The Power of Secrets

Love needs secrets. 

We need to know that the person sitting next to us, sharing that glass of wine, also shares our humanness and vulnerability. That they've shared our dreams and our failures. That they wish what we wish. We need to hear these longings and desires and vision.

But sharing these views, learning these things about each other - is so incredibly difficult.  It's like learning Chinese - hard to understand, to express, to communicate. 

Maybe this is because we continually try to brand our lives on social media - curating ourselves on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram. 

But we need more than that. We need secrets. A man needs a woman's secrets like he needs her tenderness. 

But, that's rarely what we get. And rarely what we give in kind. We're imperfect, afraid, sensitive, cautious and suspicious. We carry histories of hurt like stacks of broken hearts, teeteringly arranged on our backs like a Dr. Seuss drawing.   

Fortresses built of these fears and suspicions make for impenetrable hearts. A man won't waste a winter trying to tear down these battlements. 

No. 

He wants to meet the princess in the forest and hear her breathlessly whisper how she can sneak him into the tower. 

He wants to hear secrets.  They are an irresistible gesture of kindness, tenderness and shared longing.

In 1997, Arthur Aron, from the SUNY Stonybrook, published “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” (http://bit.ly/1F60DLK), a study on how two strangers might develop interpersonal affections (love) through a process of discovery and sharing.

In other words, he developed a verbal Petri dish that can grow love. It's the foundation for the iPhone app "36 questions on the way to love." The app of learning secrets. Of sharing.

It is evidence that this longing for learning truths and secrets and feelings - dreams and vulnerabilities - is just the right kind of environment for something really good to happen.

The secrets are a kind of metaphysical power, like the 1.21 gigawatts that Dr. Brown’s Back to the Future Delorean needed to travel in time and space.

If we take Aron's questions - and our soul's desire to learn secrets - we are connecting cables from the lightning rod on the clock tower directly to our souls. Waiting for lightning to strike.

And we’ll either get electrocuted or the car will fly.

I say plug the cables in and whisper your secrets in my ear.