I share an email address address with my husband for one simple reason- he doesn’t check the email. Ever. If he had his own address, and I didn’t check it, he’d never know he got any emails.It’s so well known that the friends who email him start off " Hi, Doreen"
Hehehe, that’s cute, Doreen. 
Simply put, Why Not?
Neither of us have anything to hide. And both of us tell each other everything anyway (unless one of us is trying to surprise the other somehow). Anyone who knows us knows that my wife and I are like a single unit.
And if by some chance there’s something we don’t want the other to look at or ask about, we tell the other WHY it’s not a shared thing - since it would be the odd exception to the rule of our life…and then respect the other’s privacy.
This whole thing of “We have nothing to hide,” is understandable, but there’s a difference between having something to hide and wanting some privacy.
I don’t send emails to my friend CB so that her husband can read them. He doesn’t need to know my business. If I wanted him to know I’d send him an email. I don’t go for the “share everything” mindset. Just because you’re married doesn’t mean that you give up your own identity. Just the thought of sharing an email addy with someone annoys me.
That’s exactly what my husband said after reading this topic. In fact, he said, short of a surprise, he doesn’t want to know anything that he can’t tell me about. He told his friends about this when we got married, and apparently they all responded with something along the lines of, “well duh.”
I had actually been thinking that I could understand those who said, “I don’t want my friend’s husband to know my business.” Then my husband explained how he felt that anyone who would ask me to hide something from him was asking me to put the friendship before the marriage – and nothing comes before marriage.
I like his idea of our marriage better because it fits in very nicely with the vision I had in my head when we were engaged. It isn’t that I gave up who I am when I got married. It’s just that Who I Am and Who He Is are now forever and inseperably entwined, a single unit, Us. I like that.
Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s what I chose. And if in pursuing this goal I chose to get a shared email address with my husband, I would expect my friends to respect my choice. And if they couldn’t, then I would have to assume that they didn’t respect me or my marriage. And someone like that can’t be my friend.
Wow, this thread just helped me not only understand an important aspect of my marriage and what I want it to be, but something that happened with a friend of mine last year…
I used to think like this, before I got divorced.
Then I was grateful for every bit of autonomy, privacy, independence, etc. that I had managed (mostly through accident) to lay my hands on.
I understand the bit about Becoming One and all, but don’t I have a right to a relationship with my father that is separate from the one with my stepmother, whom I detest?
I respect peoples’ right to communication, but shouldn’t they respect my right to privacy in my family relationships? She frequently reads my e-mails to my dad, and sometimes even responds to them. If I wanted to e-mail her, I would do it myself.
Eva, that’s kind of a different situation, IMHO. Personally, my marriage comes before my kids, but my step-kids are 3 & 4 and they need parents who are devoted to eachother. I have no idea what your situation is, so I can’t really comment.
Just because I don’t want my friend’s husband to know my business doesn’t mean that she’s “hiding” anything from him. I mean, after all, it’s MY business.
I am sooo glad to be single, as I have no interest in “becoming one” with anyone.
We have separate personal email addresses because we had separate ones when we were in college and we’ve just been used to having individual addresses. He isn’t all that interested in the coversations I have with my online friends, and vice versa. It’s just like in-person conversations; there are some people he knows who I’m not interested in talking to, so why should I have to be a party to every conversation he has with those people?
But I can see how it would be convenient to have one address for family stuff like news about a cousin getting married or whatever. In fact maybe that would keep some of our relatives from emailing me at my work account just because it’s easier for them to remember than my hotmail account. (Grr.)
For those who do share: do you have problems with figuring out who’s read and/or responded to emails, and when old stuff can be deleted? I have had to share email addresses with people when we were running some online stuff, and that was one of the things I remember being a pain about having a shared account.
Well, my stepmom and dad didn’t get married until I was 15 (I’m 34 now), after which they moved out of state. She had zero role in raising me. I’m not trying to hide anything from her, but I would prefer my private correspondence with my father to remain private.
Mr. Cricket and I have a joint email at home and separate work email addresses. He also has a military address that I don’t even know unless I check it in my contacts list.
He checks almost all of the email at home since I almost am never on the home computer–unless he’s gone. I think it works well for us. Sometimes he forgets to let me know that an old friend emailed but I check it often enough that we haven’t had any disasters or anything.
We use our work emails to do a lot of “during the day” communications–you know, who’s picking up kinder #1, what do you want for dinner, do you have anything to add to the grocery list etc…
I love email and must admit that I occasionally run through his emails on the home PC to check if any of his friends have said anything I should know about. In this way I’ve found out about schedule conflicts etc. that he would not have remembered…
I have the “primary” e-mail account, because I work at home and receive an extraordinary amount of business-related e-mail. I am online nearly constantly throughout the day, and my computer is on pretty much 24/7.
Mr. S did not have a home e-mail account until he got downsized from his corporate job in 2001. Then I set him up with his own laptop and e-mail address so he could continue to surf, communicate with his ex-co-workers, and so on. He gets and writes very little e-mail, and his computer is on only when he is using it. We know each other’s passwords, and I sometimes check his mail for him through our ISP’s Web interface; this works because he often knows about an important e-mail from a friend sooner than if he had waited to get around to checking it himself. He has no interest in my e-mail. Sometimes I will forward him something that someone has sent only to me, and we let each other read replies that we send to common friends.
So, separate e-mail, but essentially common knowledge. Our marital relationship is pretty much like Cessandra’s: What I know, he knows, and vice versa. We are a unit.
Having said that, I make no judgment against couples who choose to share an e-mail address, if that works for them. What DOES irk me is when only one person’s name (usually the husband’s) is on the account. My dad wanted to use his amateur radio callsign as my parents’ joint username, but my mom (finally!) put her foot down at that – they use his callsign for EVERYTHING, and my mom is the main one who sends e-mail anyway. So they agreed to use the model name of the RV they travel in. Works.
My sister’s e-mail address, on the other hand, has her doofus asshole husband’s name – which means that I am always seeing “Doofus Asshole” in my inbox. :mad: For cripes’ sake, it’s not that hard to use “doofusandsally” or “dslastname” or “skibunnies” or whatever. Women, speak up for yourselves!
My husband and I certainly do not share an email addy, nor would I ever care to. We are very happily married and I would attribute this to both of us having seperate social circles and respect each other’s privacy. Just because you are married, it does not mean that you have to become attached at the hip. I often feel sorry for people who are too dependent on their spouse, especially women as we tend to outlive men. I am happy knowing that if anything (gods forbid) happened to my dear, sweet husband I have a great group of friends I can rely on. He is my best friend, but not my only friend.
For me it’s easy. If it’s the usual email ( What time are we meeting tomorrow?),and I’m telling him as I see it, he just tells me how to reply, since I’m at the computer already. If he’s not around or if it needs more of a reply, I transfer it to a mailbox set up for him in Eudora ( it’s called a mailbox, but it’s really more like a folder) and tell him he’s got mail. ( He’ll read it if he knows it’s there, he just won’t check it.)
It’s not a trend. It’s just a pattern. Every Christmas break kids sign up.
I had no idea people (usually the anti-sharing-an-email side, from what I see here) felt so strongly about this.
For me and Mr. Kezermezer, it’s just an email address shrug. We’ve had the joint one since we got married. I guess they probably would let us have two. I dunno. Never occured to us to check. He has a couple free ones (ie hotmail) from before we were married, but has them routed into the one inbox for convenience. It’s not a trend, a pattern, or anything. We don’t get a lot of personal email though. Most of it’s news or daily quotes. Once in awhile I’ll get an email from a friend. Usually if he’s online when we get it, he’ll just let me know and won’t be so interested that he feels the need to open it up and read it. We do get a lot of email from my mom, but usually she just writes to us as a family so even if we did have two email addys she’d ask which one we check more, send it there, and expect us both to read it. We also only have one computer.
As for the snail mail issue, we walk down to the post box at the end of our appartment unit every night together to check it so we always know if the other gets personal mail (hardly ever do though) and it will be opened and shared. If one of us ever got a letter from a friend with information we’d know they’d want kept secret, we wouldn’t share, but that just never happens to happen.
Oh and about the leaving the bathroom door open thing… we do. Much less claustrophobic that way since we don’t have a huge bathroom. Plus we just like to be as available to each other as we can. Not like we haven’t seen each other with our pants of anyway, LOL.
I was the one who asked about the bathroom door, way back in this thread, and somewhat in jest.
Whatever works for you is your business, and I have a million questions about the leaving-the-door open thing, which would be better served in a separate thread. I wonder if there is a correlation between sharing email and keeping the door open? 
For me, though, there is such a thing as too much information.
Wordy, we have a joint e-mail account at home and separate e-mails at work. He leaves the door open; I close it. So that makes it a quasi-correlation.
Eva, of course you’re entitled to have a relationship with your father. Maybe you could begin each e-mail with “Hi Dad” or something like that to make it clear that you were speaking to him. Have you considered that maybe she’s answering on behalf of your father because he doesn’t feel comfortable e-mailing? My father loves me to pieces but he’s not a phone talker and he’s not an e-mailer. Period.
Or maybe she’s trying to develop a relationship with you. Would that be so bad?
Well, they each have their own e-mail addresses…and Dad is quite comfortable e-mailing. He is a huge geek; part of his job is buying IT systems for the NY Transit Authority. He was online many years before she was. I don’t think it’s a comfort issue for him, but a nosiness issue for her. I walys start e-mails with “Dear Dad,” so she knows damn well I’m addressing him.
As for developing a relationship with her: well, she pretty much blew that prospect when I was in college and she had Dad’s lawyer subpoena me in a dispute over college expenses. That, and the dozens of nasty letters she wrote my mom during the court case. But that’s a whole other thread.