I am something of a paradox when it comes to trust. In general, I tend to believe if not quite that all men are lying, cheating bastards, that they all at least have the capacity to be deceitful, and are quite likely to stray should the opportunity present itself.
I can’t help this and I apologise to all the men who have never ever lied to their partners.
However, whilst my world view may be a little depressing, I still have a bizarre naivety when it comes to individual relationships, and will basically believe anything anyone tells me. You’d think you’d have to be an idiot to accept any one of the following lies, yet in previous relationships, accept them I have, without, at the time, doubting them at all:
“Oh this black eye? Oh yes, I got that dancing over-enthusiastically.”
“Yes it is weird that it took me two and a half hours to get home from work even though it’s only ten minutes away. Yeah, the traffic was a bit bad.”
“My wife?? No, I’m definitely not having sex with her.”
You get my drift.
The thing is that I really want to trust people, and just can’t help but see the best in someone and give them the benefit of the doubt. I also believe that a relationship has to be built on trust. Whatever my opinion of men in general might be, I have to believe that my partner is different, otherwise what’s the point?
I was reading today about a recent study that revealed that a quarter of men have a secret email account that their partner doesn’t know about. A quarter of men! My first reaction was shock, but then I was confused. Why do people need a separate account? Aren’t emails private and personal anyway? I would never read a partner’s email, just like I would never open their post, so why the need to be secretive?
It’s not that I wouldn’t want a partner to read my emails, but it just wouldn’t occur to me to share. It would be a bit like being on the phone and someone picking up the other line to listen in. Just weird.
The survey also discovered that:
- One in ten men deliberately set up a separate account because they wanted to hide an affair or money problems
- One in twenty men have a second secret mobile phone
- Nearly 20% of men store pictures of an ex-partner
- 77% of men delete text messages in case their partners look at them
- A quarter of men had emails they said they wouldn’t want their partner to see and a third of these said they had flirty emails stored secretly.
It kind of cancels out the joy of Santa and his stuck beard doesn’t it?
What I want to know though, all this man-hating aside, is do you read your partner’s emails and/or text messages? If so, do they know about it, or do you do it in secret? Am I the unusual one in not openly sharing emails or at least sneaking a peek behind my partner’s back?
Or, if you’re a man, do you do any of the things in this survey? I’d love to know…