that other people are judging him. The risk of being rejected by you or other friends may be concerning for him.
- Your friend may not feel as attached to the friendship as you are. Many of us have been in unbalanced friendships. You may feel attached to a friend and call her your best friend, but your friend may not feel the same way. This doesn’t mean that your friend doesn’t appreciate or care about you but does mean that your friends feeling’s are not quite at the level of your feelings. As a result, you may want your friend to be open about her life, but she may not have the desire to become open with you.
- Your friend may worry about what you think. For instance, your friend broke up with her boyfriend and she knows how much you liked him and wanted the relationship to work. She may feel like you will be upset with her for deciding to end the relationship or she may feel humiliated about the breakup. Although you may not be judgmental about what happened, your friend may worry that you will judge her as a result of her actions.
- Your friend may not realize how important being open is. Although being open about your life comes natural to you, your friend may genuinely not know that being open is essential to growing a friendship. I have friends who were not open for years and sincerely did not realize that being open with people was necessary.
Dealing with a secretive friend can be tough and something that needs to be handled delicately to avoid harming the friendship. Below are things to consider when you have a secretive friend.
1. Ask yourself if you have given a reason to be untrustworthy. Were you recently gossiping about your friend? Did you withhold information from your friend? Have you betrayed the trust of your friend recently? Trust is a delicate thing and if you have ever broken that trust then your friend is probably being secretive to avoid another incident like that occurring again. Breaking trust may not be obvious. You may have casually mentioned something about your friend to other people that betrayed your friend’s trust. For instance your friend may have had her partner cheat on her. You may have mentioned this to a mutual friend, without mentioning her name but enough details for the mutual friend to figure out who you were talking about. Keep in mind that breaking trust may not have been intentional on your part. You can only remedy the situation by being a trustworthy friend again. This may involve you apologizing for the incident where you betrayed the person’s trust, taking steps to earn their trust and being patient as your friend develops trust with you again.
2. Your friend may be shy and uncomfortable about opening up. Many people fear being the subject of conversation. They would prefer to ingest information about your life than share anything about theirs. This isn’t anything personal to you but shows that your friend might not be comfortable with opening up. You can usually tell someone feels uncomfortable if she often avoids answering questions about her personal life or becomes defensive if you try to probe for more details about her life. The best thing to do in this situation is to continue being open and patient with your friend. I have some friendships where friends opened up over years. Although the process was lengthy, the friendship did deepen and became mutually open.
3. Gently confront your friend. Sometimes to preserve a friendship you may need to gently and kindly confront your friend about the situation. You may ask your friend questions to try and get them to open up more or you might ask them a vague question so that they are given the opportunity to open up if they want to. You might say, “I’ve noticed you have been a bit distant lately. Is everything okay? I’m worried about you and just want to let you know I’m here for you if you would ever like to talk.” Confronting a friend may not solve the problem or be the right way to go about the situation. Choose to confront a friend if you feel it is necessary. For instance, if you feel your friend is depressed, doing something illegal or dangerous or really needs support, then you may want to gently confront your friend. However, confronting your friend just to know more facts about their past is probably not necessary and could harm the friendship.
4. friend has the right to be secretive about his or her life. As hard as it can be to accept, your friend is not entitled to be open to you or share specific details about her life. For instance, I have had some painful things occur in my childhood. I very rarely tell people about these instances. The people I tell may be a close friend or someone I barely know. I may share this information with someone who isn’t a close friend because he experienced the same things as myself. I may choose to share this with a partner or a best friend. Yet, I don’t have to share these personal details with all my close friendships just because we are close friends. Pressuring someone to open up to you will feel unnatural, make your friend feel guilty and uncomfortable and takes away the opportunity for the trust to grow organically. Often times the best way to handle secretive friends is to respect that they want to be secretive and to adjust how you choose to manage the friendship. For instance, you might choose to share less personal details about your own life so that you don’t feel as upset about the situation.
5. A secretive friend can help us learn more about ourselves. I’m naturally a very open person and can often easily open up without knowing someone that well. Yet, it took a secretive friend to make me realize that being open isn’t always a good thing. When you have a friend who chooses to be secretive, instead of viewing that secretiveness automatically as a bad thing, try to see the benefits from it. For instance, if you find out that your friend hid from you times in his life where he was addicted to hardcore drugs and made some terrible decisions, instead of feeling shocked and angry that he never shared that with you, try to understand where that came from. You may be a trustworthy person but not everybody is. Some details are better left unsaid around specific people. Being open about everything in your life may be okay most of the time but some people could take advantage of that information. Being too open about your life could prevent you from some great opportunities to listen and broaden your perspective too. Being cautious about sharing details about your life isn’t always a bad thing, so try to see things from a different perspective as well.
6. Understand when a friendship is incompatible or worth fighting for. Everyone has different levels of secretiveness that they can cope with. For instance, I could tolerate a friendship where I never met my friend’s family, other friends and such. I could understand if a friend didn’t feel comfortable sharing some parts of their past with me that makes them feel upset. I’m okay if a friend chooses to never mix friend groups. However, I would have a hard time being friends with someone who kept their long-time partner a secret, withheld current information about their life (i.e., hobbies, career and so on) from me or someone who never told me anything about their past. A friendship would be incompatible without a certain degree of openness. Try to assess what you can deal with in your own friendships. If you are happy with a friend who isn’t as open as you like but has other wonderful qualities, then the friendship may be worth hanging in there for. However, if you feel the friendship is stagnant or is unbalanced due to the secretiveness then this could be a sign that the friendship is incompatible.
Some friendships may never be transparent or have mutual openness to the degree you would like. Being friends with a person may involve that you accept that there will be parts of their life that will remain hidden to you. This isn’t a bad thing either. Surround yourself with good friends. Some of these friendships will be very close to you and involve openness and a lack of secretiveness. Other friends may be great to hang out with but you may have to accept that you may never know everything about this friend. As you surround yourself with supportive friendships you will start to feel less upset that one of your friends is not quite as open as you wish he or she could be. You can also learn to back away or be less open with a friend who continues to be secretive about their life. Or you might continue to be friends with someone who is secretive and allow the friendship to grow organically, even if openness takes years.