“One of the problems with social networks is that it is getting harder and harder for others to complain about you behind your back.”
“There is something pure and romantic about the idea of sharing everything, and having no secrets from one another. But it’s romantic the same way that Romeo and Juliet is romantic, in a tragic, horrible, everyone-is-miserable-and-dies-at-the-end kind of way. Email is one of the few private spaces left in this hyper-sharing age. . . . Trust is an important bedrock for any relationship, but this isn’t trust. This is mutually assured trust destruction. Intimacy comes from sharing select private information with people, not giving them keys to your privacy kingdom. When you share your password with someone, you open yourself up to the obvious downsides suggested by the Times. But you’re not just violating your own privacy, you’re violating that of everyone you correspond with. People send an email to your account assuming you’re the only one who will see it. . . . There are a few lines we can draw to keep ourselves from truly living in a Little Brother society. An important one is keeping passwords to your email and social networking accounts to yourself.” — Kashmir Hill, “Why Sharing Passwords With Your Girlfriend/Boyfriend Is A Spectacularly Bad Idea,” Forbes (January 18, 2012)
One of the most fascinating episodes of House—”The Social Contract” (S05E17)—tells the story of Nick Greenwald, a well-respected editor at a prestigious press who suddenly loses the ability to tell lies. He simply cannot help but tell people precisely what’s on his mind. And the results are disastrous: he insults his boss and tells a bestselling author that his new book sucks, seriously endangering his career; he tells his wife that her interests are silly and she’s not that smart, seriously endangering his marriage; and he tells his little girl that she doesn’t have an auditory-processing disorder, she’s just below average (like her mother), seriously endangering his relationship with his daughter.
Now, if Nick hated his life, this might be for the best. But he doesn’t! All to the contrary: he loves his job, he loves his wife, and he loves his daughter. It’s clear that he’s horrified—genuinely horrified—by the stupid shit coming out of his mouth, and he’s deeply saddened by how much his words are hurting his loved ones. But he just can’t stop. Dr. Gregory House wryly promises to fix Nick Greenwald and return him to his “happy hypocrite” existence in no time. And House delivers. But we can see, from the awkward manner in which Nick and his wife make up after the surgery, that things are never going to be the same between them.
I couldn’t help but think of this House episode as my friends and I discussed whether or not couples should have each other passwords. Some say—like the NSA—if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, whilst others said that people (even married people) have a right to privacy. As for me, well, I couldn’t help but remember something that the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb said in The Bed of Procrustes:
“One of the problems with social networks is that it is getting harder and harder for others to complain about you behind your back.”
We need to be able to complain about the people we love in peace. This is probably a human right and definitely a human necessity. Back in the day, of course, all of this bitching and complaining would have taken place in person. It could be overheard only by someone within earshot (hence the term “eavesdropping”). When things went to the telephone things got a little trickier. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s overheard a telephone conversation you wish you hadn’t overheard. Even so, if you could find a safe place to chat (and your phones weren’t being tapped), a telephone bitch-fest was usually every bit as safe as a the old-fashioned face-to-face variety.
But alas, all of this has changed with the advent of texting and email. There’s a record of everything now. Everything. And that presents new problems—big problems—for couples who wish to stay together for more than six months. Maybe it’s time to return to the simple wisdom of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923):
“let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.”
Maybe in this brave new world of ours, letting “there be spaces in your togetherness” means granting your partner a little online privacy. Regardless, as one friend put it a moment ago,
“unless you expect your partner to ask you to transcribe private conversations with others, you should have an expectation of privacy in other communications.”
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Photo credit: Getty Images
In my family we never read each others letters.
My partner = wife, always has and always will