I think there may be an age gap on the conjoined email address part; I’m 46, and I can’t think of a single couple my age that has one joint email account. Everyone’s got their own- the closest I can think of are a few where they both have work emails, and only one of the two has their own private account, but it’s in their name, not “the_doofuses@gmail.com” or anything like that.
However, I’ve noticed that once you get above about 50, it seems to be more common. I think it may be because they were fully-fledged adults when email became common, and they think of it as akin to a postal mailbox. Younger people think of it as something more personal, because our first experiences were likely in college or before.
Marriage has always been bittersweet, that’s why we have developed so many rituals around it. Marriage by its nature involves the destruction of two households for the creation of a new one. The relationships between the childhood family are irrevocably different. You hope that the difference is one that you can live with and in many cases, it’s a positive change, but sometimes it isn’t. Such is the way of things. Life is always changing and there’s really nothing we can do about it.
To me, the knowledge of Littlebro sharing anything I share with him with 2.SiL is not a problem at all. The knowledge that Middlebro needs to measure his sharing carefully, on the other hand, is, because to me it’s one of the many issues I see with Middlebro and 1.SiL regarding communication, trust, being on the same page…
Does Littlebro tell 2.SiL everything I tell him? No. He’s got financial information on me that I’m sure he hasn’t shared with her any more than he’d share it with the President of Japan (if he happened to know the President of Japan, which he doesn’t). But he knows both of us well enough to know perfectly well what to share and how.
???
Of course you could but it would be up to your sister whether to respect your privacy. That would depend on your relationship and what the information may be.
FTR, the OP is regarding communicating by e-mail, I’d hope that if my siblings had “private family matters” or otherwise they need to discuss with me that they would speak to me in person or pick up the phone.
I’m 54 and I don’t know anyone my age who has a joint account anymore. My parents who are in their 80s certainly don’t. It’s a very rare thing these days but I agree that those that exist are legacy accounts from twenty years ago.
The underlying hostility toward the sister is far out of proportion to the offense described. It suits the OP to live hundreds of miles apart because the sister uses “we” too often in talking about her life? The OP hasn’t let go of the fact that the sister’s husband doesn’t work outside the home, after thirty years? The mother still treats the sister’s husband like an interloper?
Something bad happened among these people long ago.
As a baseball and hockey coach and a Scouter, I come across many joint e-mail accounts which parents share as a primary contact for their children’s activities. I know it’s not quite the same but there are circumstances where it makes sense.
Yeah, the email address is not the problem with this family. There is clearly no respect at all for the sister’s husband and little or none for their marriage. Email got nothing to do with it.
I don’t know whether the OP has the respect problem or the sister’s husband has the respect problem or both, but…
If you think your sister is in an unhealthy relationship and you won’t straight-up tell her, then that’s your problem not hers.
And if your sister has a shared email address, well, either you write to her or you don’t - but realistically, she was going to share the information with him anyway. He’s her husband, not some random man.
If I have a friend or relative who is married, I pretty much assume that anything I tell them is going to be shared with their spouse. Sure, it might not be shared, but the odds are that it will be, so that is my assumption. You would be wise to make the same assumption. That’s pretty much what marriage is all about.
I also thought about tomndebb but IIRC the story there is that he registered the account thinking they’d both use it and then it mostly became his account and she didn’t care. So she went off and did her own thing. This is the way it often works. I know a number of couples with “joint emails” but the reality is that email has become so ubiquitous that every one of them has mostly just passed the joint address on to the primary person who uses it and the other spouse has made a new one just for them. So Jill and Rob have jillrob@blah.com for her and robin@blah.com for him. Mary and Don had something similar. This is very common in older couples who saw email at first as an analog of a mailbox on the front of the house. No one expects his and hers mailboxes at a house, do they? Once you started using it and saw how customized it became with various subscriptions and correspondence then people started making separate ones.
On a more specific note, it’s their relationship, my advice is to keep your expectations to your own relationships and don’t take offense on behalf of your mother either. If your mom is uncomfortable with the shared communication channel with her daughter and son-in-law let her address it with them. Get yourself out of that loop, nothing good will come of it.
The guy who runs a local group I’m a member of doesn’t just share an email address with his wife, he uses her Facebook account too. I’ve never even met her, but he sends messages to the group via that account all the time, plus asks people to message him via that account.
Sure, I think it’s a little odd, especially as he’s more active on the account than the actual person whose name it’s in, but it apparently works for them.
Why don’t we have the same feeling about sending a paper letter to someone who shares a physical mailbox?
I think the answer is we have this greatly inflated opinion of how secure or private email is. It is possible to send email securely, but normal email is as secure as a postcard; anyone who merely comes in contact with it by accident can read the entire thing.
My wife and I have separate email accounts but we both know each other’s passwords.
She doesn’t use a cell phone so I have her account logged in as a second account on mine. I get alerts every time she gets an email.
None of that matters because she tells me what she gets in email anyway.
I can’t imagine why spouses would not have all the password info for each others accounts and devices. Can you imagine the headache if something happened to one and the other had to beg, plead and finagle to get access to the other’s accounts?
I do not have my gf’s passwords primarily because I do not want them. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own. She has hers written down somewhere and I have mine also documented just in case one of us dies.
Sure he can - but that doesn’t mean he does. My husband and I have a joint email address from when we first got internet service around 1995 or so- and back then, it was one address per account. Just because his name was included in the address didn’t mean he actually read it - at least, not before I told him that he had an email. It was so well known that I was the designated email reader that his friends started off their emails by saying hello to me.
And about all the rest- it doesn't matter. You could email your sister at her own separate address, write her a letter, talk to her in person or or the phone - it doesn't matter. If she wants him to have the information, he will have it.
BTW , you may not know as much about your sister’s relationship with her husband as you think you do. I recently spent a week traveling with my sister to attend our niece’s wedding and a number of times she made remarks about me being married so long that I couldn’t make a decision without my husband. I can make a decision without my husband just fine- but considering what I had to put up with from her for the sin of watching movies or reading a Kindle on the 10 hour flight* I didn’t want to pick a restaurant or activity as long as I could tolerate her preference. She blamed my “I don’t care, whatever you want” attitude on my husband who was’t even on the trip, but she was actually the cause of it. There’s really no reason for you to have decided that you sister doesn’t define herself independently of her husband because she says “we have decided” rather than “I have decided” unless the joint decision is about what your sister is going to have for lunch.
A whole week of “I never watch TV”,“You always have your face in a screen” ( which wasn’t even true) , " I can’t believe you’re reading that while I’m reading a real book" “How can this be the first time you’ve had____?”