I have to go with DianaG on this one. Sharing absolutely everything with your spouse is a perversion of marriage goals. What if you are a teacher, lawyer, doctor, journalist, police officer, psychologist, spy, or just someone that people think they can talk to? No, I’m not buying it or seeing the point. Sharing everything isn’t noble. It just means you are a blabbermouth with an excuse.
This is a fascinating thread. I am learning that some people have adult relationships, and others have soulmates.
I usually feel it’s a cop out to question another poster’s reading comprehension – it’s more likely that the writing was unclear – but I really can’t see anything confusing about this:
If Sister Vigilante is going to repeat “Anything told to [her] in confidence” to her husband, she has the responsibility to make this clear to the person who is doing the confiding. It is not the friend’s duty to follow up a request for secrecy with a checklist of people who are really, truly not supposed to be told. If Sister Vigilante can’t keep a secret then she simply should not agree to keep any, she should say “You know I tell my husband everything, so if you’re not comfortable with both of us knowing then you shouldn’t tell me.”
I completely agree with both these points, and much of what DianaG has stated.
And I especially agree with the point that it doesn’t make you a better SO. That thought, in itself, could be fleshed out many ways (though my SO is also one of my best friends, we’re still two different people, with different ideas and opinions, which have served to help us grow). As stated, I wouldn’t be surprised or shocked that things were shared with an SO, but if it’s an open policy of telling-all, without discretion, then I’d like to know, so that I no longer confide in that person(s).
Frankly, I think the “only if I suspected something” is the worst possible answer. I’d rather it be a fully open thing or a fully personal thing. The idea that someone suspects something already means that there’s a problem with trust and I think it should be addressed with that person rather than snooping through stuff and coming to some sort of conclusion that doesn’t make sense.
To me, trust is the absolute most important part of a relationship, any relationship, and if that doesn’t exist, it’s meaningless. To that point, in a past relationship my ex was going to give me her email password and I specifically had to ask her not to, because I did trust her and I didn’t want the temptation to snoop and learn things that weren’t my place to know. And by that, I mean things that were between her and her friends. I felt the same way about her reading my email or texts; it wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, but in some cases friends share things with me and it’s not my place to decide who else should or shouldn’t see that.
Beyond that, snooping often leads to taking things out of context. Even in the best relationships, I think people deserve some kind of personal outlet. Sometimes its nice to get an outside perspective on some issues, because it’s from the outside, it’s something that other person knows well, or whatever.
So yeah, I’d never read a girlfriend’s email. If I was suspicious, there’s already a problem and I need to talk to whether or not a potential snoop would turn up anything. Or if there’s some other reason I’d want to see something, I’d just ask her.
My brother said to me a while ago “I need to tell you a secret. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t even tell [your other half].” At that point I was able to stop him and tell him, “I probably won’t be able to keep it from him; I’m lousy at telling secrets.” So he was able to decide that he didn’t mind him knowing.
It’s most definitely incumbent on me to tell others! And I am one who believes there is a world of difference between secrecy and privacy. I can’t keep a secret from my SO to save my life. I do value my privacy very highly though and won’t submerge my identity into his.
That’s what I was thinking - it’s not just your privacy, but that of the people emailing you.
On GMail I often chat with people and sometimes those chats are pretty personal; they’re saved just like emails. I would feel extremely uncomfortable if my partner had been reading a chat where my friend had been talking about, say, suicidal thoughts. That is not the kind of thing I would expect someone to share with their partner. Or if they did, I certainly wouldn’t expect them to replay the entire conversation.
And even if it were something less than that, like them gushing joyfully about their latest date, they might tell me a lot more details (not TMI, just little things) than they would my partner.
It would also be easy to take things out of context. If your partner mentions a hot girl at the coffee shop, it might somehow look more significant written down in an email than if he’d just mentioned it to a friend.
I’m glad it’s working for your marriage. I really am. Though I don’t really get this mentality.
Unless something someone tells me has the potential to affect my relationship with my husband (for example, a friend has a reason to believe my husband is cheating on me or something similarly catastrophic), if I’m given information I know is confidential, it is kept that way.
Example of something to keep private: A friend told me she was was pregnant. She’d been trying through IVF for about a year and was worried because she’d had several miscarriages. She asked that I keep it very confidential because we all have friends in common and she didn’t want to have to go through the heartbreak of informing her friends that she’d lost another baby. Of course I’m not going to tell my husband. No, he’s not going to tell anyone else, but that’s not the point. She asked me not to tell, I’m not going to tell.
I assume that anything I tell a person will be told to their long term spouse. I have a friend with a wife who’s a bit attention-seeking and if I want to avoid her spoiling something, I either don’t tell my friend, or make a point that he isn’t to tell his wife.
My husband and I are both open with our passwords and our gmail accounts. We’ve both lived in places with little outside communication, where we needed the other to log into our accounts and handle things. That being said, I would be a bit weirded out if he started going through my old emails or opening recent emails from friends and family and reading them. Mostly because I already tell him most everything.