Private Vs. Secret

I will apologize in advance. My thoughts are going to be all over the place with this post.

I had some company last Friday that really has had me thinking over certain things. Particularly in certain situations of how would characterize a relationship, or in the very least how one person relates to another person in social situations.

The person that came over to visit is rather difficult to capture and has been a real struggle over the past few years. Attempting to capture and then keep her attention can often be described as a real struggle.

But I have continued to battle with the struggles and obstacles to win her attention.

At long last, I won it long enough that she promised that she would come and visit me in my home. This is something that I NEVER thought was ever going to happen in my lifetime. But she was here.

Now that has past, and I am glad that had happened. Yet I failed to recognize the signals and hints that possibly she would like to do it again. Days went by before it finally snapped in my brain that’s what she was hinting at.

The biggest problem that I have with her lately is communication. She doesn’t respond much… if she responds at all.

To me, it just seems like one road block after another, after another. I can contact her and there’s just no guarantee that there will be a response. Once there is a response, I can continue building communication. But then again if the conversation goes down the road in a different direction, her main “go-to” is to just end it.

I believe that a lot of people would find it rude and disrespectful. I cannot make any excuses for it, nor can I possibly understand why that is. But I do have this theory. And I wanted to write this theory down.

Even after knowing her for a number of years now, there’s still quite a bit about her that I do not understand or know about her. Generally a person can learn a lot about another person just within a year. And I don’t remember exactly when I met her but has been probably four years, maybe five.

Sure, I could ask her questions if I want to know something about her. But it runs into the risk of her just ending the conversation if she doesn’t want to answer the inquiry.

There’s not too much information on her social media pages. One could pass it off as that she doesn’t use it as much as many other people do.

But then it struck me.

This woman is a private person. Quite a bit of information that I could learn about her, is not something that is available by her choice. What I know about her, is what she has told me. (Or maybe perhaps from other people that know her as well. But I have to take other people’s information with a grain of salt.)

I don’t think that being a private person is necessarily a bad thing. But I think that it does make things really difficult for friendships and relationships of the kind to grow.

I think that being a private person is better than a secretive person.

If a person is private, it could be that nobody knows anything about that person or that very few people do. If a person is secretive, then that person has told another person about their lives, but then expect that other person not to tell anyone of what they have heard. It turns into an obligation that is expected to be kept.

I think that obligation and expectation can be something that could lead into something dangerous because often times if you are telling secrets, you have to find someone that you can trust who won’t just take that information you told in secrecy and spread it to other people. And by the time it gets back to you, the information could be so diluted that the truth is totally absent.

And perhaps being private is also more of a guarded way of self-security for herself, for lack of a better term. If you are keeping private to yourself, you don’t run the risk of telling anyone and having their possible actions come back to hurt you.

Maybe that’s what she has experienced in the past, long before I met her. Perhaps she was burned by someone with the information that they had about her personal life and now she just keeps private to protect herself.

All that I can really say for sure is that I have gained her trust to the point that she would come into my home, by herself willingly, and be within my company with only the two of us around for several hours behind closed doors of my home.

Everyone’s privacy should be respected. No matter who or what. I believe in that. And maybe she was giving hints that she wants to return. But I don’t want to be that secretive shoulder that she cries on whenever her world gets turns upside down.

True, we should be there for all of our friends. But there comes a line to be drawn in the sand if one person is just using the other for a sounding board or a cushion for their emotions and feelings, then up and leave… and EXPECT me to keep things to myself.

So I wanted that off my chest. I honestly should be happy that she came over and reflect happily over the course of the evening.