Two. The secret

A very large number of people in this are hiding it, and the most common person it is hidden from is a spouse.

The hiding starts small and reasonable. You do not want to worry them. You are going to sort it out first. Then the gap between what they think and what is true gets wide enough that closing it feels like a confession rather than an update, and now there are two problems and the second one is growing faster than the first.

There is no instruction here about telling anyone, because that is your marriage and your circumstances and not something a course can weigh. What is worth knowing is the mechanism. Secrecy adds a second load, it removes the only person who could share the first one, and it is one of the things that turns a manageable situation into an unmanageable one.

Two things are worth having while it is still hidden, and neither one is an instruction to disclose anything. The first is that the tradition already has a name for the person whose need nobody can see. The miskin, the Prophet said, peace be upon him, is not the one who goes round the people and is turned away with a morsel or two. The miskin is the one who does not find enough to suffice him, is not recognised as such so that charity might be given to him, and does not ask people for anything. The Qur'an says the same of them: the unknowing might think them rich because of their self restraint. Hidden need is a recognised category, and the failure named in it belongs to whoever failed to notice it.

The second is which way the obligation runs. A Muslim is a Muslim's brother; he does not wrong him or abandon him. Whoever relieves a Muslim of an anxiety, Allah relieves him of one of the anxieties of the Day of Resurrection. And whoever conceals a Muslim's fault, Allah conceals his. If what frightens you most is being found out, notice that concealment is what the tradition asks of the people who find out.

If the hiding has become the bigger problem, that is a marker in lesson six, and there are advisers who do exactly this conversation with couples.