And if people have nothing to hide, why do they object to the government listening in on their phone conversations?:rolleyes:
But if you truly believe this, put your money where your mouth is and post your username and password to your e-mail account. (What? You won’t do this? Then you must have something to hide!). After all, everyone loves having hackers get into their e-mail account – if they have nothing to hide.
I don’t want to show my personal e-mail to anyone else and I have nothing to hide, either. It’s private. Breaking into the e-mail is a betrayal of trust; once his wife finds out, the marriage is over.
Looks like you and neuroman subscribe to the same issue of False Logic. What you’re suggesting is a pretty far cry from showing your husband your email account, don’t you think?
What I’m saying is that if I suspected my wife of cheating and thought it would help to see her emails, I would not break into her account. I would go to her and ask if I could seem them. If she obliged, then either my suspicions would be confirmed or everything would be cleared up and we’d get on with our lives. If she did not oblige, I would become even more suspicious and wonder what she was hiding. I wouldn’t ask her to show me anything that didn’t pertain to the conversation at hand (although when I was married we did have the kind of relationship where we knew each other’s passwords).
And, if you suspected, went to her, and she specified not these email, for any of the above delineated reasons, would that make you sure or more suspicious?
Would her, correctly in those cases, saying you’d have to trust her on why, be enough?
Either you trust someone or you don’t. You don’t trust them if they prove something to you.
Needing proof implies a loss of trust already. How many times/things does she have to prove to him for her to be trusted?
I understand what you’re saying, and I agree that needing proof implies a loss of trust, but the fact is, we just don’t have enough information in this particular case to make that call. Why has Tristan’s friend “come to the conclusion that he needs to see her e-mail”? Did he catch his wife kissing another man? Is he overreacting to an offhand comment she made? Did somebody say, “Dude, I’m porking your wife, check her email.”?
The only thing I can definitively say without more information is that I would not break into her email. Personally, as I’ve said, I would ask her directly if I could see them, but that only stems from my desire to have a completely open relationship, communication-wise.
No good comes from spying on someone you should trust.
This marriage is already on a fast track to being over, since he no longer has any trust in her.
You need to advise him to find a good divorce lawyer to advise him on what he needs to do in planning for a potential divorce and custody issues. And if he’s sneaky enough to snoop in his wife’s e-mail. He might want to set up interviews with the five best divorce lawyers in town, so they would all be conflicted and precluded from taking his wife as a client.
One thing to think about is that they have very different senses of privacy. If hers is stronger, that alone may be enough to make him think that something is up. Personally, mine is so strong that I make a lot of noise when I approach my husband when he is at his computer. If he asked to see my e-mail account–something I can’t imagine him doing–I don’t know what I’d do. Show him and walk out for good or angrily refuse and tell him we needed counseling. Hard to know, but with me, just asking would be a pretty irreversible step. Needless to say, anyone I caught snooping would be unlikely to be forgiven. I think it would be as hard to forgive as an affair.
Same here. Even though we spend most of our waking hours together and I love him to death, I don’t like the idea of my SO looking at my emails or even over my shoulder as I’m online (including on the Dope). I know logically it’s not the same thing as a diary, but that’s how I treat it because it is not meant for his eyes (and, like my diary, contains a mix of fact and fiction and plenty of pseudonyms). He is very much the same way, and I don’t suspect him of cheating.
If he thinks she’s cheating, he should confront her. If he doesn’t have enough evidence or isn’t sure enough to do that, then I don’t think he’s got a case for snooping.
The internet does provide an outlet for a lot of people to do things they wouldn’t in person – post dating profiles they don’t follow up on, flirt on Facebook, correspond by email with old flames. So even if he does find something, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s cheating.
As someone who did have something to hide from her then-SO in her private email, I’d have to say that snooping into or demanding to see her private email will only make the situation worse.
If the wife has nothing to hide, then invading her email privacy 1) will yield no fruit, 2) will needlessly violate her privacy and righteously piss her off if she discovers it, and 3) will not address whatever problem she’s dealing with. If there is a specific behavior that is arousing your friend’s suspicions, he needs to ask about that directly.
If the wife does have something to hide, then snooping will paint her husband not as a person she can discuss her problem with, but an untrustworthy sneak. This will be especially bad if she’s already thinking about leaving him. All she’ll do is cover her tracks better. If your friend wants to work things out, he needs to be the rational, trustworthy one.
The problem is the wife having email that doesn’t indicate cheating but will make her embarrassed. For instance, maybe she’s a murder and if he read the email he’d find that out
Or maybe she likes to go to karaoke and sing Clay Aiken songs. I might do that, but I certainly would take that secret to the grave
The basic thing is he doesn’t trust her. And unless she’s a total moron, she’s already gotten rid of the evidence in her email.
Everyone has hit on the trust issues pretty well, and the various problems associated with actually looking at her email (with or without permission) and maybe my mind is just more devious than most, but if she is conducting illicit affairs through email, then what are the chance she is using the email account that he knows about?
Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo (just to name a few) accounts are easy to set up and easy to keep secret. If it were me (which it never would be) and if I were going to do something in email that I did not want my spouse to be aware of, I would simply set up a new email account, do whatever I wanted to there and if came spouse came sniffing around I could toss him my password and my blessing to get into the account he knew of with the knowledge that he would not find anything incriminating and I could continue to do as I please without his interference.
If the wife is cheating then the relationship should end because she’s an unfaithful liar and has violated his trust in her. If she isn’t cheating, then the relationship should end because he’s both a paranoid snoop and such an enormous coward that he would rather violate her trust in him than confront the issue directly. If things have really reached the point where you’re wondering if spying on somebody’s private correspondence is ethical behavior then just end the wretched thing already.
I agree with all that you said in theory, but would take it even further than that. If things have reached a point where there is such a thing as “private correspondence” amongst spouses, then just end the wretched thing already.
I may be old fashioned but my husband and I took our vows seriously; when we married we “became one” for all intents and purposes. There is nothing too personal or too private to share with my husband or for him to share with me. Of course we each have separate pursuits and interests that don’t always include each other but even those aren’t “private” to the point where they are considered “none of his/her business”. We don’t keep separate email accounts (other than his work email and the first thing he did with that was email the password to me so I could check something for him) we don’t keep separate bank accounts (but don’t judge those who do) and we do not keep secrets no matter how mundane from one another. Saying something to me is the same as saying it to my husband, saying it to my husband is the same as saying it to me and we each have the other’s blessing to speak and act the other’s behalf.
If I thought something of his was out of bounds for me or if he thought something of mine was off limits to him, I would have to reconsider whether we should remain married at all.
I’ve given passwords to girlfriends before. I’ve had their passwords too. This was in relationships far less serious than a marriage. I understand what you’re saying. But if you never needed or even wanted your SO’s password before and suddenly you find yourself wanting it just so you can assuage your jealous suspicions, things are far enough gone that you should probably move on.
I don’t really have any secrets to keep. If my girlfriend wanted my password because she wanted to check the bills, or read an email from a family member, or any number of reasonable requests, I’d give it over with a clear conscience and no worries. If she wanted it because she was suspicious of me, there’s a big, big problem. If she deceived me into thinking she wanted it for legitimate reasons when she was really just checking up on me, if I found out there would be a big, big problem. A relationship needs trust. If that’s gone, and in the OP’s friend’s case it seems like it is, then it’s time to let go.
My husband has my email passwords, too… because I trust him not to be in my email looking for something he can use against me. He’s logged in to look at bills and things, but the moment he logs in to “check up on me,” the relationship is in far worse shape than it would be from one of us having a private email.
/edit: I don’t see a problem with private information between spouses if it doesn’t affect the marriage. My family doesn’t want me to necessarily tell him about their female problems or relationship woes, and he doesn’t want to know. If he insisted that I tell him every single thing everyone tells me, I’d be wondering what controlling behavior to look out for next.
True, but there is a world of difference between sharing everything or not keeping secrets from your husband and insistence that you tell every little thing.
If someone said to me, “Don’t tell your husband but…” I would stop them there. I don’t want to know anything that I would need to keep from him, and he (sitting right here and nodding in agreement) doesn’t want to know anything he couldn’t share with me.
Not that we always tell each other every snippet of gossip or boring stories about our friends or every conversation we have had away from one another, but neither of us feel like there is anything we can’t share or tell if we choose to. My family feels the same way, it is how I was raised, and my husband is medical so my Mom has no problem discussing details of her hysterectomy with me knowing that I might (and probably will) also discuss it with my husband. And my friends know me well enough and trust both of us enough to not let my marriage interfere with or inhibit them from speaking to me even about personal issues. (And again it is not like I tell every detail of every conversation to hubby…but I could if I wanted to and will if it comes up or is pertinent.)
There are two sides to every story. My friend told me his side, so I sided with him. When I found out about his bipolar disorder and drinking problems, I realized his wife didn’t have a sweet deal either.
Personally, I would step away and help clean up in the fallout. Don’t get involved until things settle down. The next time something like this happens to me, I’m going to go with the listener role rather than the fixer role. Let your friend make their own mistakes, learn from them, grow, and you can be supportive.
Eh, my subscription ran out four months ago and I haven’t renewed.
Although an unwanted spousal search and an unwanted police search are different things, I see them as philosophically similar. It may be the difference between a candy bar and a $500 leather jacket, but it’s still stealing.
Just quoting because it’s the most recent and most succinct way of putting this thought.
I really don’t think this is right. A marriage comes with a much larger level of commitment. You can’t just cut-and-run over suspected infidelity, despite the lack of trust it entails. You have an ethical obligation to do everything you can to repair the relationship. In this case, either the guy is paranoid and needs counseling, or he needs to talk to his wife about his misgivings, and both of them try to work together to save the relationship (with counseling there possible, too). Her denials are obviously not sufficient.
The option of asking to read her emails is there, but, from what I gather, this has already happened, or her computer use wouldn’t be described as furtive.
Woah. On a bit of reread, I noticed they have a kid. This makes the ethical obligation to try and make the marriage work even stronger, if that is at all possible.
BTW, if she actually is cheating, but they decide to try and work things out, having a keylogger and having access to emails is definitely ethical. You don’t get that trust back automatically.
(BTW, even if she did know to erase evidence, it’s really not that hard to get the evidence back anyways. Deleted files don’t just go away, you know.)
