Should Married Couples Check Each Other’s Phones?

Should Married Couples Check Each Other’s Phones?

Life requires a sense of boundaries. In the Western world, privacy and personal boundaries may be concepts that are more widely valued, but in our traditional culture this element has often been missing. Parents, spouses, children, and even siblings may live together as family, yet each of them is still an independent individual, and that part of them deserves respect. Many conflicts in life are closely tied to the absence of boundaries. Our social structure is no longer built on rigid hierarchies such as ruler over subject, father over son, or husband over wife, yet our moral and ethical thinking has not been updated and improved in time. Parents’ interference in their children’s lives has become a major source of family tragedies, while the lack of basic trust and respect between spouses has produced another share of them. In this sense, looking through someone’s phone may be the fuse that ignites many tragedies, but it is also the inevitable result of missing and disordered family ethics.

Returning to the question of whether spouses should check each other’s phones: to some extent, the information and level of privacy contained in a phone should be regarded as comparable to a diary, as part of the individual that deserves respect. Although a phone may contain far more information, in terms of value and the extent to which it reveals a person’s inner world, it may fall far short of a diary. Part of the reason is that nowadays most people no longer examine their inner selves very deeply. While the information age has brought convenience, it has also made information more superficial. The urge to pry into privacy is an innate human instinct. It is precisely this instinct that opens one Pandora’s box after another, with endless consequences. Hidden complaints, ambiguity, jealousy, and even well-intentioned lies may seem like signs of a looming storm, but more often they are only a flash of lightning that will soon disappear. Yet once these things are exposed, all possibility of handling them constructively is removed. And if a situation is already certain, undeniable, and beyond repair, then whether or not one looks into the other’s privacy may no longer be the most important issue.

There may be only one set of facts, but inner feelings, mutual understanding, care, and the warmth of enduring companionship make it possible for problems to be resolved in more than one way. Sometimes what we should consider more carefully is the future direction of life and what we hope for from it. How to weigh those things against the truth is a balance each person may measure differently in their own heart. But no matter how we weigh and consider things, barging into someone’s privacy to obtain information—while stripping away care, understanding, discussion, and even the chance for the other person to explain themselves—cannot be called wise, nor can it lead to the best possible outcome.

Therefore, unless required by law, basic respect for privacy is something the whole society should continue to learn and practice. Only in this way can society truly move in a more civilized direction.