What if a personal friend of mine currently on another continent needed to confide a secret with me and only me? What if I wanted to surprise my wife with something for her birthday? What if I had a personal problem not involving a secret relationship which, for one reason or another, I simply didn’t want to tell my wife? What if I used the private email account for both personal and work purposes, and someone sent me sensitive data on a company? I can think of any number of reasons for privacy that don’t involve intimate relationships.
Once again, it comes down to trust. Do you trust your SO not to go catting around? If so, you should trust his or her decision for a certain amount of privacy. If not, then maybe email accounts aren’t what you should be worried about in the relationship.
In a couple of instances, I’d say you have some trust issues in your relationships, in a couple of other cases, it’s just an ad hoc request rather than a standing policy.
This is the opposite of my angle. I don’t feel any need to read my wife’s e-mail (I usually only do it if she asks me to, but I see all the headers anyway since we share the same account at home), I just don’t understand why anyone in a trusting relationship would give a shit if their SO read their e-mail. It’s never even crossed my mind to open a private e-mail account that my wife couldn’t have access to. I’ve got nothing to hide, so what would be the point?
I’d say that we’re talking about a basic difference in personality here. I’m very much of the opinion that privacy is a thing to be valued in its own right. I don’t believe people need a reason to be private. I best heard it expressed in The Thin Red Line of all places where someone monologues to himself that one just has to find his own space where no one else can go, and that’s how you get through things. it took a lot of searching, but I finally found a kindred spirit in my wife.
We actually don’t have trust issues. If we did, I seriously doubt we’d be together, seeing as how the both of us are pretty independent, and we don’t have kids. It’s just that one of the reasons we’re so compatible is that we both know when to back off, and even if we were suspicious, snooping my diary/email or her diary/fanfic is a line both of us know not to cross.
I’m not saying my way’s better, but I really couldn’t live any other way after all these years. If you and your spouse have no secrets and it’s working out, then mazel tov!
It’s funny, although Diogenes the Cynic and I have fairly major differences politically, I find that family-wise we usually think very similarly. My husband and I open each other’s mail all the time – it wouldn’t occurr to either of us to think twice about it.
As for email, it’s pretty much the same. I could easily read his home email, as I could our kid’s email. I set up the email accounts, none of which are password protected anyway. I don’t go through his email, usually, unless I have a particular reason to do so. Last time I went into his email it was to check an address for a party we were going to – the invitation was in his inbox. He could check mine at anytime, too. As I said, it isn’t password protected, and it wouldn’t bother me a bit if he needed to look for something and went into my email to find it. I actually know his passwords, for his business computer as well. He often works from home and, if he’s working outside or in the garage, will often ask me to run upstairs and check his inbox periodically to be sure there isn’t something coming in he needs to deal with right away.
I should probably clarify that both my wife and I have a common email and a private email. If it’s in the common email box, then no problem. There’s no real way to avoid happening across a letter addressed to the other, because half our friends forget to put a salutation anyway. When I talk about private emails, I mean private email addresses that one would have to go out of his or her way to get into.
Outside of politics, I find myself agreeing with just about everything Diogenes says. I think he’s my evil twin. (-:
And I agree about his viewpoint here too. It wouldn’t even occur to me to have a private E-mail account from her, because I have no need to. If a need did arise, for example if I had to carry on some sensitive work-related correspondence, I’d tell her why I was opening the account, just to keep her mind at ease.
Now, I can see situations where you might want to keep private personal mail, but most of these situations to me would be the sign of a troubled relationship. For example, if you had marital problems you couldn’t resolve, and you went to a friend who had similar problems and asked for advice. I can see how you might want to keep that communicaton private. But that’s because you’ve already got much bigger problems, and you’re in ‘last resort’ territory.
In a healthy, happy relationship, I have a hard time imagining ever wanting to maintain a relationship with another person, of either sex, and hide it from my wife.
Btw, I used to have a policy of posting on message boards under my own name instead of a pseudonym, on the theory that if I said something that I didn’t want associated with the ‘real’ me, I shouldn’t be saying it at all. Same basic principle. I had to stop doing that when the internet became ubiquitous, though, because there are certainly things I might say that I don’t want an employer knowing, and I don’t want some lunatic with a political grudge coming after me and trashing my name or worse. But I gave that up with regret.
Again with that secret relationship. Look, I agree with you about the secret relationship. I don’t have any friends, guy or girl, that my wife doesn’t know about. I agree with you that it’s seriously screwed up to have one behind your spouse’s back.
But sometimes friends have to talk just between friends. Why do I have to tell my wife everything? She’s my spouse, not my priest. (By the way, I didn’t set up my private account to keep things from her. I needed something for this board, and I didn’t want to give out my real name which is on our email.)
I don’t use my private email only for this page. I use it for ordering presents for the Missus, and I belong to several messageboards for my hobbies. That can fill your inbox up pretty quickly.
The difference between us is that you seem to think that just because I can tell my wife everything, I should tell my wife everything. I don’t think I need to. First off, I will not tell her secrets entrusted to me by my friends, especially when I’ve promised said friends that it will stay with me. Most of the time, my friends tell me those sorts of things face to face, but thanks to the army and languages (one of my hobbies), I have friends all over the globe. The only way for them to tell me stuff is by email. Both my wife and my friends know that they email me that stuff only through my personal email.
I just don’t see anything unusual with this. Forty years ago, guys and girls gossiped in bars or over the back fence. I’d bet that their spouses didn’t hear half that stuff. Now people with email. Same thing.
If there are absolutely no secrets between you and your spouse, well . . . OK. If you’ve progressed to the point where you’re opening each other’s mail, fine. (Sorry, I still can’t get over that one. If Mrs. Fresh found that I’d opened her mail, the consequences would be swift and dire.). But not everyone’s like that. If my wife doesn’t want me to know something, and I can be reasonably sure that it doesn’t affect the marriage, then I figure I’m better off not knowing. Same with her. You’ve got really, really open people, and then you’ve got really really private people, and the personalities themselves have nothing to do with the relationship.
I have to say I totally agree with everything Diogenes and Sam Stone are saying. It’s refreshing to know that there are people out there who feel the same way! I was beginning to think everyone was so secretive/paranoid as a default. I really wish that my SO felt the same way… to be open and honest enough that he didn’t feel like it would be a huge invasion of privacy if I saw his e-mail. The sheer fact he is so protective of things like that makes me uneasy. And that doesn’t nurture trust, you know? Like I said before, I often leave my e-mail open, and I wouldn’t care if he read it. However, he is religious about making sure he signs out of his e-mail and closes the page. That’s just not how I think people in a loving trusting relationship should be.
Some people are just private by nature. I have my computer, my email, my passwords, and nobody but me knows them. I would be extremely pissed off if someone decided to go and read my emails without my permission. I consider it snooping, and insulting.
I’ve never had a relationship with someone and read his email. Never, not once. Never knew any of their passwords, and never expected them to tell me all the stuff their buddies talked about with them either.
I don’t think being in a relationship means you give up every bit of privacy, and there’s no way in hell I would ever consider giving any of my passwords to any guy.
I’m wondering if this isn’t a cultural change due to the advent of the internet, E-mail, and casual communication? I think our parent’s generation had much more of the, “When we get married, we’re a team who share everything” mindset.
You might be right about the parent’s generation thing, too. My parents are 65 and 70 and they share the same email address. Their like-aged friends are all the same – one email addy per married couple. And my folks definately have no privacy issues as regards their mail, either.
Likewise, even in political threads the only thing I can remember getting really pissed about was the Swift Boat stuff (and no reason to bring that up again).
I also think you might be right about the generational thing. All this electronic communication seems to have led to a different expecation of privacy than what we grew up with. It sounds like you’re marriage is pretty much like mine in that whatever mail, including e-mail, comes into our household comes to US rather than to ME or HER.
I didn’t exactly ‘grow up’ with e-mail, but it seemed like a natural extension of any other thing that I would consider private. My mother would think nothing of opening bills that were in my father’s name, but a letter with a hand written address to him from an individual would not be opened by her. He wouldn’t open her letters either.
They’ve been married for 32 years and he’s never gone into her purse. He brings it to her and she gets him what he needs.
I think it’s more that I was raised with the belief that certain things are shared, and other things are private, and that you don’t invade a person’s privacy. I was also raised believing that you don’t lose your identity when you get into a relationship and that it’s still OK to keep confidence when a friend tells you something. I take that all really seriously, which I suppose is part of what makes me a good systems admin. I see stuff about companies that normally only their lawyer and their CEO see, and none of it has ever been publicly disclosed.
I agree with this, and Linty’s subsequent posts. In my relationship, the fact that my wife and I don’t feel the need to read each other’s correspondence is a sign of trust and respect for each other; if I learned that she was reading all of my e-mail for no particular reason, and not telling me, that would signal that we had a trust problem. But from Diogenes’ posts I can understand how different people would have a different perspective.
See, if I was the person you’re describing, my answer would be, Why would you automatically assume that valuing privacy = having something to hide? That would indicate to me that you had some other reason not to trust me; otherwise why would you feel the need to check up?
Typo Knig? is that you? MODS - Diogenese The Cynic is clearly a sock puppet!!
::: reviews join date :::
MODS! Typo Knig is clearly a sock puppet!!!
More seriously… I’d say the exact same thing goes in our household. I don’t especially care whether my spouse reads my email, except a) I know he has no interest in doing so, and b) he’d be bored silly if he did. Same goes for me reading his email.
My friends tell me things in confidence that are not my husband’s business. I am the friend; he isn’t.
We keep separate email accounts. I don’t know if he knows my passwords. I just asked him and he doesn’t think he does. I know one of his, apparently. Ooh, I know his Netflix password.
We have very different interests. I’m into poetry; he’s into ham radio. I’m into politics; he’s into fishing.
Now, he’s been known to claim that we have a bunch in common, but I would have you know that the massive stacks of books he brought into the marriage and reads obsessively are science fiction, and I don’t read science fiction.
I’m in the “it can’t be snooping if you have the same email account” school. And in practice we do not read each other’s email — by now we know whose is whose. I do read correspondence involving invitations or events addressed to Dearly Beloved and put them on the calendar because otherwise he’d never remember to go anywhere.
But then we have joint everything else also, it works for us. It doesn’t work for everybody.
For the rest, well, I generally operate on the assumption that anything known to three people is going to get out sooner or later. Via email/snail mail/credit card purchases/something.
