I have a friend who is asking my advice. I’m not sure what to tell him, so I figured i would put it to the dope.
Guy is a good dude, if a bit of a fritterhead about girls. He’s been married to this girl for about 7 years, they have a kid. They’ve known each otehr forever.
They have recently been having some martial issues, and he has come to the conclusion that he needs to see her e-mail. He is semi-convinced himself that she’s seeing someone, or planning on it.
Given this information, how unethical would it be for him to access her e-mail without her consent?
He has asked her if there is someone else, and she denies it, but apparently is still being VERY furtive about her computer use.
I’m pretty sure he’s leaning towards doing it regardless of what advice he is given. Any suggestions or advice?
I disagree. If a person believes they are being lied to, I think they should go ahead and try to find out the truth. If he is convinced he’s being cheated on, or about to be, then he really ahs nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
Although he’s really going to spoil the surprise party. . .
If he’s right, it will come out sooner or later. I think we can all agree on that.
The question is, when and if it comes to pass that his fears are confirmed, will knowing he broke trust with someone he loves make him feel any better? I doubt it. It will only make him feel worse to know he did not act in accordance with his beliefs. Assuming he believes the old adage, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
On top of being cheated on and heart broken now he’ll mix in knowing he didn’t live up to his own ideals as well. I say, don’t do it, just wait it out.
He already suspects, so he can already take whatever actions he feels necessary to protect his home, assets, feelings etc. He can be prepared for what may be coming at him next without knowing this for sure right now.
I say don’t do it, wait it out and prepare for the worst to the best of his ability. At least he’ll still have some self respect when and if it does come.
If he’s wrong he’s going to have over ridden his own beliefs and have to live with it for the rest of his life.
I know that if my husband were asking to look at my email, I would be furtive, as well. I am a seperate person and have a right to some things that are just for me.
And I have absolutely nothing to hide.
It really comes down to why he thinks she’s cheating. Is he a jealous type? Has their sex life waned? Is she not spending any time at home? Because there could be good reasons that do not involve the wife cheating (though they could still mean there is a problem in the relationship that needs to be addressed).
Whether she is cheating or not, this relationship needs help. They should look into couples counselling (especially for the sake of their child).
Well if she has nothing to hide, then why won’t she show him her email account? :dubious:
I don’t think he should go behind her back to check, but has he tried asking her point-blank if he can read her emails? After seven years of marriage they should be to the point where they can share anything, and if she’s hiding something (whether it’s an affair or not) then that’s a problem.
What happens if he does snoop in her E-mail and finds… nothing? Nothing at all, no love letters, no dating website notifications, no Craigslist responses to “casual encounters” postings, and definitely nothing about a surprise party for him.
What does he do then? Does he assume that she just has a “thing” about her E-mail that he never noticed before? Or does he assume she’s just really good at covering her tracks, and start snooping deeper on her computer - maybe he checks the browser history for alternate E-mail account webpages, maybe he installs a keylogger. What lengths is he going to go to, trying to prove his theory? He needs to think about that possibility before taking any action.
Alternately, what if he finds that what he assumes is communication with a lover is really just with a female friend, talking over her sadness over what appears to be a disintegrating marriage? What if he sees through her eyes what she feels she has done to try to rehabilitate the relationship, and his poor reactions to that?
One step that he could take – which would be ethical, but which might endanger the relationship – would be to ask his wife if he could look at her email.
I know what my wife would say, because she often leaves her email open on the computer that we share, so I can’t help seeing the messages from the one email list that she belongs too, plus the messages from our children & friends that she usually forwards to me. But, if the wife has something to hide, asking for permission might be a step towards ending the marriage.
Breaking into email looking for infidelity will only make him interpret everything he reads as some extramarital affair. There is no context surrounding the messages and he will only think the worst. Say there is an email from a guy saying, “Yesterday was fun. Let’s do it again some time.” He is going to assume the wife is having an affair with this man and it will only open up more avenues of worry. In reality it could be a message about a business meeting the other day. Further, women cannot control men sending sexually suggestive email. I know this because I am one of these men.
Instead of breaking a line of trust that you can never have back, he should simply ask her to see the email. No need to be passive aggressive. If he does not trust her, he should tell her.
One of the aphorisms that always comes out here when discussing things like infidelity is, if you have to hide it from your partner, you shouldn’t be doing it. That applies to both members of this couple - if she’s doing things on the computer she has to hide, she shouldn’t be doing them. If he is planning to do something he has to hide from her, he shouldn’t be doing that, either.
Do you know, Tristan, what circumstances prompted your friend to start suspecting his wife?
Some people just like their privacy; I don’t like my husband snooping around in my purse without permission, and I’ve got nothing to hide in it.
For your friend, is he prepared to deal with the repercussions if he snoops in her email, then she finds out and is irate? Will he be okay with the knowledge that he brought his marriage one step closer to ending, and his wife wasn’t even cheating on him?
If he has some reason to think she’s cheating, why hasn’t he confronted her about it? (Or has he?) Snooping through her email seems demeaning to both of them.
When I was married, my husband would call me at home every now and then and ask me to go into his email and get him an address that was in there or something. So I knew his password but I never looked other than when he specifically asked. And I didn’t snoop around when I was in there. I had no reason to and I wasn’t interested anyway.
He did not have access to my email because it just never came up that I had to ask him to go into my account. But I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell him my password. There was nothing in there that I didn’t want him to know about.
But let’s say there were some things that I didn’t really want him to see, like an email exchange with a friend about marital problems. I don’t believe that spouses should necessarily “share everything,” and if I wanted to vent to a friend about how I felt, well, I should be able to do that without him seeing it. So in that case, I might have avoided giving him access for some minor reason.
But if it was a matter of showing that I wasn’t having an extramarital affair, well then I’d certainly let him look! It would be unfortunate that he saw the negative things I said about him, but oh well.
Yep. If my beau asked to see my email, the answer would be “no”, regardless of whether I was cheating or not. Not only are the contents of my inbox none of his damn business, but it’s such an odd request that I would wonder why he’d want to see my emails.
It doesn’t take much effort to put 2 and 2 together and reach the conclusion that he suspects I’m up to something. In which case he could simply ask me straight out if I was cheating. But he didn’t, so I’m inclined to suspect he would disbelieve me automatically. Trust is already broken here. Either he has the balls to ask her straight out, or he doesn’t have faith in her faithfulness, in which case he should just call it a day and find another GF/wife.
If my husband asked this of me and this were the case though, I would tell him - go ahead and look, but you can’t read e-mails from X or this subject line because they are from a friend about her own personal business and I told her I would keep it private (or whatever.) She might lie about that but it would be tough to come up with a reason on the spot that would hold up when looking at her inbox. It’s not foolproof…especially if she is having an affair with a friend of the family that she could say was confiding in her for some other reason, but it would probably at least point out who that person might be.
I wouldn’t just say ‘no you can’t even look at any of it’ without giving a reason at all. He could open up her e-mail with her standing there telling him ‘not that one’ or whatever. Sure, she could just tell him not to open any that discuss her affair, but I would think that just seeing the sheer number of e-mails from random guy or seeing the recipients or subject lines would be enough to point one way or the other. If I were accused of cheating when I was innocent, I would be pretty pissed, but also eager to prove my innocence just so he could be proven wrong (putting me back on the moral highground )
What exactly does she say when he asks to read her e-mail? (Or hasn’t he flat out asked? I agree with those saying he should.)
Although, if he is really this worried about it, I agree that there are issues even if she isn’t cheating.
First of all if she is cheating, talking about cheating, talking about marital problems, etc, she sure has hell shouldn’t be doing it via email. If you want to keep secrets it’s best not to write them down whether they be ethical or not.
Secondly, if he thinks she’s cheating she might as well be because their relationship is fucked. For whatever reason he has lost his trust in her and it’s extremely rare that that trust can ever be achieved again. There’s no point going through her email. The only chance they have is to sit down and point blank talk about his trust issues and what’s causing them. Even then the relationship probably won’t recover but at least he won’t have been sneaking around like a thief.
That would probably be my first response, but I think my pride would eventually make me want to show him how wrong he was to doubt me. It would piss me off to think he was still thinking I had cheated, or was telling other people that maybe I had. I would want to show that he was the ass, not me. But, I can see how other people might not react that way.
I would just want to walk out of the marriage with the record clear, so to speak.
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