If he thinks she’s going to cheat (or already has) then his instincts may be on the mark. It is very much his business, and I would not feel too bad about his checking the emails, any more than if he followed her to a lunch date or checked her cell phone records or credit card receipts. The relationship is obviously seriously eroded already. I certainly wouldn’t advise him to do it, but I don’t think it’s a terrible thing for him to do. My husband and I don’t read each other’s emails, but we could if we wanted to, and we know each other’s passwords. Computer furtiveness is different from not liking people reading over your shoulder.
Yeah, he’s already asked her whether she’s got someone else, she’s already said no, and he doesn’t believe her. If he doesn’t believe her, his lack of trust is a problem whether she happens to be trusthworthy or not; once you don’t believe your SO’s word on one subject, why would you believe it on anything else?
Huh. SpouseO and I share a computer at home; he knows my passwords and I know his. And the only time I’d look at his email (or vice versa) is if he asked me to go retrieve something there. (I’ve asked him to do this for me in the past.) Or if he’s setting up the email on my phone. It’s just nice to allow people privacy, even if they’re the person you’re closest to in the whole world.
And neither of us have anything to hide, either.
I think Ferret Herder really hit it up there earlier. If the evidence he assumes is there isn’t there, how hard is he going to look? And what more damage will that do? No good can come of this.
What would her voluntarily showing him her e-mail accomplish, anyway? If she does it voluntarily, then she can easily get rid of anything incriminating.
And if he sneaks, and checks her e-mail without knowing, and finds nothing? Is he going to trust her again just because there’s no evidence in the e-mail? I doubt that would really erase all his fears that she’s cheating. He’d just be in the same position he was before, thinking she was cheating but not having any evidence.
On the offhand chance he does find something, it may not be what he thought he’d find - maybe she’s being furtive because she’s been looking for a divorce lawyer or even trying to figure out if he’s the one cheating.
Something different to bring to the discussion:
It’s spelled quandary.
No less ethical than looking in her purse or her sock drawer or in her car or her journal. If he can do it without actually breaking and entering then it isn’t terribly unethical I don’t think. If he is asking then he knows it’s going too far though.
So, let’s say he has a look. Is he going to drop the subject and be convinced of her fidelity if he sees no incriminating emails? I’ll answer that - no, he isn’t. He is going to keep turning over rocks until he finds the evidence he believes is there or until he breaks the relationship.
I really hope I’m misunderstanding you, because you seem to be saying that a person has to keep everything under lock and key to have any reasonable expectation of privacy…and that’s some kind of fucked up. Especially the part about reading somebody’s freaking journal. A purse or a car or even a sock drawer is a psychological semi-private space where something is yours for your own personal use, but it’s not unheard-of for you to send someone else in to get something because they have a legitimate need for it. A journal, however, is by all social conventions the most private psychological space outside one’s own brain. Reading it without explicit, uncoerced permission (barring some sort of threat to someone’s physical safety) is exceedingly unethical.
And I certainly hope that if MitzeKatze’s husband is in the medical field he realizes there are things people tell him that he should not and in fact is legally forbidden to share with her. “This is none of your wife’s business, so don’t tell her” is quite frankly nothing you should need to tell a medical professional, it should go without saying, even without the medical privacy laws.
As for the original question, I wouldn’t want my husband rooting through my emails for the same reason I don’t want him rooting through my purse or underwear drawer without my say-so. It’s not that there’s anything to hide in there, or indeed anything he hasn’t already seen before. It’s just that…well, it’s mine and is all wrapped up in me having an identity outside of him. As much as we’re a single unit, we’re not two bodies with one hive mind, you know? As such, having our own little separate spaces on top of the shared spaces is important.
This is an ethical mishmash! On the one hand, I consider email to be private, just as my viewing history is private, but on the other hand, if the partner isn’t open about the record, it makes me wonder what is going on.
I guess that I would simple ask if anything is going on, and if that didn’t satisfy me, I would ask for access to the email and history.
Note: I would have to be pretty desperate to go to this extent.
She clearly doesn’t trust him, and he clearly doesn’t trust her.
The only question now is whether they both will admit that and decide whether it’s worth working on, or to end the relationship.
That sums it up.
So, Tristan? Any news?
I’ve been that person. Lives can be deeply damaged and even ruined.
I had confided some sensitive and deeply personal information to a lifelong friend with the explicit understanding that the information be shared with no one. I trusted her implicitly as we had kept each others confidences since childhood. Before I told her, it was made clear that it was a “take this to your grave” disclosure. She had agreed.
The situation between my partner and myself involved no one other than the two of us. There was no material, physical or emotional harm, either known or unknown, to anyone else on the planet. It wasn’t anything illegal. We were having difficulties and I needed some emotional support and advice from what I thought was a dear friend.
She told her husband. Her husband expressed moral and religious outrage about my situation, which frankly was none of his damn business. He freely discussed his outrage, naming me and the occupation and general location of my partner (he didn’t know my partners name, but the occupation narrowed the possibility of his identity down to one reasonable choice), with various people. Word got out (and back to me). Her husband also made it a point to inform my partners organization about our relationship. As a direct result of the scandal that followed, my partners career tanked. We were both borderline suicidal. I felt especially guilty because I was the root cause of the mess. If I hadn’t trusted her (and frankly from a lifetime of experience with her, I had no reason to believe that I couldn’t trust her), we wouldn’t have been exposed.
I confronted my friend since she was the only living individual with knowledge of the situation and had to be the one who told her husband. I was sobbing and asking her why she told her husband my private business while trying to impress upon her the amount of damage this had caused. I felt like I was in shock, both from the betrayal and lack of remorse. Her husband was riding the moral high horse and made it clear that he felt my partner and I deserved everything that was happening. She righteously informed me, in front of her husband, that they “have no secrets between them”.
They “don’t have secrets between them” my ass. At her wedding rehersal dinner, she and her husband to be’s brother each had a couple drinks too many and were giving each other a congratulatory kiss, which blossomed into drunken compliments, which then turned into multiple drunken kisses, drunken groping, and finally sloppy drunken sex. Both she and her future brother in law were deeply ashamed with a less than zero chance of a repeat. She was terrified her husband to be would find out because he would have dumped her. We had a long talk and I advised her to keep her mouth shut, there was no reason to ruin her impending marriage and the relationship between the brothers over something that was clearly a one time mistake that all involved deeply regretted, and to just forget it ever happened. The brother agreed.
Years passed, and I had for all intents and purposes forgotten about it until the moment she righteously defended her actions by saying she and her husband don’t have any secrets between them. I had always prided myself on keeping confidences and had several opportunities in the past to divulge a secret that would result in a personal or social gain in some way, but had always declined to do so, without even having to think about it, because I felt my obligation to keep a confidence was unshakeable as long as no harm was being caused to anyone.
I was so enraged at her comment (and in total despair about my partners and my situation) that her wedding rehearsal sexual liasion was out of my mouth before I could even think straight. I wasn’t waiting for an opportunity to blurt out this or any other confidence as revenge. Normally, even in highly charged emotional situations, I think before I speak. I wasn’t even thinking at this point. I just went for it, and to be really honest, I didn’t give a flying f*&^. From the look on her face, her husband knew it was true. They ended up getting a divorce.