On Secrets

(Sept 2025)

A secret is a powerful instance of language that we discover early in life — it evokes an image where one’s voice is cupped by the hands and in a hushed tone, delivers a classified message to its receiver. It signifies privileged access to vulnerable information, a risk in its discovery by an unintended other, and the creation of social space based on exclusion and difference. In children, the contents of a secret commonly ranges from innocent gossip to romantic crush, but in transition into adulthood, the notion of a secret explodes and takes our innocence as collateral — morphing to include conspiracy, transgression, and betrayal. As outsiders to such a secret, we may be indifferent (‘that has nothing to do with me’), paranoiac (‘I’m afraid that it has something to do with me’), or resentful (‘I should be included’). In the formation of a secret, we are then introduced to three distinct parties: the secret-bearing holder, the recipient, and the excluded outsider. As such, it appears that what constitutes a secret is inherently in the positing of the outsider, present or absent. What was perhaps a neutral exchange between two parties, becomes secret when there is reason to hide from peering eyes. And if we are to situate ourselves as outsiders, the existence of secrets (without knowing their content) is enough to pluralize speech, introducing an ethics that complicates the relationship between honesty and deception.

Secrets are produced in a variety of ways. The first instance involves the recipient intuiting the sensitivity of shared content and sensing that if indiscriminately shared, would culminate in discord and distrust. The second case is more abrupt — when a message becomes a ‘secret’ retroactively and without the recipient’s awareness. The dilemma arises when the recipient realizes that in ‘giving it away’, what was shared inadvertently exposes the secret-holder. This example becomes particularly pertinent when ethics are later considered. Through a variety of signals, the recipient learns ‘the hard way’ that what was offered in conversation was not meant for outsider consumption. This classic case of miscommunication and misunderstanding is inherent to speaking beings since language itself is not a medium of complete transparency between the self and the other. A secret takes on the status of an object, where its value is tied intimately with exclusion, rendering its contents as secondary. Secrecy in this way becomes a form of currency, where each effort to keep itself hidden is a deposit of emotional investment, producing an increase in value — whereby leaking its contents results in total liquidation.

When the status of this object is known to be secret, it offers pleasures for all parties involved, including the outsider. The secret-holder and the recipient’s retention of the secret produces a gratification of concealed knowledge and an enjoyment of in-group membership produced by the frame of exclusion. In contrast to the secret-holder’s willful self-disclosure to others, the recipient’s nonconsensual revelation of a secret’s contents reveals a perverse underside that sabotages the social pact, showing a pleasure in a particular expulsion. The recipient in this way, ‘gets off on’ the secret by sharing it with others. Once a pattern emerges, it designates the regularity of gossip as a fetish. To prolong this sadistic satisfaction, the recipient must keep their own indulgence hidden for as long as possible — by monitoring the loyalty of ‘those who now know’ and checking with the possibility of the secret-holder finding out. A certain fascination with self-destruction and transgression emerges when the recipient shares the secret with the outsider. Despite being aware of the risks it poses to the relationship with the secret-holder, the recipient may succumb to the specific pleasure of sharing the secret, perhaps through some coaxing by the outsider (‘I won’t tell them that you told me’). Given their lack of membership, the outsider has greater possibility for shameless enjoyment — a unique vantage point of witnessing the live-action detonation of a relationship behind a screen of anonymity and uninvolvement. Here, we locate a sadistic quality in the outsider’s participation, found in the inattention to the possible erosion of another’s relationship, and a latent masochism in the recipient’s act of revealing, despite the likelihood of introducing distrust and paranoia to their relationship with the secret-holder.

Interestingly, the initial positions that structured the hierarchy based on an in-group/out-group distinction, now become inverted — power is no longer situated at the top by ‘those who know’ but by outsiders who have no stake in the secret’s circulation. In a sense, what was at first a pleasure produced by knowledge becomes the very threat to the secret-holder, although in a different form — as the knowledge of its exposure. In this way, the nature of the object-as-secret is both pleasurable and threatening. Tragically, the act of confiding has the potential to implode both secret-holder and recipient. It seems that here, the recipient is the weakest link. Betrayal, intentional or not, unclothes the secret-holder, turning them into a social exhibition for a voyeuristic audience. The utterance of what becomes a secret then becomes a kind of demand, a bind between oneself and the recipient, a promise not to be broken, an oath from which one swears silence. It implicates the other. In another way, we could see the secret-holder as holding a perverse position of power in relation to the recipient — handing them one half of enjoyment with an implicit prohibition not to enjoy the tempting latter half in their absence (‘You do not get to enjoy the pleasure of disclosure’).

Through an evolutionary lens, a functional account can be made for secrets. Sitting adjacent to blackmail and gossip, secrets seem to function like a social litmus test, a heuristic for determining who to trust and who to exclude. In this sense, the desire to share secrets is informed not only by an ancient history, but also by what it means to be a speaking self. If we are to imagine ourselves as children once more, are our secrets not simply expressions of what we really think and feel about ourselves and the world? If so, then the secrets we share as adults are perhaps defensive postures clothed as chatter or confession — a fear that a commitment to complete transparency and unflinching honesty assures self-destruction. What was at first a form of childhood expression is now a complicated strategy of self-preservation, where in the act of openness, we risk turning our vulnerability into an objectified plaything.