In many ways, I'm a very private person. And I believe that what is intimate between two people loses it's intimacy when it's public fodder - or when either person feels free to just talk about it to anyone who asks. For me, respecting my privacy - and OUR privacy - is part of what I ask of a partner. And it's part of the respect I give my partner with his other partner(s).
I'm going to bump this thread, and this quote (on a re-read!) triggered it.
I mentioned in my "Life Stories" post that my wife and I had an amazing talk about one of the ladies I'm head-over-heels for.
A kind of sub-topic is this discussion was "how much we're comfortable sharing". And I don't mean sexual details because at this point, my wife knows all of my sexual details since I'm not having sex with anyone but her.
I asked the very blunt question of "What do you think about A?"
The answer was probably very honest, tinged with feelings of challenge and insecurity, but the overall jist was that she didn't feel she had enough relation time with A to get a very good impression.
Yet, when we ended the conversation, my wife did make a comment, playfully with that all-too-much-seriousness that I can detect about "sharing this with your friends".
In the subject of "friends", I'm specificially referring to her metamours (am I using that term correctly... my partners that she, through me, is involved with?) but I'm not sure she gets the level of intimacy I have with them. In contract, she has far less connection but far more sex with her partners.
Anyway...
The flip-side of removing DADT policies is the risk of oversharing. I don't share with people I don't deeply trust, and yet, my reading of her sense of trust is still a little off. I don't think I have a point beyond "it's a delicate balance" but it certainly can feel like a quagmire sometimes.