My SO leaves for an extended fishing season, and we have an agreement that I open his mail while he is gone.
When he is able to call, I can report anything important he needs to know from his mail.
Otherwise, I would never do it, and I would not want him to open my mail, except in some special pre- agreed upon situation.
I did this when I was pretty sure my ex wife was cheating on me. I was right. Sorry, but I’m not going to apologize for that; how would it have helped anyone for that to be prolonged?
Had I not had good reason to be suspicious then of course I would not have.
When I was pretty sure that my ex was cheating on me*, I asked him. He said no, and I didn’t believe him. At that point, confirmation wouldn’t have even made a difference, since it was over the second I realized that I didn’t trust him. I wouldn’t have felt better about the whole thing if I’d done my own share of trust-violating.
*Of course he was. If you think that someone is cheating on you, and you’re not the kind of person who ALWAYS thinks that your SO’s are cheating on you, then they probably are.
My (now) ex took a different route. I guess she agreed with those who say that couples should share everything (like passwords). I didn’t mind doing this, and I wish she had just said that. Instead, she took the tack of saying “Why haven’t you given me your passwords yet? Do you have something to hide? What are you hiding from me?!”
Uh, jumping right to being suspicious before even asking me if you could have my passwords? Yeah, that’s pretty crappy. If she had just explained how she felt (that couples should share things like accounts and have each other’s passwords for things), I’d have been fine with it.
Instead, I felt sort of forced to give it to her to rectify the situation and to ease her immediate suspicion.
Hence why she’s my ex.
I’ve run into this line of thinking before.
It goes like this. Partner 1 says “I’d never read your email, but I need to have your password, just in case.”
Partner 2: “If you’re never going to read my email, you don’t need my password.”
Partner 1: “You won’t give me your password? YOU MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE!! Now you MUST give me your password to prove to me that you don’t!”
As to what someone is communicating about that he or she doesn’t want to share with his or her partner, it could be anything. A bad day. A fight with the spouse/partner. Just griping. Anything. Insisting that the communication is via email makes it somehow different from, say, talking on the phone doesn’t hold water. If your partner isn’t allowed to have private email that you don’t know about, that’s the same as telling him that he can never have a conversation that you’re not allowed to monitor. No difference whatsoever. In fact, it’s worse, because email is saved – it’s like saying that he must keep a record of all conversations and make them available to you on demand.
The right to private communication seems to me to be absolute in a relationship. I’d never ask for my spouse’s email password, and I’d never turn over mine.
I’ve never had any cause to, but hypothetically if I needed a phone number or email for someone school related or something, I probably would. I don’t think my wife would care, and I don’t think she has any personal emails anyway. Probably those two are related. If I thought she’d care, I wouldn’t. (I don’t have her computer password, though, so I couldn’t actually do this.)
The closest I’ve come is getting something, probably money, out of her purse once. Then, I was more worried about not putting things back right somehow (and getting in trouble for messing up her bag-o-stuff organization system), than about what I might find.
I keep a list of passwords in a password file. My wife does the same. She knows how to get into my password file, and I know how to get into hers. I don’t care if she reads my e-mails or listens to my voicemails or looks through my browser history. I don’t think she makes a habit of it.
On our shared desktop we have separate accounts (same thing on our shared laptop) and we switch logins when we use the computer. If I go to the computer, and she is logged on with an open e-mail window, I’ll probably read the e-mail before I switch logons. It’s an automatic reaction, like finding a piece of paper with writing on it on the desk, I’ll look at it to see what it says. She does the same.
We are both OK with it.
Back to the question in the OP: there is a difference between reading someone’s e-mails without them knowing about it, when they’ve never said to you “don’t read my e-mails”, and reading someone’s e-mails after they have said to you “never read my e-mails”.
It would be hard for me to understand if my wife told me “under no circumstances are you allowed to look at my e-mails”, because the reverse (her reading my e-mails) is something that wouldn’t bother me in the least.
Confirmation wise, I think the first affair it can be important for some, because people often want to know whether its them or the other person.
While trust has been lost either way, which one it is can have different implications for future relationships. I think also the length of the relationship can also have implications for what the person wants to do, eg work on themselves or as a couple vs separating if it turns out to be true or just them being suspicious/anxious.
Otara
In my last relationship, a friend popped online once and told me that my then-boyfriend had propositioned him for a random hook-up. I was blown away and couldn’t imagine he had the right person. Immediately my mind started wander and I did some snooping to see if my friend was telling me the truth. I trusted him, but I wanted to verify. Sure enough I found plenty of evidence of cheating. Was it right for me to go snooping after only having heard it from a friend? Probably not. But if I had confronted my boyfriend about it, he may have deleted all the evidence and denied it all and I would have never known.
But if my now-boyfriend ever caught wind of the same thing about me, I wouldn’t get mad at him if he went snooping around on my account. I’d openly give him my email, facebook or whatever password if he asked me for it, honestly.
That’s an excellent point, would people who want access to their partner’s email also want to be able to listen in to their phone calls? There is also the issue of the privacy of the people with whom your partner is communicating, they should probably be informed that they are writing not just an individual, but a unit.
See, in my world, anything you tell one partner, you expect that the other will/can find out about. We do operate as a unit and so do all the other married types we know.
I sometimes listen in on his phone calls if I happen to be around. He listens in on mine, too.
I guess ‘privacy’ between my spouse and I isn’t something we really have or need. We share everything with each other.
What on earth would I need to keep ‘private’ from my husband? (Other than keeping what he is getting for his birthday or Christmas a secret?)
FTR, we have been married for 8 years and have two kids so it’s not like we are still in the lovey dovey phase.
I’m glad that works for you, but your world is my vision of hell.
When you say you listen in on his calls, do you mean you pick up another handset and listen in without the other call participant knowing? Or do you mean you are in the same room when he is on the phone?
:eek: Because we’re individual people and we haven’t given up that individuality just because we’re together. I mean, if listening in on each other’s phone calls works for you, fine, but it would horrify the both of us. We need to have a life separate for each other.
It’s what works for us.
Hell yes I’d secretly read my SO’s email.
That’s how I found out my ex wife was fucking another man.
I’d like to avoid catching an STD because my spouse is a whore, but golly I’d hate to invade her privacy!
A married person having an inaccessible email account is not privacy, it’s secrecy. Those with nothing to hide, hide nothing.
I consider my email to be like my diary. It’s not exactly full of secrets, but the past ten years of worth of emails are archived, and there is plenty there that there is just no reason for my SO to read. Privacy is not the same as secrecy. I’m not doing anything secret when I’m in the bathroom with raging diarrhea, but I do appreciate some privacy.
Does he really need to see me to email a mutual friend from when we were casually dating, where I talk about the guys I’d been seeing and their positives and negatives? Does he really want to see our friend’s reply? Does he want to know how much more money the other guy made than him, or how I evaluated their sexual techniques in comparison? Does he want to know how unsure I was in those early days, and which of my friends thought I should have dated the richer, cuter dude?
He knows about my previous relationships in some detail, but does it do any good for him to relieve it blow-by-blow in my archived emails? This stuff is mine, it’s a piece of me and how I got to the point where I am in my life. But there is no reason for him to read my old love letters.
I was once violently attacked, gravely injured and subject to an attempted rape. Does he really want to read my emails from immediately after that, when I was pretty traumatized and going through my own healing process? Why should that be his domain? I didn’t know him then, and he wasn’t the one who had to go through the trauma and the healing. He knows what happened, of course, but all of the stuff that was going through my head then isn’t really his to browse on the coach while eating Cheetos.
We all need to have some space for ourselves, for our own thoughts and memories. For some of us, that’s in our inbox.
If you were that afraid of catching an STI, and you suspected her of infidelity, it’s not like you needed the email to protect you. You could just avoid having sex with her.
True, or I could just go ahead and find the truth by reading her email.
I like my way better. I guess she should’ve picked a better password.
I guess you both should have picked better spouses.
Spam reported.