What shocking secret made you see someone completely differently?

There's an engineering professional at my workplace that likes to wear pricey articles of clothing.

He even sports a brightling wristwash, and those things are priced from around 3 grand to over 17 grand as his work timepiece.

Turns out that he and his wife are buried beneath a mountain of credit card debt, and while I don't look down my nose at him, I definitely view his attire and accessories a little differently knowing that fact.

There was this one girl I'd known for a long time, but wasn't massively close to, who we all thought was being terribly controlled by her boyfriend.

She'd tell us that he decided when she was

allowed to drink, when she was allowed to go out, what she was allowed to do, stuff like that,

and that he'd started to impose bedtimes for her and shouted her over what seemed like extremely

minor things. We all thought he was awful and we encouraged her to leave. Then she moved in with me

and I realized

she was extremely emotionally unstable and an alcoholic. Within months, I found myself wanting to do

or in some cases actually doing all the things she had said her controlling boyfriend had done.

I remember one time after trying to remain patient with her for a while, she said one thing that

was relatively minor and it

was just the last straw for me. I snapped and screamed at her. I then got phone calls from our

mutual friends to talk about my behavior and anger management, presumably as a result of the story

being told back to them in a somewhat biased way. So in a way, her secret changed my opinion of him. I should say that I still know he was no saint.

He was very far from it. In fact, for instance, he'd been pretty violent in their time together, and this was corroborated by others.

There were plenty of times I got so angry I felt like raising a hand to her, and I had to walk away to calm down.

There's never an excuse

to actually hit someone. I guess what I'd say now is that they're both pretty terrible,

but I had a much less black and white view of both of them after getting to know her better.

...