Reader Letters: The Thing I Never Told My Sister

Last month we asked a single question: is there something you have never told the person you are closest to?

We expected a handful of replies. We received close to four hundred.

The letters are published here with permission and with identifying details removed. What follows is not a survey and does not claim to be representative. It is simply what people said.

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The largest group was money

By some distance. More people had concealed a financial fact from a sibling, parent or partner than had concealed anything else.

Very little of it was extravagance. It was debt, mostly, and the shame attached to it. Several people described paying off a family member's obligation quietly and never mentioning it. Several more described the reverse: taking help and letting everyone believe they had managed alone.

One line appeared, in various forms, more than twenty times: I could have told them at the beginning. After a year it had become a lie, and I couldn't work out how to undo it.

The second group was resentment about care

Almost always about a parent.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has lived it. One sibling, usually the one who lives nearest, absorbs the practical work of an ageing parent. The others visit, are grateful, and go home.

What people had not said out loud was not that they wanted help. It was the calculation underneath: I gave up four years, and when the house is divided it will be divided equally, and I will say nothing, because saying something would make me the one who cared about money.

Nobody in this group had raised it. Every one of them expected it to surface eventually.

The third group was the smallest and the heaviest

People who knew something about a family member that the family member did not know had been noticed.

An affair. A diagnosis. A child's situation at school. In each case the writer had decided that saying it would cause more damage than carrying it.

Some were clearly right. Some, reading their own account back, seemed to realise mid-letter that they were not.

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What we take from it

Two things.

The first is how much of what goes unsaid is not malicious. Almost none of these were lies told for advantage. They were silences kept to protect somebody — usually the person being kept in the dark, sometimes the writer's own standing in the family.

The second is the timing. Nearly every letter contained a version of the same sentence: there was a moment early on when I could have said it easily.

That moment is the whole thing. A fact disclosed at the time is information. The same fact disclosed three years later is a secret, and the person hearing it will react not to the fact but to the concealment.

If you are currently inside one of these silences, that is the part worth knowing. The cost is not sitting still. It is growing.

We are continuing to read replies. If you would like to write to us, our address is on the contact page.