Finding it difficult to be truthful with one’s spouse is a problem in shalom bayis, of course. Possibly it’s normal to experience this difficulty, but that doesn’t mean that it should be accepted as “just one of those things.” Whenever a person finds it hard to be open in any relationship, he should try to discover why.
Sometimes, it’s very simple: You’re doing something wrong, and you don’t want the other person — your spouse, or anyone else for that matter — to find out. Obviously, the solution is not to hide the wrong behavior even more effectively so that you can continue to do it. The embarrassment you feel should prompt you to do teshuvah so that you can resume being open and truthful.
Wanting to make a good impression on others is something Hashem ingrained in us for our benefit, as Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai said to his talmidim before he was niftar: “Yehi ratzon that your fear of Heaven shall be as great as your fear of man.” We see the same principle at work in the mitzvah of yichud, where the presence of a man’s wife is a strong deterrent to him sinning despite temptation. Similarly, even the strongest internet filter isn’t quite as good as something like Webchaver, where you know that someone else can see exactly what you were looking at on your computer. This is part of human nature and the way Hashem wants things to be — for our own good.
From this we can understand that taking the opposite approach, and overcoming our natural sense of shame to tell a spouse about our sins, is often mistaken and damaging. A good wife should and will care very much if her husband acts wrongly, and chances are she won’t simply accept or worse, condone his behavior if there is no desire on his part to improve his ways. His openness may be setting himself and his marriage up for a whole new problem of unacceptance, mistrust, long-term resentment, and disconnection. This is aside from the fact that simply “getting over the shame” can cripple him from overcoming the actual problem, even if his wife were to take it “well.”
A person who finds himself slipping should harness the shame he feels to improve, so that in the future he no longer needs to feel embarrassment and can restore truthfulness and transparency to his relationship with his spouse. He should never try to overcome his sense of shame by laughing at how easy it is to convince his wife that there’s nothing wrong, or convincing himself that it’s “normal” to hide things from one’s wife and that there’s nothing in his relationship that needs fixing.
