Today's Draw: Book in the House of Ring from the Whimsy Lenormand by Pepi Valderrama and the Deck of Lenormand Houses by the beautiful and talented ME. How good are you at keeping secrets? When you promise not to tell, does that include your husband and/or best friend? Is there ever any kind of secret that you feel you just HAVE to tell or you'll burst?
Before we begin, I endorse Pepi's Whimsy Lenormand. It's adorable. And it comes with a little card that says it's made just for you. And it's adorable.
Now that that's out of the way, Lenormand is read in pairs, at a minimum. And what you do with Lenormand that's different from tarot is that you string the keywords from the cards together to create a phrase or sentence or compound word. So rather than have entire long stories that you tell with, say, five tarot cards, with Lenormand, you'd end up with a short sentence. Straightforward and to the point.
So the keywords for Book, include secrets, knowledge, information, investigation, mysteries, education or an actual book. For Ring, the words include commitment, promise, contract, obligation, guarantee. So for Book in the House of Ring, you might say "secret promise", "an investigation into a contract" or "learning about contracts." For today, though, I'm using "sworn to secrecy."
From what I understand, among married couples, there's an implied "if you tell a married person a secret, they get a free pass to tell their spouse." If you tell one member of the couple, it's the same as telling the entire couple. I've heard this from many couples, so I assume it's a pretty universal thing. If I tell a married woman a secret, she gets to tell her husband without violating the bounds of the sacred secret trust.
Now this doesn't mean she WILL tell the secret. But she does have the option. And I get it. This is their partner. Maybe they've promised not to have any secrets between them. But more likely it's that pretty much anyone holding a certain type of secret eventually feels like they're going to explode if they don't tell someone. I think this is more common among women, because we're such sharers. Many men also enjoy sharing secrets, but most that I've met are bottomless holes into which you can throw your secrets and never hear from them again. I admire men like that. They serve a very important purpose.
Anyway, when I heard about this phenomena many years ago, I created my own rule. I mean, just because I'm single doesn't mean I have to explode. If married women get to spill their guts, then I should get to spill mine, too. Like with married women, my rule is optional. I only put it into action if I feel like I will burst without telling someone. I rarely have a bottomless secret pit of a male around me, so instead I'll tell someone you don't know, will never meet and who really doesn't give a crap. Since that's my rule, I rarely enact it. It's no fun telling someone who doesn't care. But I'm human. I need an out. Some secrets are too good.
All of this goes into the category of "things people never talk about." Nobody will ever come out and tell you that they may tell your secret to someone. They always swear they won't. But, call me cynical, I never believe that. Since most of my friends are married, I assume their husbands know crap about me that I wouldn't tell them myself.
So here's what I'm asking you today...how good are you at telling secrets? I would estimate I keep way more than half the secrets I'm told because, frankly, they're lame secrets. I mean, they're important to the person telling them, but nobody else would care. In that sense, I'm very much like the bottomless man I described earlier. Ask me a week from now and I won't even be able to remember the conversation, much less the secret. So I give myself a roughly 85% secret-keeping rate. The rate is probably higher for "sworn secrets" and right in the pocket for "assumed secrets" or secrets that come out in private discussions, but haven't specifically been labeled a secret.
Honestly, where do you think you land in all of that? And what about your own secrets? Are you any good at keeping those? I'm nervous even writing about this myself, but I know I'm a vault compared to many people I know so I'm not ashamed. And then, of course, I know people who are a vault compared to me. But let's keep it real...do you ever tell?
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