Talking About One's Marriage

If your spouse (or boyfriend or girlfriend) wants you to never discuss any legitimate problems within the relationship with other people, you have a controlling partner.  I do not mean someone who has a subjective preference for you to not talk about such things outside of the relationship but recognizes it as just that, a non-obligatory personal desire.  This is someone who demands or gently but deviously pressures you to keep anything that might make the relationship look strained (even if it is) from others.

Aside from the controlling and irrationalistic aspects of this, does keeping such things within the marriage (or dating partnership) truly help?  It might accomplish only the confining buildup of frustration, sadness, or anxiety until it bursts forth in, at a minimum, harsh conversation between the spouses.  This does nothing beneficial for a marriage even if some people fallaciously believe or personally prefer for the initial cause--being silent about problems with outside friends, family members, or therapists--to be pursued.

There is also the fact that, intentionally or unintentionally but negligently, someone might hope his or her partner does not mention relational issues to others because they do not want to stop behavior that might be objectively abusive.  Whether it is someone else raging against their partner having interests, friends, or pasttimes beyond them or seeking to combat or extinguish their partner's attraction to other people, or something else, they want to control their partner in ways they have no right to (and everyone needs to have interests beyond their partner because the necessary logical, philosophical truths of reality are not dependent on or strictly about people).

Wanting your spouse to wait for a certain time to pass before talking about marital struggles with external parties is not necessarily controlling, nor is wanting them to only be accurate in what they say or to leave out a few especially personal details without lying about anything else.  All of this can be done without one spouse being controlling, illicitly demanding, or otherwise abusive.  Even these can be urged out of emotionalistic, selfish motives rather than anything rational, though.

Furthermore, it is not only professional therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists who could be validly told about one's marital problems.  There is nothing irrational, malicious, unfaithful, or slanderous about telling one's friends of either gender about such things as long as one is honest.  This also does not exclude talking to one's romantic partner about the same problems, which would need to happen if they are to be directly resolved together as it is--although an irrational or abusive partner does not need prompting from the other party to realize what they are doing and cease.  In any of these directions, talking about relationship issues is vital when they arise.