Privacy is a privilege that many of us cling to in a time when emails can be transmitted from one computer to another in nanoseconds. Privacy in the modern marriage is based more on trust than ever before. You can pick up your spouse’s cell phone and in short order have access to their email, their text messages and even the stored list of phone numbers.
Privacy in the age of the Internet is a complicated issue. For even the most sensitive of data, you just require a few key numbers to enter and most married couples know their spouse’s social security number, zip code and birth date. Yet beyond this, there is a great issue of how far is too far? When does spending time on the Internet actually become detrimental to the marriage? When do an Internet friendship and the privileges therein circumvent a spouse’s right to privacy?
Married People Need Friends
Married people need friends – whether your spouse is your best friend or not, it’s healthy to have other friendships outside the marriage. But a friendship that takes place only in cyberspace may have different rules applied to it than your friend across the street. After all, there is a feeling that you can confide in an Internet friend with some relative assurance that they aren’t going to run into your spouse on the street nor are they going to gossip about what you have to say, you hope.
Confidence and Trust
Privacy matters, more now than ever before and no spouse wants to feel excluded from a relationship that her husband or his wife may have. Internet relationships are exclusive in that sense. But how hard is it for any of us to log into our spouse’s email account? Their cell phone? Their blackberry? Truthfully, it’s not hard at all.
But we have to trust them and they have to trust us, because when it comes to privacy in your marriage, the buck stops with you and your spouse. It’s your responsibility and it’s your spouse’s responsibility to promote faith and trust in the marriage and to protect and promote privacy.
How do you and your spouse protect privacy and ensure trust and faith in your marriage?