Privacy and your Russian Wife
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Lynn Visson explains in her book, ‘Wedded Strangers’:
“Americans cannot understand when their wives or their family reads their mail or listens to their telephone conversations. Russians have absolutely no respect for privacy. The Russian language does not even have a word for privacy.”
I can’t tell you how disconcerting it was for me to find that my wife had found and read letters I had sent to other women. Not that there were any smoking guns or anything I was particularly ashamed of in those letters. It was more the idea that she had violated my privacy.
She has no idea what the word privacy means. The letters weren’t sitting around, waiting to be read. They were filed away. My wife felt the need to investigate her new home. Trust me, when you get married your home becomes her home and she feels entitled to go anywhere in it.
Not only was she not embarrassed about violating my privacy, she felt compelled to discuss the content of my letters with me. She would also open written correspondence addressed to me through the post office. She was reading my mail.
My feeling is that if you read correspondence that is not addressed to you, then you are responsible for dealing with any uncomfortable feelings that come up from reading it.
My feeling was that if you want to open my bills, then you can just go ahead and pay them.
There Is No Russian Word For ‘Privacy’:
Again, I didn’t have anything to hide. I was just shocked. I never had anyone open my mail before. This became a source of disagreement between us.
My wife claimed she was just trying to ‘understand American life.’ I accused her of being a budding KGB agent and ‘checking up on me.’
If wasn’t just my wife. Her Russian girlfriend would come over to our house, use my computer to get on the Internet, and would then read my personal correspondence.
Her girlfriend would feel free to discuss the content of my letters with my wife.
If you think this is an isolated case, I assure you it is not. If you think that this will never happen to you, you are wrong. If you think that you are going to be able to discuss this rationally with your wife, you are mistaken. The only thing you can do is take precautions beforehand.
I assure you that every Russian woman is a budding KGB agent.
I don’t even think it is just Russian women. I have many acquaintenances who are married to American women and many of them do the same thing.
One American woman divorced her husband because she ‘discovered’ that her husband was looking at porn on the home computer. Apparently she found a list of the websites he had visited. It wasn’t anything that the FBI was going to put him in jail for, but he ended up divorced just the same.
Personally, I’m not rationalizing his behavior. He probably isn’t the best human being in the world or the worst. However, there are lessons to be learned here.
It’s probably best to stay away from personal vices on the home front. Of course, if you can’t enjoy yourself in the privacy of your own home, where can you enjoy yourself?
