Imagine you are equipped with a micro-camera, allowing everyone to see what you are doing and saying at any moment of the day. Sleeping, waking-up, getting ready, commuting, working, communicating with your friends, going to the gym, having a date, meeting with your parents, helping your friend who just broke up, having an argument with someone… You would be sharing everything with the World.
And now imagine that people can react live on social media to whatever action you are taking and any decision you are making. They can comment negatively or positively, being supportive or against you and you would need to monitor all the debates, justifying your actions or your thoughts.
Now think about what could happen. Would people continue to be friends with you, other than those live acquaintances supporters? Would anyone you meet want to appear on social media? What would your life become?
When you decide to do something solely and fully you need to be ready to accept the consequences it can involve. In a love relationship, sharing everything with your partner can give the impression of an honest, loyal and trustful relationship, when instead it can lead to great loss for the individuals.
What we’re going cover is:
1- Full Transparency or Free
Policing?
2- Freedom of your inner thoughts
3- Mini-camera effect
Full Transparency or Policing?
Being fully transparent in a love relationship is saying everything honestly and sharing openly your digital life with your partner: your phone or PC passwords, allowing the other free access to your text messages, emails, photos or social media accounts, etc. To sum up, having no secrets whatsoever with the other. But is this totally fine and healthy?
Looking at it objectively, having such level of access in the intimacy of the loved one can seem a way to have absolute trust in the other: having nothing to hide. It seems reassuring, ideal, doesn’t it!?
But in reality, it is not about trust. Allowing your partner to access everything is allowing him or her to ‘check on you’: this creates control over the other. All can be questioned and will need to be justified when a question will be asked. It removes freedom and can limit the other to live freely their relationships with friends and have their secret garden.
Being fully transparent is like accessing your inner thoughts.
It is being part of discussions you were not part of, missing context, interpreting wrongly what you read. Which is at the antipodes of the principles of loving and not being jealous. Not being jealous is giving trust, which is to not be wanting or needing to check on the other.
Imagine that your partner is secretly organizing a surprise for you, and that by having access to his phone, you read accidentally the messages about it. How would you feel?
Or what about if you caught that your partner sent a “heart emoticon” to a girlfriend? Well with no context this can be interpreted in multiple ways: being kind with his friend or sending “too much love”, when in reality, he simply really liked what she was telling him and reacted sending a heart.
As you can’t be someone else or be in another person’s shoes and mind, you also can’t own a person. When you have access to the other’s intimacy, it is like intruding their life, their thoughts. It is projecting how the other thinks, responds to other people, how they can be different with other persons than you. Automatically, it can lead to confusion, interpretation, self-storytelling about what is happening in a bribe of a discussion you read.
Having access will never be enough. It can be reassuring momentarily, but it will not stop you from imagining scenarios of what could this be all about. You simply cannot stay neutral when reading something the other wrote to someone else. You are instantly projecting that it could mean something more. If one partner in the couple is not trusting the other, whatever he or she will read from the others’ text messages will trigger questioning, blaming, and open the temptation to want to change the other’s behavior, to change the person.
Now what if I suspect my partner to have an affair? Having access to check his messages would be very helpful, wouldn’t it?
If you are in a fully transparent relationship with your partner and that he is having an affair, while you would feel safe and reassured to not find anything abnormal in his messages or emails, it is likely he will have created new channels to communicate with his mistress, hiding it from you.
Knowing you would have access to the ‘usual channels’, he may have chosen an alternative way to communicate, or simply deleting the messages straight away. So you may think you have it all under control, but in reality you don’t because all this would happen underground.
We had a fantastic communication, but my partner still has cheated on me. I need to regain his trust and therefore he shouldn’t have anything to hide.
If you decided to stay with your partner, that means you are ready to be with him despite what happened and have decided to trust in him and your love again, without needing to ‘check on him’. Starting to check on the other’s phone is then a sign of mistrust.
While it may be true your partner has ended this relationship, it is not excluded he will not have another one. No one is excluded from it. And having full transparency will not avoid it but create more opportunities to be creative about hiding an affair.
Deciding to have a fully transparent relationship, by allowing the other to see through your eyes, is not without consequences.
The idea of sharing everything in a couple can seem to be a proof of trust and love towards each other, a way to have a fusional relationship where there are no secrets.
But wearing a mini-camera all day every day is a hard task. You never know when the other will be checking you out, what interpretation he or she will make of your personal discussions with others, and what comments (live or delayed) you are exposing yourself to. Not to forget, you don’t know how you will be credible enough to justify yourself, or even defend yourself. And after all, do you need to?
So how do you live freely without that controlling mini-camera?
You need to be conscious of the consequences that the “camera effect” may have on you and your couple. What seemed love is turning out to be Control, of the other person. Full transparency may work for a while, but soon the social media impact will boomerang back at you. You will be hurt by what you read and assume of it. It will become an addiction or a routine to check on the other, loosing spontaneity, creating conflicts, endless explanations and still making you feel miserable, when supposedly, knowing everything of the other was going to make you feel both fantastic, trusting and loving!
Relationships are never that simple, but by installing an honest and open communication, by learning how to understand each other, you can free yourselves from control and worry of what happened in the background, because after all it is not your business, you have already all yours to manage. This is how you can build true trust instead with your partner.