AITA For Not Telling My Girlfriend About My Hobby?

Posted by u/StraightOuttaSmallville43

I (28/M) recently had a difficult conversation with my girlfriend “Louise” (31/F) about some secrets that I had been keeping from her. Let me say upfront that these are secrets that only my family and a few close friends know about. There are some peculiarities I’m not going to get into, but the short version of the story is that while my girlfriend knew that I was adopted she didn’t know the full story. Most particularly that my heritage gives me a number of talents which I use for a hobby that I have become quite good at.

To be honest, I didn’t know how she would react. I thought there was a chance that she knew. Her job requires that she be observant and I am frankly a little surprised that this had been going on right in front of her without her realizing it. But even if she didn’t know, I thought that this would be a funny sort of story that we might tell our grandkids or an unspoken wink whenever something about all this came up. I thought we’d have a laugh about it.

Instead she was really angry. Really, really mad. She was especially angry at the part where my hobby involved creating a separate persona and interacting with her as both identities independently, which she referred to as a “giant mindfuck”. She went on about how I would flirt with her as two different people and how she wasted a lot of mental bandwidth trying to sort out which she was in love with. Then she drilled in that she chose my more meek and mild-mannered every day persona because she saw in me an earnestness when it turns out I am a “lying motherfucker”. I asked if she wishes she’d chosen the other persona but she pointed out that she’d thought he was a hero but “he’s a lying motherfucker, too.”

So it doesn’t sound like she thinks she made the wrong decision in which persona she chose, which left me a little confused as to the precise nature of the complaint.

She also attacked my professional integrity, because my day job involves commenting on national and international affairs which I had been doing while also secretly an active participant in world events (as part of my hobby). I pointed out that I had actually deflected a lot of the reporting involving all of this to her, and then she blew up about how I was risking her career and how she would “lose all credibility” if people found out that she had such a huge conflict of interest. She also worried that people would think she’s the “dumbest nitwit on the planet” for not figuring everything out. I wanted to point out how weird I thought it was it was that she hadn’t noticed, but thought better of it. In retrospect maybe that was the one thing I did right.

Otherwise it seems like no matter what I said and did, she would just get more angry.

So now she’s breaking up with me and threatening to tell on me to our boss. She says the only way to salvage her career is to come clean with everybody now. I talked to my friend “Dwayne”, who is in this with me, and now he’s mad at me because he thinks she might be able to figure out his hobby, too. I talked to my parents about it and they expressed more than a little frustration that I have had them lying on my behalf to her for so long. I wouldn’t say that they are angry with me, but they’re not as sympathetic as I had hoped.

What was I supposed to do here? AITA for not telling my girlfriend about my hobby? AITA for telling her and risking things for Dwayne?