Why Telling Your Partner Everything Isn't Always an Act of Love, According to Walter Riso

“Honesty is the foundation of a good relationship” is one of the least questioned lines about romantic love. Walter Riso gathers several real cases where saying absolutely everything didn’t strengthen a single relationship: it destroyed it.

In ¿Amar o depender? (2003), psychologist Walter Riso devotes a section to what he calls affective territoriality: the space of personal reserve that, in his framework, every healthy relationship needs to keep. To make this somewhat uncomfortable case, up against the usual discourse on total honesty, he draws on several specific examples.

The kiss that cost five years of peace

A woman who wasn’t doing especially well with her husband started feeling attracted to his best friend. Nothing had ever happened between them until, one night with a few drinks too many, he kissed her and she didn’t pull away.

Some time later, during a couples’ course, in a moment of full honesty, she confessed both the attraction (which was already fading) and the kiss. The result, according to Riso, landed very unevenly between the two: she made peace with herself; he became depressed and deeply jealous. Riso recounts that, five years later, whenever his obsession flared up again, he’d still demand more details about that kiss. The question the author himself raises is direct: was it really worth telling?

The secret savings and the punishment that followed

Another woman, who sold cosmetics to help with household expenses, decided to open her own account and keep a small portion of her sales, on her mother’s advice and because of her husband’s stinginess. Later, advised by a priest, she decided to confess that small, unauthorized savings to her husband.

Riso sums up the reaction in one blunt line: “She would have been better off in prison.” The husband’s reprisals ranged from stripping away privileges to public humiliation. The honesty, in this case, repaired nothing: it simply opened a new wound.

The confessed attraction that cost a job

A man made the mistake, as Riso describes it, of confessing to his wife that he still felt some attraction to a former girlfriend, now married, who worked at the same company. The consequence was so intense that, to restore peace at home, he ended up quitting his job.

The revelation that broke off an engagement

A young woman about to get married, already having frequent sex with her fiancé, confessed to him that he hadn’t been the first man in her life. The wedding, Riso writes, fell apart completely.

Walter Riso’s unconventional conclusion

With these four examples, Riso isn’t defending deceit or active lying. What he questions is a widespread idea: that all transparency, without nuance, improves a relationship. His argument has several layers:

• Sharing every thought, passing attraction, or momentary impulse doesn’t equal being more honest: sometimes it simply amounts to transferring your own emotional weight onto the other person, with no real need to.
• Reasonable privacy, in his framework, isn’t the same as secrecy: it’s a space of your own that doesn’t threaten shared trust, as long as it doesn’t involve hiding decisions that do directly affect the relationship.
• Once certain information is shared, there’s no way to take it back. The damage caused by the revelation can be far greater and longer-lasting than the benefit of having “been honest.”

Riso sums up his position with a distinction that separates two things we tend to confuse: “One thing is handing over your heart, another is handing over your mind.” In other words, you can love someone deeply without that obliging you to narrate out loud every thought that crosses your mind.

When it does matter to talk

None of this means, as Riso himself clarifies, that hiding relevant information is advisable. The difference he draws lies in the type of information:

• Shared decisions (household money, future plans, important changes to the relationship) do call for clear, honest communication, something close to what the assertive communication profile describes.
• Passing thoughts, doubts, or attractions with no real consequences for the relationship fall, in his framework, within a reasonable margin of personal privacy.

The question Riso leaves open, more than a fixed rule, is useful on its own: before sharing something with your partner, ask whether that confession is meant to ease your own conscience or genuinely contributes something constructive to the relationship. They’re not always the same thing, and confusing them, as his cases show, can cost dearly.

A different question than “should I tell them?”

Riso suggests that, instead of starting from the question “should I tell them everything?”, it can be more useful to ask what function that specific confession would serve. In all four cases described, whoever confessed got immediate relief, while whoever received the confession carried information they hadn’t asked for and that, in none of the four cases, changed anything for the better. The cost and the benefit, he notes, weren’t distributed evenly between the two people.

This doesn’t amount, Riso insists, to promoting relationships built on systematic concealment. It amounts to distinguishing between two questions that often get mixed up: “is it true?” and “does sharing it now, this way, with this person, actually help?” Only the first question always has the same answer.