<p>We have separate email accounts. We never even thought about sharing one. They are accessible to each of us (ie. for convenience sake, we don’t log out) but I have never looked at his and I doubt he’s looked at mine. (We’d be bored!) Trust is not an issue between us.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is any deep rooted problem for most people who share same email with spouse. I think it’s mostly out of laziness to set up a separate one. I do shop online quite a bit. By sharing one email address would definitely pose a problem for me when purchasing presents for husband.</p>
<p>I think a more interesting question would be - do you share your financial acct(s) with your spouse? We share everything together, but I know of a lot of couples that do not. My parents have always shared their accts and I just took it for granted that every family did. But maybe it is for a different thread.</p>
<p>In this day of IP providers granting numerous address per account, why share? I feel very uncomfortable writing to my friends who share with their spouses. My conversations are meant for them. I think it shows a lack of independence and more importantly, a lack of trust. Why does anyone need the supervision of their spouse. If the spouse wants to flirt via email they can do it with their work one or gmail. Frankly this issue never occurred to me. I have a friend who is of a different political persuasion then her spouse and I think any political stuff I send her never gets through since she shares with her spouse. The privacy belongs to the person writing to you as well as yourself.</p>
<p>H and I have never shared an email address. It never occurred to me to share. He gets a lot of stuff from his college class alumni ( a military academy) that I have no interest in and I have always gotten a lot from groups I volunteer with so it wouldn’t be practical anyway.</p>
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<p>Like you, oldfort H & I have always shared financial accounts. I was suprised when I first found out that a lot of couples don’t. But we were married young (23) before we had any assets or money so maybe that’s why.</p>
<p>FallGirl - we also got married young, 22. We didn’t have any assets. Well, we had $950 from wedding gifts.
Not even enough to get a divorce, maybe that’s why we stayed together too.</p>
<p>We don’t share an e-mail account, but we do stay logged in and can easily access each other’s mail, which we’ve done on occasion when the other person asks (i.e. H is away and is expecting a reply to something on his home e-mail - he’s too un-tech savvy to figure out how to access it from the road!) It’s never been an issue. </p>
<p>As for financial accounts, we have some jointly and some in our own names. Everything is completely transparent to the other person, and we always discuss if we’re going to shift money around, which account we’re taking certain expenses out of, etc. We consider it all joint money, even when some of it is only in one of our names.</p>
<p>We have been together since we were 18…shared everything since…including student loans, lol. I guess this is why I would be bothered if all of a sudden something, anything, was off limits to me. A passworded email acct would be in this category.It would be an odd change in behavior.</p>
<p>We have a lot of computers in our house and most of them have saved passwords for email accounts so in general, if someone wanted to read email received by other members, they could. So in general, email is common even though everyone has multiple email accounts.</p>
<p>I am friends with two couples who don’t have separate email accounts for husband and wife. I’m friends with both the husband and wife in both cases, but find it really awkward that they share an email. There are times when I really just want to talk to the woman (like when we were both going through menopause and I didn’t want to discuss my issues in an email that her husband could read). When I get an email from them, I never know which one it comes from and who to respond to (do I always have to address an email to them as “Dear Mary and Bob”?). </p>
<p>Luckily one of the women has a Facebook profile, so I often send her PMs through Facebook instead of using email. The other couple, both have work emails that I can use if desperate.</p>
<p>How on earth can you plan a surprise party for one member of the couple if you share an email?</p>
<p>My husband and I did share when we first got e-mail, but it was confusing, because one of us would open the account, see an unfamiliar address, and not know whether it was junk mail or an e-mail intended for the other person. Also, it bothered my sister, who wanted to be able to send e-mails about personal matters that she might not necessarily want to share with my husband. Although he was careful not to open e-mails from her, it just didn’t feel right. </p>
<p>I now have three e-mail accounts of my own – my work e-mail, my “real” personal e-mail, and a second personal e-mail that I give out to companies that intend to send me junk mail. That old family account still exists, and I believe my husband uses it for banking purposes and maybe a few other things. But he primarily uses his work e-mail, even for personal use, which strikes me as really weird because he can’t access it from home. But to each his own.</p>
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<p>To me, that’s the big argument against shared e-mail. It’s not just about your own comfort level with sharing – it’s about the sender of the e-mail and an implied intention that the e-mail they are sending is being seen by the person they are sending it to and no one else. I have a Mac and since I like their mail program, my mail is not password protected. I never set up my computer so I could log in and out as a user because that seems like a hassle. My e-mail is generally open. My family feels free to pick up my laptop if they want to do a quick google, but they don’t go into my e-mail, even if it’s open. I don’t think that bank accounts are a good analogy because it doesn’t involve privacy issues for a third party – it’s about how the two people in the marriage are running their finances. I think a better analogy is the phone. I don’t expect my husband (or my friends’ husbands) to pick up the phone and listen in on conversations without asking to do so.</p>
<p>My husband and I have always had separate email accounts. I can’t imagine sharing. If someone wants to email with both of us, it’s easy enough to CC. </p>
<p>I do know some couples who share an account, but they tend to be a generation older (my in-laws, my mother and stepfather).</p>
<p>It never occurred to me, or to my husband, to share an account. Actually, when I first set up an email account, I chose to set up a private one through yahoo because I travelled a lot and it was easily accessible. This was back in the days when accessing other accounts was a pain in the butt. We’ve changed service providers a few times through the years but have never once used those email addresses. My H has a work account which has security on it that no one else can access, other than his assistant, but he also has a yahoo account for the rare occasion that he needs it.</p>
<p>I have a yahoo and a hotmail account. I agree with lunitari that it is usually the older generation that only has one. My parents and inlaws are examples of that. I have a friend who used to share one with her husband until a group of us convinced her to get her own gmail account. None of us felt comfortable communicating with her via email knowing that he would be reading everything first.</p>
<p>We have separate accounts but my DH and I work together. I function as kind of his executive assistant among other things. I can and do access his email when he is away, etc. I can’t understand the earlier post about it bothering someone when they know that an assistant is checking email. We do it so that the sender is ensured of getting their information delivered promptly. DH does not have and does not want email on his phone. I have it on mine. He often tells people when they email him to copy me so that I can let him know if something important comes in on a weekend or when one/both of us is travelling.</p>
<p>I have four separate email addresses; DH has three. But I sometimes look at his email and sometimes he looks at mine, usually when we’re trying to find something we know is there. I’ve been known to call home and get whomever was handy to search my email for an address. </p>
<p>One of my sisters shares her email with her husband. I think it’s weird but she prefers it that way. They’ve been married for 54 years so I guess it works for them.</p>
<p>I had a conversation over the weekend with a fraud investigator who says that adultery is usually just the tip of the iceberg; people who mess around often mess around in a lot of other ways. They hide money, don’t pay taxes, etc. (His comments on the recent spate of adulterous elected officials were fascinating.) Anyway, his remarks on people who hide things from their spouses made me awfully pleased I know my husband’s passwords.</p>
<p>I shared an email addy with my late husband. He just wasn’t all that interested in emailing people.</p>
<p>My now husband and I both have our own email addresses. We have each other’s passwords, but I know I have only gone into his when he has asked me to.</p>
<p>We had 4 accounts at last check:
- a household e-mail where goes all our common stuff (bills, notices from school, FF e-mails, etc., go) and our civic life stuff (softball league, music school, town commissions, historical society, etc.);
- wife’s work e-mail
- my work e-mail
- my own personal account; that’s where I get NSFW e-mails from my brother, hate mail from message boards, etc)</p>
<p>Most of my personal stuff goes to the household account. If someone wants to send me something for my eyes only they get to use use my personal account.</p>
<p>I have no idea if wifely even has a personal e-mail account. . . . not curious.</p>
<p>Kei</p>
<p>Ex-H shared a personal account with me (actually, he just had people send his stuff to mine, he never had his own outside of work - - but he never asked for the password or looked at it, he had me reply for him if necessary). When he mentioned one day that he had set up his own personal account, I got suspicious. Fortunately he is not too innovative with passwords, and I guessed right on the first try. And… you may have guessed by now… there were e-mails out there from the girlfriend who was NOT his wife about them moving in together. Just another “behavior change” red flag for anyone suspicious that their spouse is cheating, I guess.</p>
<p>H and I have always shared an email address. Neither insists on it, we just do. We read each others’ mail, no problem. If we had it in more than one place, we’d forget to check it, start missing things. Same bank account, too, and no secrets.
I have, a few times, received emails from male friends (just friends) I knew before I met H. I made a point of showing H the emails so he wouldn’t wonder who they are. These friends were just saying “Hi,” so nothing to hide. Our kids can read our email–it’s all rated G! I have a yahoo account for a couple groups I belong to that send tons of messages. Kids and H know my password, but they would have no interest in anything on there. </p>
<p>What I hate is when someone stands over my shoulder and reads a message I’m writing. Or if H read all my outgoing messages and questioned me about them–that would annoy and creep me out.</p>
<p>For some reason I find this thread fascinating (more than I think I should). </p>
<p>Let’s see. We share bank accounts, bills and all investments. We also work just a floor apart, read each others work a lot, commute together, and spend most of our spare time together. </p>
<p>But we tend to have different expertise with investments (so each of us leads on different decisions of that kind). We also tend to divide up household responsibilities. We have separate iphones, separate facebook pages, and different email accounts (for work and personal). We also have separate laptops (that go from work to home) with separate bookmarks. We don’t tend to open each other’s mail that comes to the house, only because once open, it might not get noticed (if it looks time urgent or truly interesting we might, but otherwise don’t bother). </p>
<p>Nothing hidden, it’s just not of interest. I’m sure we know each others’ passwords.</p>
<p>Maybe because when we met we already had our own work and personal emails so just never changed (and both of us were sending the equivalent of email via the internet on our respective campuses back in the 80s). </p>
<p>As an aside, I agree with prior posters that it’s the <em>change in behavior</em> (of lots of kinds) one has to see as a red flag.</p>