It may be because I have worked in IT for decades but I could never imagine asking for someone’s password.
I have the ability to read anyone’s email at work or at home, heck I could key log or sniff IP traffic too, but I could never justify doing so in a million years and I never have outside of technical need in over 20 years.
If you don’t have trust why the heck are you even in a relationship with this person.
I’m an open book though, I will admit any bad thing I’ve ever done, but you aren’t getting my password, if our relationship is at that point you want to force it we better start talking to the bank on the landlord. to see who keeps the loan/lease.
Sitting down and reading through ten years of archived emails pretty extreme: I would never sit down and read my husband’s email box, but I’d scroll through looking for an email from his sister if I needed to know what time they were coming over.
But if you already suspected her of cheating on you, did the email really prove anything? What if you hadn’t found incriminating evidence? Would you just have gone ahead and had sex with her? It seems like your relationship was already over by the time you suspected.
I can understand this, because I’m in the “wouldn’t bother me” camp, while my husband is in the “don’t read my emails” camp. But he’s a much more private person than I am in general. We have exchanged passwords, but only for use in an emergency, like if something happens to one of us and the other needs to notify loved ones.
That said, I might feel differently if the relationship was different. I can think of some people in my past who I would not have wanted to see my conversations with others. I don’t know why it’s different now, perhaps it’s a difference in the other person’s attitude overall. Maybe now I feel I’ve got less to hide as well, I dunno.
The only issue would be the privacy of those I’m conversing with. They deserve not to have THEIR emails read without their permission.
Impersonating me would be a different issue altogether. That, I couldn’t abide.
I agree, this bugs me, a lot. If you don’t feel the need for personal privacy that’s fine, but you don’t have the right to violate *other *people’s privacy. If I found out that my friends’ spouses were reading our correspondence you bet I’d be pissed.
Too late to edit, but for everyone who’s all “Of course it’s fine for my spouse to read my email!” does it bother you that you’re also letting your spouse read your friends’, family’s, and other correspondents’ email? Do you at least let these people know that their correspondence with you isn’t private?
Is it odd that they EXPECT this correspondence isn’t private?
Apparently, I think married is having someone who is an extension of myself. Others appear not to feel this way. (Seriously, I am puzzled. Why get into a lifelong sharing of yourself without, you know, sharing ALL of yourself.)
When you’re dealing with the question of “Do I leave my wife and split up the family?”, seeking proof of cheating is natural, I would think.
I agree that the relationship was already over, but that’s using hindsight. Many spouses don’t want to believe that when they’re in the midst of a domestic drama.
I did give this more thought, and a rather obvious fact hit my caffeine-deprived brain: If a person wants to cheat and is smarter than my ex, they could simply spend five minutes opening a new email account. Duh.
If something is so intensely personal that not even my spouse is welcome to be a part of the conversation, I wouldn’t want to talk about it via email anyway. That’s just me though. I’m turning into an old fart.
If I tell something to a friend of mine that’s married, I just assume that they’ll be telling their wife or husband. Not necessarily that they’ll run home and repeat the conversation, but that they would feel free to repeat it. I thought that was understood that this is common amongst married couples. At least the married couples I know.
Unless of course someone e-mailed me and said “don’t tell your wife about this!” Then I wouldn’t repeat it to her. But that would only happen for a surprise birthday party or Christmas gift exchange or something like that.
I also assume that my friend’s spouses get general outlines of whatever interesting situations that my friends and I have discussed. I do *not *assume that they read our correspondence, which is not remotely the same thing. If I were talking to both of them, I’d have addressed it to both of them.
It isn’t as if my husband and I read every e-mail the other sends. How dull would that be? But my friends and family know how close we are as a couple. We don’t keep secrets from each other, and they should not tell me things they don’t want him to know.
[QUOTE=evensven]
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?
[/QUOTE]
Maybe part of the divide is this. I don’t have anything remotely like that in my in-box. I’ve been with my husband since I was 18, and I’ve done nothing since then that he doesn’t or shouldn’t know about. My e-mail consists of day-to-day bullshit; it isn’t remotely diary-like or particularly interesting.
I don’t know if you’ve discussed it with them, but if it’s that important to you, then maybe you should. I know if someone writes me a letter, or an e-mail, and my wife would ask me “what did s/he say”, I would feel perfectly free to tell her “here, read it yourself.”
I am not an extension of my other half! I love him dearly and I signed up to spend the rest of my life with him but certainly not to abrogate my own self-identity. It may not be important to other people, but it is to me.
Hell, I don’t tell him every stray thought that passes through my head. I keep a lot of things to myself until I am ready to share them. These aren’t so-called “bad” thoughts and I think people are bringing baggage to the issue if they think all private thoughts are bad.
I never signed up to be a part of him. I signed up to be a part of this relationship, which has give and take, but I still insist on being my own separate person. And to me it verges on downright Orwellian to believe that “those who don’t need to hide, don’t hide”. To me, anyway.
I can’t describe it any further than the fact that I am, and always will be, my own person. Separate from him. I wouldn’t tell him “Read it yourself” to an e-mail, I’d summarize it for him.
I don’t tell my wife everything either. I guess the difference is, my wife is my best companion and my best friend. Things I don’t want to tell my wife, I don’t tell anyone else. I can’t think of something that I would be willing to tell a friend of mine, but would want to hide from my wife.
With the few friends that I regularly email with actual conversation (as opposed to plan-making), I do know that they share some stuff but not everything with their spouses, and I trust their discretion.
I also know a few people who I know feel as you and perfectparanoia do, and frankly I wouldn’t email them anything sensitive, or even tell them anything sensitive. When they chose to mindmeld with someone I didn’t choose to mindmeld with I stopped sharing, which is unfortunate since that’s what makes for a friendship.
Really, I don’t expect anyone to treat our conversations or correspondence as top secret, I just expect a little discretion.
But that’s not the question. Can you think of anything that someone else might tell you that they wouldn’t necessarily want to tell your wife, or might at least communicate differently if they did?
Sure, I can think of stuff. In that case, I assume that they would do like I do. For example, if I tell something to my friend, or my brother, and I don’t want his wife to know, I would make sure to add “don’t tell your wife”. But this happens so rarely that I can’t remember the last time I did it, or even if I ever did it.
See, that stuff that Even Sven posted about, the love letters and the processing while she was healing…that’s the kind of thing that I would want my sweetie to read, if he was interested in it at all. (I understand some people are upset by reading the details of their SO’s relationships with others, so I might omit that if he had that attitude.)
If he reads it, he then knows and understands me that much better. And partners understanding each other better is good, right?
