We all have our preconceived notions of people in our lives, whether it be good or bad. However, it only takes one event or secret for our entire perspective of someone to completely change forever.
Below, people share the one secret they learned about someone that forever changed how they looked at them. Check them out.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
From Average To Great
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“I was near the Mexican border while on a work trip.
One of my co-workers wanted to go over the border for dinner, so he could buy an authentic Mexican poncho. He wanted that poncho. He couldn’t stop talking about it to the point where it got annoying.
We all decided to go to Mexico, had dinner, split up for shopping in the touristy area, then met back up. While he was heading back, I saw that he had his poncho. Good for him.
But then I saw him walk by a woman begging on the side of the street. It was a chilly night, and she seemed cold with just a thin, ratty blanket around her shoulders. My co-worker stopped, gave her his poncho, and she put it on and seemed to express thanks. He then came to where we were, not knowing I had seen him.
We asked if he got his poncho, and he said, ‘Nah, couldn’t find one,’ and that was that.
The average annoying co-worker became good-guy Greg on the spot.”
Never Judge A Book By Its Cover
“My wife’s best friend confided in us that, while short of money, she was moonlighting as a professional dominatrix.
Until then we had thought that she was super boring and vanilla.”
How Quickly One’s Life Can Change
“The local park homeless man was once a professor of ancient history and dead languages and could speak and write in languages many of us would never even see. He used to teach at Trinity college until he was convicted for his wife’s death. How she died or if he did it is a mystery to me, but one person I’ve spoken too reckons it was an accident and another says they don’t think he did it.
It made me see the reality that no matter who you are, you could end up in a terrible place just like that.”
A Heart Of Gold Underneath That Exterior
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“My wife, a defense attorney, has a work colleague who is the biggest jerk you will ever meet. A blowhard who revels in winning at any cost and brags about the snarky things he does to twist the knife. He’s known as a sharp legal mind, but I get the sense that he likes to try to mess with weaker ADAs or other counselors and loves it when he catches them in some technicality. He makes all those stereotypes about lawyers seem valid.
My church had a habitat for humanity-esque service weekend where we were rehabbing an old warehouse into a new space as a temporary women’s shelter for battered women. The offices were already up, but the individual rooms needed to be refloored, the bathrooms re-tiled, sheetrock needed to be hung and primed. To my surprise, I saw the jerk there with a toolbelt helping to install a sink.
Long story short, he donates his legal services to that one shelter– helping to set up restraining orders, divorces, and custody for abused women trying to get away from their abusive partners/family.
At first, I wondered if this was court-ordered community service. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had done something to deserve it and then pissed off a judge somewhere. But no, the coordinator for the shelter who was working with my church says that he had been doing that for the past few years. Apparently, his wife’s previous husband was an abuser, and he has a real heart for people in that situation.”
A Love Story For The Ages
“My sister starts dating this guy. He left his ex for my sister. My sister and I are pretty close, so I hang out with this guy quite a bit while hanging with her. He tells us all these crazy things his ex did and how she was this psycho girl. So, of course, I’m like ‘whoa, good on you for leaving, she sounds terrible.’ Eventually, the guy starts to get clingy and annoying showing up at my sister’s house randomly at all hours of the night. Staying at her house when she goes to work on his days off. They had only been together a couple of months at this point, and it was too much for her. She breaks it off.
Fast forward about six months. I’m a groomsman in my buddy’s wedding. I hit off with the maid of honor. We are chatting before the rehearsal dinner. She seems cool. End up sitting by her at dinner and laughing and talking the whole night.
After I get home, I look her up on Facebook. I finally find her page and pull it up. Who do I see in her profile picture with her? My sister’s ex-boyfriend! I creep on her profile. He’s her boyfriend. I message her like ‘dude, your dating so-and-so?’. She confirms. I ask for how long. She tells me it’s been like three years, but they broke up for a few months while he was with someone else and got back together. This chick is the crazy ex-girlfriend! I tell her that the person he was with while they were broken up was my sister. She says she knew already. She knew who I was and apparently was freaking out when her cousin told her I was friends with her husband and would be at the wedding with her.
Against my better judgment, I continue being friends with her. She invited me over for a Super Bowl party and a few other get-togethers at her and the boyfriend’s place. I start getting closer with this girl and start to see that the guy is controlling and physically and emotionally abusive. It took everything I had to not knock his teeth in. Eventually, I convince her to leave him and move in with me just to get away from him.
Now, it’s three years later, and we are getting married next year. Crazy roller coaster ride that has been.”
Better Safe Than Sorry
“A family member’s ex-wife of several years whom I was still close with asked me never to leave my daughter alone with my relative. She said that the reason they never had kids was that he confided when having too much to drink that he had uncontrollable desires towards young, really young girls. He was upset and told her he felt he was evil and deserved to die. She asked him if he ever did anything and he said no and asked her to forgive him and asked God to make him better.
This was surprising information. She didn’t tell me in spite and still loves him very much. I haven’t heard or seen evidence of grooming or any extra attention paid to any of the female children in my family. He could have just had too much to drink and out of his mind, but there is zero way I’m going to leave my daughter alone with him or let her out of my sight at family functions.
I don’t have evidence that what she said was true so I can’t do anything with the information other than being diligent.”
The Roller Coaster Of A Story
“In my early days as a lawyer, I represented a sweet old widower with Parkinson’s disease who was being sued by a local store for groceries his late wife had purchased on credit without ever paying. I felt awful for him.
And then, shortly before trial, I found out he’d done jail time for assaulting children.”
Ruined The Games For Everyone
“I had a guy in my Dungeons & Dragons group with a beautiful redheaded girlfriend. All of us thought the redhead was gorgeous but, you know, bro code…until it was revealed that the slightly-annoying-but-tolerated power gamer of the group made it clear that he thought he was ‘next in line’ to date the redhead if Guy #1 left the picture.
This destroyed our gaming group. Redhead thought it was hilarious in a cringe kind of way and hurt his feelings, and I was aghast that a human being’s mind could operate that way. Like, dude, she’s not a friggin’ carnival prize! I couldn’t stand to play or even speak to him anymore, but it was pretty clear he wasn’t coming back anyway. Good riddance!”
This Is A Case Of Karma
“There was a woman, whom I considered my friend for many, many years. She had cancer, survived it, but it was still there and created many problems.
She even appeared on TV shows as an advocate for cancer patients, did a lot of political activism, was very much opposed to euthanasia. She published some books.
Then one fine day, through a series of coincidences, it turned out that her cancer had never existed. She had completely made it up. A big fat whopping lie.
I would feel ashamed because I fell for it for so long – except that a lot of other people fell for it too, including professionals – doctors, nurses, priests.
It ended that friendship. And it made me think a lot about how easily fooled we all are.
Oh, by the way, she has died by now, of cancer as it turns out.”
Horrifying Display Of Racism
“The worst story for me involves a sibling set of cousins (my third cousins). Two sisters and a brother.
The youngest sister was dating a mixed race guy (one parent black, the other white). I didn’t realize how racist the family was. They told her to leave him immediately, and when they found out she not only hadn’t left him but was also now hooking up with him, her siblings beat her up while their father watched and they forced her onto a plane to the EU the next day, black eye and all. She had her documents seized by her sister and was a prisoner to her.
I found out about a year later about this when our other cousin told me. I can never look at anyone in that family again the same way, and it’s so sad because as a kid I was very fond of them. The older sister had a coffee shop which my dad used to take us to a lot, and I think that’s where he met my stepmom.
I am not sure if this is a secret now since my mom knows and I didn’t tell her, though at the time my cousin asked me to keep it quiet because it was top secret and very sensitive information. I don’t know if any of the family know that I know about this as well.”
Two Sides To Every Story
“There was this one girl I’d known for a long time but wasn’t massively close to who we all thought was being controlled by her boyfriend. She would tell us that he decided when you were allowed to drink when she was allowed to go out, what she was allowed to do, that he hid things around the house, and that he had started to impose bedtimes for her and shout at her over what seemed like minor things. We all thought he was awful and encouraged her to leave.
Then she moved in with me, and I realized she was extremely emotionally unstable and an overly heavy drinker. Within months, I found myself wanting to do, or in some cases doing, all the things she 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 the last straw – I just snapped and screamed at her. I then got phone calls from all 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 biased way.
So, in a way, her secret changed my opinion of him.”
A Heavy Secret For One To Bear
“I was dating my boyfriend that would eventually become my husband and father of my child when we decided to move in with his parents for financial reasons. On our last trip from our apartment to their house with our stuff, at a four-way stop, he says ‘my mom cheated on my dad.’
Now the act of cheating wasn’t all that surprising or shameful considering his parents had been together since they were 15 and had their first child at that age. I didn’t judge, but there were two parts of the story that made me change my view.
Who she cheated with: It was her husband’s nephew. They were adults when it occurred, but the nephew was the same age as her oldest son (who is 14 years older than my boyfriend), which meant that she had been around this kid from the time he was born and her oldest son was super close to.
My boyfriend found this out from his cousin (younger sister of nephew) when he was 12 and confronted his mom, who admitted everything and guilt tripped him into never telling his dad. So, he had kept that secret for nearly 15 years at the time.
Now…it has been about eight years since, and we lived with his parents for two years. In that time I learned that his mom just plain likes to keep secrets from his dad, such as the credit cards she took out in his name to pay for boyfriend’s debt and the money she continued to funnel him. I learned she liked to have little whisper sessions about this with my boyfriend and it grossed me out. I learned that she relies heavily on emotional fulfillment and gratification from her sons in a weird and almost reverse Oepidus type way. All of this compounded on to what I had been told, and her character was officially enough to make my skin crawl.
My boyfriend and I ended up divorced around a year and a half into our marriage. And truth be told a lot of it had to do with her. My view of him started to change. I lost respect for him and his acceptance of the coddling. Our relationship deteriorated.
We now have a beautiful son and a pretty good co-parenting relationship. He is remarried and will never tell his wife of his mom’s indiscretions. He will hold onto that secret forever. His dad and older brothers will never know what he’s had to keep inside for 20 years now. And my heart still breaks for him for it.”
Animal Lovers Are Top Tier
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“About 20 years ago, I was sitting at a stoplight in Tucson, Ariz. On the opposite, diagonal corner was a Circle-K. I saw a woman standing on the median on that side of the street with a sign asking for money with a dog on a rope leash.
It was a long red light, and as I waited, a guy came out of the Circle-K with one of those sandwich things that has two halves of a sandwich on top of each other in a plastic container? He joins the woman on the median, opens the sandwich, takes out one half, tears THAT in half, takes one quarter for himself and hands the other quarter to the woman. Then he gives the entire another half of the sandwich to the dog.
I drove down, made a U-turn, came back, made a right, then another U-Turn, and slid into the left-hand turn lane. I slid the window down and handed them $40.
Anyone that would feed an animal more than themselves? That’s a winner in my books.”
You Never Know What Someone Is Hiding
“There was this guy in my high school who was the typical big meathead football player bully. Picking fights, playing mean-spirited pranks, super homophobic and misogynistic. He was something straight out of a teen movie. My senior year he ended up in my English class.
At the end of the year, we had to do senior statements which are speeches where you talk about a harrowing/life changing event you’ve been through. He got up and began to tell a heart-wrenching story about how he and his brother have been abused by his father since they were children. He hates football and wishes he could do drama like he wants, but his father would never allow it. He acknowledged what a jerk he is and was beside himself for not knowing how to treat others. He quietly went back to his seat where he proceeded to cry quietly for the remainder of the class.
His story radically changed my opinion of him. He was the first person who made me realize most people do deserve compassion. He still lives in my hometown and occasionally I find him at the bar downtown. He’s a good guy, much quieter now, but hopefully pursuing something he loves because he deserves the happiness.”
It Doesn’t Right The Wrong, But It Gives Perspective
“I met a friend’s new boyfriend who told me that he had spent time in jail for two counts of driving under the influence. He got one, and then he got another one, and the judge gave him jail time. He drank a lot, but when I met him, he was at least careful about not driving. But to be honest, I judged him for it. It’s pretty awful to drive under the influence. And how do you get one charge and then not learn your lesson? It was something that affected the way I saw him. Fast forward three years, and now he is married to my friend.
One night, I am out with my friend, and she makes a comment about his sister. I had heard that he had a sister who died, but I never knew the details. It turns out she was a victim of a violent, bloody murder by an ex-boyfriend and my friend’s husband is the one who found her body. He walked into the house coming home from college for summer break and found her. The two driving incidents were in that first six months after her death. After I learned that I had so much compassion for him and the terrible pain he must have been going through. People deal with such terrible things, and they don’t always deal with them well.”
People Can Redeem Themselves
“I worked a construction job with a small company during college. One of the guys I worked with, let’s call him Dave. Dave was very quiet and usually kept to himself but knew how to do just about anything. Framing, tool repair, finish work. You name it he knew how to do it. After the initial introductions and a few weeks of work he warmed up to me, and we got along well. After working for a few months, he didn’t show up at work one morning. This was strange because Dave was never late. After talking to some of my other coworkers, I found out that Dave was a registered offender and that he had, as part of his sentence, to submit to random dwelling searches. I honestly was blindsided by this, as I would never have guessed that he had a criminal record.
This change my views on ex-cons almost completely. I majored in criminal justice and was in class with future cops and corrections officers. The attitude toward convicted felons was that they are unredeemable and will offend again. I bought into that mode of thinking as many college students do with no real-world experience.
After seeing Dave work and hearing him talk it was obvious that he realized his mistakes and was making a huge effort to make things right. Being nosy I looked up his conviction when I got off work that day. The crime was bad, but it was nonviolent and had happened a decade or so before I met him. The next day everyone went on working, but I found a deeper respect for Dave. And I learned that a person is not the sum of their past mistakes.”