First, a bit of setup: I’m on OKCupid, an online dating site. One of the features on this site is a set of “match questions” with multiple-choice answers. Your answers to these questions are fed into OKCupid’s database, which matches your answers against those of other users, and thus generates a “match” score. If you post an answer as “public”, other users can also see your answer to that specific question.
With me so far? Splendid.
Anyway, there’s one thing I seen a lot on this site that really blows my mind: Many, many women answer “Only if I suspected something” to this question:
To me, this is absolutely shocking - invading a mate’s privacy in this way seems a profound invasion of privacy at best, and potentially criminal at worst. If you’d asked me, I’d have guessed that only a very tiny a dysfunctional subset of users would give any answer to this question other than “absolutely not!”
And yet, that seems not to be the case - a conditional “yes” seems to be a popular answer among 25-35-year-old college-educated women.
So, what does the Dope think is going on here? Is it just that OKCupid users are more messed-up than I’d have guessed, or is this behavior less unacceptable than I’d thought?
I’m not the demographic in question, but the answer for me is absolutely not, if for no other reason than I’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone did it to me.
I wouldn’t snoop, but I wouldn’t hesitate if there was a legitimate reason–if, for example, I knew there was an email in his box that had information I needed and he was asleep or something, I would go look. I’d tell him later just because I wouldn’t want to look like I was snooping.
Sure, this sounds reasonable. But I don’t think that’s what the question is getting at - it refers to doing this without the other person’s knowledge or permission.
In my example, I don’t ask for permission, except in the general sense that I know he won’t mind. It doesn’t happen often, though, Maybe once every few years?
It would be completely unacceptable to me. It signal a relationship that is already fundamentally broken. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a viable relationship.
Like a lot of OKCupid question, I feel this one is badly written to the point that it’s difficult to interpret what an answer means. The question says “any reason”, which includes everything from “I’m feeling curious” to “I’m being held at gunpoint and ordered to read my SO’s email”. I mean, I can certainly imagine scenarios where reading someone else’s email without their permission would be the lesser of two evils, they just aren’t very plausible.
It’s also not clear to me from the question whether the situation is one where I’d have to guess my SO’s password to get into the email account, or whether I innocently went to use my computer after my SO has been over and discover that my SO forgot to log out of Gmail. I can’t see doing the former except in a very extreme, far-fetched scenario where I believed that people were in serious danger and that information included in my SO’s email would help. But if it were a “Wait a sec, this isn’t my Gmail” situation, I don’t think I’d be able to restrain myself from at least taking a glance at the subject headings.
I certainly wouldn’t, and I’d be pissed if my girlfriend did it. Just like I won’t read her texts or instant messages without her permission, and vice versa.
Under most circumstances no. Now, if she had vanished and I was looking for clues for what happened, or I happened to notice an email with a title like re: Plan to Kill Der Trihs then that would be a different matter. Basically, any situation extreme enough that the normal social rules are suspended.
Well yeah, but “for any reason” includes cases where trust has been broken, or there is something wrong with the relationship.
While I personally, don’t think I’d read an SO’s email without her consent under any circumstances, I think “Only if I suspected something” is a reasonable response, if it comes from a reasonable, non-paranoid person who would only suspect something if they had a good reason to. I can think of plenty of scenarios where it might turn out be in the SO’s best interest to snoop.
My ex-wife did it to me all the time. I wasn’t doing anything especially wrong by any standard. Her personal triumph of a ‘big bust’ was finding something that I wrote here that she didn’t agree with. She found references to a site with topless pics once and that was enough to get locked out of the house and then having to sleep on the couch for a month after I got back in. Yeah, I am glad it is over and it is something I will have zero tolerance for in the future.
Reading anyone’s e-mail or looking at their online accounts without their consent, even your spouses, is technically very illegal. I wish that they would throw a few of them in prison for it to get the word out.
I never did that to her BTW even though I could have easily. I do not believe in it and think it is reprehensible behavior. Figure stuff out a different way if you are that worried about something.
Technically can’t happen with me and my husband - we have each memorized each others passwords and use each other’s email accounts fairly regularly.
We actually have a notarized paper in our safe-deposit box stating that we each grant full access to each other’s web-presence. Don’t know if it’s legally binding, but it makes us feel better to have it.
I don’t have anything to hide, neither does he. It makes it easier for us if we know the account accesses so if either of us is occupied (usually driving) we can send an email or email-chat to someone from the appropriate account, or check on things that need dealing with (invitations or scheduling events).
We usually tell our friends that we’re taking dictation for each other, but sometimes not. It isn’t like it’s hard for them to tell: I can write and spell, and he can’t (dyslexic).
Now, if he got a different email account - unless he told me about it, I wouldn’t know about it to snoop into, because I don’t go messing around his stuff, and I think googling-facebooking-internet-searching people you know is borderline stalkerish.
He could have umpteen different accounts for weird shit that I don’t know, but I don’t know, and everything’s fine with our relationship as far as I can tell. So for that, the answer would be “No, because I would be clueless that he had an account to snoop in, nor do I particularly think that snooping in an email account would solve any problems that we were potentially having.”
I do think it’s funny that so many couples keep totally separate emails and banking and suchlike - our actual finances are separated, but each of us is on all the accounts. For me it would be hard to keep that level of privacy from someone I’m sharing my life with.
Absolutely not, if I pick up my wife’s computer and she is still logged on the Gmail, I make a potnt of handing it back to her and not to even look at the subject lines. It is not that either of us are hiding anything, it is that we are both allowed to have private thoughts.
Really? You’re surprised that if someone thinks their mate is cheating on them that they would do whatever it takes to prove it? Some people will take it even further and hire private investigators and such, man.
It’s easy to say “Oh I would never” if you’re in a healthy relationship where you feel secure you can trust your SO, but I do think that most people would snoop if they were actually in a situation where they had reason to think the spouse was up to no good. I would give those who answered the question that way credit for at least being honest about what they would do instead of lying themselves.