What secret did you hide from your spouse that nearly wrecked your relationship?

I hid that I was 10k in debt. Before we were together, I made great money, had few living expenses and the world was good.

Paid cash for almost everything. While dating, I'd buy her gifts regularly, or would go out to dinner and a show.

I had a project car that I worked on

constantly. Once we got married and bought a house, had kids, etc., living expenses went up, but my wages

didn't go up as much. Don't get me wrong, we were paying the bills, but there just wasn't as much

disposable income. Over time, I continued living the way I had been, with gifts, projects,

guy toys and stuff, and slowly debt started to rack up. Most of it went on credit cards,

and when she asked me where I was getting things, it was usually that I bought them used or

traded something else, or that I'd saved up. All my direct deposits went to my bank account.

I had sources of income from

work bonuses when I was on call that I wouldn't tell her about and send off to the cards

to keep them off my back. Since there wasn't a regular source of income, I was always dreading

a phone call asking where this month's payments were. One night, such a call came and I didn't

pick up the phone. But my wife did. It was concerning

a late payment to a card that my wife didn't know about. They wouldn't tell her the balance on the

card for privacy reasons, but the cat was pretty much out of the bag. To some, 10K may not sound like a

lot of money, and to us at that time it really wasn't. It was the loss of trust, the hiding, the lying,

and the cloak and dagger of it all, selling stuff on eBay to get money to make minimum

payments. We did work through it, and it made our marriage stronger. We made a plan to fix

things financially and worked together on my spending issues. It took time to rebuild the trust,

but I still to this day wish I would have told her sooner or never let it happen in the first place.

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