William Ifeanyi Moore: Hello Relationship! Goodbye Telephone Privacy

Is there a point where it is okay for the other half to possess all passwords with unrestricted access to our electronic life? At first glance, some may say a married couple share everything and that includes passwords…and yes, your phone too. After all if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. Another group would cite the right to individual privacy – arguing that our electronic life is more than just our actions, but also to a degree, our fantasies, which can be likened to a virtual mapping of our mind. If you may indulge me and contemplate the year 3000 where communication is now transmitted directly from one mind to the other. With this technology, technically speaking we would be able to share each other’s mind. Will you be okay sharing your mind with your spouse? After all, if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear, right?

The line between relationship and individual territory can be thin and blurry with different people willing to compromise varied degrees of their individuality for companionship. At what point is it okay for a partner to touch the other’s phone? I’m not even talking about touching it to have a sniff around, I mean just to even play Candy Crush. A week? A month? Six months? A year? After marriage? When they die? In heaven? Never? No one can really say.

But before we get lost in regulating privacy, we need to have a discussion of why we even need it in the first place. Thanks to bad parenting, media influence, societal and cultural values, and a million and two other factors I cannot be bothered to name, the modern day human mind has never been closer to the brink of insanity trying to create the illusion of our ideal image to be perceived as our actual image. This of course is often far from our realistic image. Just think of Bill Clinton getting that blow job and how the world was up in arms like he was the first man to get head in an office. If the same story leaked about Donald Trump, we wouldn’t have perceived it in the same light because the image Mr Trump parades has much room for such behavior. The same cannot be said about Bill Clinton.

In other words, privacy is just our right to the secret which we use to portray ourselves, as we would like the world to see us. Statistically speaking 47% of the population with body parts fetishes have a foot fetish, but people would sooner go to jail than tell you they like to suck toes. {Or maybe not! Check out the post on BellaNaija last week about all sorts of fetishes} As my friend put it, everyone will tell you they watch porn, but no one will let you go through their browsing history.

Perhaps our right to privacy is a social contract we have all agreed to because we aren’t easily capable of unconditional acceptance of each other. The fact that we would be worried about our other half constantly being able to read our minds is evidence that we do need to keep things from each other, even if only thoughts. Until we master the all accepting love often attributed to the God of our universe, the need for a degree of privacy will not go away.

I cannot tell you where the line starts or stops with privacy. To be honest, it is something I am still pondering myself. But it is important to know that as much as we shouldn’t let paranoia drive us to distrust, we also shouldn’t take advantage of our partner’s respect for our space to run wild.

P.S Do you have an online or phone privacy story to share? Or perhaps some words of wisdom regarding privacy? Please don’t be scared of the comment section 🙂

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