Most people in relationships try to strike a delicate balance between being their realest selves and their best selves. You want to show your partner who you truly are, but you also want to protect how they see you. You want to be honest, but not too raw. You want to admit to your mistakes, but not lose face.

This inner tug-of-war can lead us to doing strange things. This is especially the case if we’ve done something we’re not proud of. We find a way to look honest without having to face the full discomfort of it. These are ways that might feel right in the moment, but can be quite costly in the long-term over time.

Imagine this: you splurge on something expensive, but you used money from the shared account. The guilt sets in, and you decide to tell your partner. But instead of saying everything, you only admit part of it.

You say you “overspent a little,” or that “something came up.” You don’t lie, but you also don’t tell the whole truth, either. It feels like taking the high road, but what you’ve really done is protect your image while asking your partner to carry the weight of what they don’t know.

This is one of two habits that often look healthy on the surface, but underneath, they’re self-protective strategies that can make you a worse partner without realizing it.

1. You Prune The Story To Maintain Peace

You may think that the act of revealing only part of the truth is “not a big deal,” but most psychologists will beg to differ. In fact, they even have a name for it: partial confession.

In simple terms, this refers to the decision you make after a transgression, whether big or small, to admit to only the “comfortable” parts of the story. And although we might tell ourselves that we’re doing it to avoid unnecessary drama, what we’re actually aiming for is easing our conscience. In turn, we’re seemingly also softening the emotional fallout.

In a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, researchers ran a series of experiments on this exact behavior. The study — aptly titled “I Cheated, but Only a Little” — found that people often confess partially after doing something dishonest because they believe it makes them look more credible than saying nothing at all.

However, the results suggested otherwise. People who confessed to only a part of their wrongdoing felt much worse than those who stayed silent altogether, as well as those who’d fully confessed. They experienced more guilt, less relief and were actually seen as less trustworthy by others. It was a lose-lose across the board.

Evidently, partial confession doesn’t seem to benefit anyone involved. It doesn’t repair trust, nor does it make you feel any lighter. Instead, it leaves both partners stuck in an uneasy emotional limbo. You’re not fully absolved of your wrongdoing, and your partner’s not fully informed, either.

In relationships, lying by partial omission can become a habit if you allow it to. You hide small details — like where the money went, or who you texted, or what really happened at that party — and you tell yourself that it’s harmless. But every small omission will place a little bit of distance between you and your partner. Over time, they’ll sense that something’s missing, even if they can’t name it. In time, the connection will start to feel slightly less safe.

The bottom line is that the pain of a full confession is often more bearable than the gradual toll that half-truths will take. When you say everything, you give your partner the chance to deal with reality, rather than your edited version of it. It may hurt in the moment, but it keeps both of you anchored in the same story.

2. You Focus On The Highlights

We want our partners to love our whole selves, but we often forget that in order to do that, we have to expose our whole selves to them, too. Things only become more complicated when we’re not ready to admit to our own flaws. And so, we end up sharing only the palatable parts of the story with our partners. The hope, usually, is that they continue to perceive us as the “perfect” person we secretly wish that we were.

Psychological researchers refer to this “selective disclosure,” or the act of sharing strategically to manage how you’re perceived, rather than to build genuine intimacy.

As a 2024 study published in Personal Relationships illustrates, people with higher attachment avoidance tend to share positive events more often than negative ones in their relationships. In other words, they curate what their partners see: they reveal the parts that make them look warm, successful or easy to love, while secretly tucking away the rest.

We see this play out in what some people consider “strategic oversharing.” You fill the air with details like your intentions, your emotions or your context, but conveniently leave out the one piece of the story that could make you look bad. You might talk about your stressful week or your desire to “do better,” but skip over the fact that you relapsed into an old habit, snapped at someone or made a choice you regret.

It feels honest, even vulnerable, to share the circumstantial details. But, in reality, what you’ve actually done is redirect the attention your partner is giving you. They walk away assuming that they’ve heard the full story, and you walk away feeling safe from judgment. Yet, beneath all that sharing, the details most conducive to intimacy are actually left unspoken.

When this pattern repeats, the relationship starts to feel emotionally crowded, but still strangely empty. Partners begin to sense that there’s an ongoing performance and effort to stay likable, composed or “put-together.” Eventually, the relationship starts to feel less like a partnership and more like a presentation.

How To Not Let ‘Honesty’ Break Your Bond

It’s easy to think honesty will break something fragile in your relationship. That if you say the hard thing, the whole thing will shatter. But research consistently shows the opposite to be true instead: that avoiding rupture is what makes relationships fragile.

Dr John Gottman’s long-term studies on marital stability found that couples who repair in real time — who address small ruptures as they happen — are far more resilient than those who avoid confrontation. Silence breaks couples down far more than conflict does.

Of course, telling the full, uncomfortable truth can create a small rupture. But at the exact same time, it also offers you the chance to repair. And in a majority of relationships, it’s those repairs that build trust thicker than before. Each time you survive a hard conversation, your relationship becomes a little less afraid of honesty.

If you’re curious how authentic your relationship really is, you can take the science-backed Authenticity In Relationships Scale and gauge if your relationship runs on performance, or on truth.

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes, here.