You know what I mean.

While hanging out together, out of nothing or maybe out of suspicion, you grab his phone and you just start browsing through his chat messages and his photos. Even worse, you do this while he’s in the shower or when he’s asleep.

Nobody likes that.

Even if you do check his phones in front of him, I’ll bet he’s going to have this itch of dislike seeing you browsing.

That’s why when started to live together, me and Francy agreed not to check each other’s phones.

“That’s weird. Aren’t you guys married and you guys are not supposed to have secrets?”

Many years ago when I shot my first javanese wedding, there’s this ritual when the bride and the groom raised their glass to feed each other, and then they each drank from their own glass. The master of the ceremony said, “This represent that even they are married to each other, one must still respect each other’s privacy.” His words stuck with me until now.

Yes we shouldn’t have (bad) secrets when we’re married.

But secrets are very different than privacy. Everyone should still have their privacy.

When I see my wife, even thought we have a very open line of communication, I know that there’s 10-20% of her that I will never know, and I love that fact.

“Eh?” some of you might ask.

When there’s a part of your #lifepartner that you’ll never know and you can still hold her hands tightly and go to sleep smiling, that is true trust.

That’s a sign of a healthy relationship.

In Nicholas Cage’s movie ‘The Weather Man’ – he and his wife were given this exercise about trust: They each must write a secret about themselves that their partner do not know about on a piece of paper, fold it and then pass it to their partner and trust him/her partner to not open it. Of course the movie being a comedy, Cage cannot last five minutes not opening the damn thing (he opened it in a toilet). It ended with a huge (and funny) fight when his wife found out. (It’s a great movie, go get it.)

UPDATE: I found the video for the above scene

A couple months back I was late for a meeting and I couldn’t find my phone. Because I had to call the client when I arrived, I brought Francy’s phone instead. Later in the car the phone beeped and it was Francy from my phone: “Found it.”

Stuck in traffic with my wife’s phone that I never looked at in my hand, there was this twitch to browse her messages: things she said about me to her friends, things she might not like about my family, her dissapointments about our marriage.

But I didn’t.

And I know she didn’t either.