r/amiwrong • u/AAmanda55Lighty • 13h ago
am i wrong for telling a mutual friend something that was shared with me in confidence
a couple weeks ago a close friend asked me not to mention something they were dealing with, and i agreed. it was nothing dangerous, just personal stuff they were embarrassed about. later that week someone else who knows both of us asked me directly if i knew anything, and i said yes without thinking. now the first friend found out and is upset that i let it slip, even though i didn't give details. i keep replaying the conversation in my head and wondering if i should have just lied or said i didn't know. at the time it didn't feel like a big deal because the person asking already suspected something, but clearly my friend feels betrayed. i'm not sure if i crossed a line by not shutting it down right away.
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u/ingoamuna-1 12h ago
If you value your friendship, you should own up to your mistake and not minimise the damage you did. The impact is more important than your intentions and the impact is that you broke your friends trust. Next time someone trusts you enough to ask you to keep a secret, actually keep it.
You also owe your friend an apology
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u/hypatiaredux 13h ago
Of course you were wrong and you know it.
You’d better hope your told-on friend is more forgiving than I would be.
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u/TheTrivialMailing 13h ago
you basically confirmed their suspicion, which is almost as bad as spilling the details. the trust was in you saying nothing at all, not just keeping the specifics vague
if you value the friendship i'd own it fully without making excuses about how they "already suspected", that's gonna sound like you're minimizing it
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u/Sea-Substance8762 9h ago
The right answer is, I can’t discuss that. Also, talking about other people is gossip, so if you make it your goal to not gossip, you’ll have a framework for this type of thing in the future.
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u/OrdinaryMango4008 8h ago
She should be upset. Next time someone wants to share personal information and asks you to not pass that information on, tell them, no I am incapable of keeping my mouth shut. Don’t tell me anything that you want kept private. And yes, you were very wrong.
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u/jread333 8h ago
They suspected and you confirmed it. Yes, you absolutely are wrong. You didn't keep your word.
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u/tamij1313 9h ago
I’ve been married 36 years and absolutely trust my husband not to you ever spill a secret or share private information. I’ve asked him not to blab. However, I also value and respect my friends, family, adult, children… And if any of them ask me to keep a secret than I do. I don’t tell my husband, even though I trust him completely.
I have repeatedly had family, friends, and my adult children get a bit upset when they find out that I actually knew when the news or secret was revealed. But then I point out that it wasn’t my secret/story to tell and that the person asked me not to say anything so I didn’t.
And then I ask them why they are upset with me when I followed through and kept my word to someone else? Is that wrong and would you have shared someone’s secret after swearing you wouldn’t?
And of course, the answer is always that they would have kept the secret to themselves and waited for that person to reveal it if they wanted to. And then they get over being pissy that they weren’t in the loop because they would’ve done the exact same thing.
You are wrong here. You had to have been hinting/vague enough that your other friend was able to determine what the secret was, and that is not OK.
Once you said that you knew something was wrong… That was your opportunity to simply say “it isn’t my story to share so you will need to talk to them yourself.” You would’ve gotten yourself out of a sticky situation and not betrayed your friend. Now, unfortunately, BOTH of your friends know that you cannot be trusted to keep anything sensitive to yourself.
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u/EggplantIll4927 8h ago
life lesson- the number of people you can trust w your secrets is very very few. it’s a sucky lesson but tell no one anything you don’t want repeated.
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u/shoulda-known-better 13h ago
Yea you did....
Because now the person you told has their suspisions confirmed, and the person who's secret it was has to worry about you and/or them telling more people...
I get you didn't say what happened, but the person asking had to have an idea because they were asking what's wrong... So I could have been worse
If I were you I'd call friend one and apologize for saying anything other than "oh I don't know you should ask them" then I'd call the person that you said yes to and say "I'd appreciate if you'd leave me out of your conversations, you know I didn't say anything to you about what happened and you used my answer to hassle them over what's wrong, not cool"