This silly situation got me thinking — it’s about a mother rifling through her 17-year-old daughter’s handbag, and finding the morning-after pill — all about the whole topic of privacy and personal space.
Am I the only man in the world who, if his wife asks hims to “get it out of my purse”, just hands her the bag to get whatever it is out for herself?
If ever there’s an article which exemplifies the concept of “private space”, it’s a woman’s handbag. When I’m asked why I didn’t just look in the bag, I usually make a joke of it, saying things like: “There’s things with teeth in there!”
It’s not that I’m afraid of what I’ll find in there — I doubt very much whether there’s anything in there that could upset me — but it really is a concern for my wife’s privacy.
Everyone needs a private space. It’s not necessarily a space that might harbor something that the owner doesn’t want anyone else to see, although it very well might be; but there’s a concept involved which I think should be respected at all costs.
There’s another old saying that covers this: if you invade someone’s privacy, don’t be shocked or angered by what you may find.
My old friend Patterson once told me how his wife was always asking him, “What are you thinking about?” and he, quite understandably, took umbrage at her impertinence. “For fuck’s sake,” he expostulated to me, “are there no parts of my life that she doesn’t want to examine or look over?” Anyway, the next time she asked him that intrusive question, his response was epic: “I was just thinking about how I’d spend the insurance money if you died.” And when she got upset, his response was equally cutting: “Do you just want me to lie to you?” End of discussion, and much later, end of marriage (his second or third, I don’t remember).
I remember once reading about a guy who got pissed off when he discovered his wife going over his workshop, opening cupboards and looking into his toolbox. And when he confronted her — “What the fuck did you think you’d find?” — his wife couldn’t understand his anger, because she had no clue about how men want their privacy kept sacrosanct.
Here’s the thing. We men are evil fuckers. In every man, there’s a quiet, secret space which harbors impure thoughts, impure activities and pathological impulses. Sometimes, to be sure, those secret spaces include nefarious activities: infidelity, criminality, shameful behavior, whatever. Whether it’s a phone, a hiding place or a secret credit card / bank account, it doesn’t matter; they exist.
The point is that even if that secret space doesn’t involve something nefarious, it’s still private and we will guard it zealously. Think of it as a personal manifestation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment: the right to privacy being the ability of an individual to keep their personal information and private life out of the public domain. And in this case, “public” doesn’t just mean “the public”; it means everyone else in the fucking world, including wives, children and parents.
So yeah, our concerned mother in the above article was being snoopy — even though I think she had every right to be concerned about her not-yet-adult daughter — but it’s quite understandable that her daughter would feel utterly betrayed by the invasion of her privacy, nevertheless.
what rational guy would put his hands into a woman’s purse? That’s a black hole of a jumbled mess. If my hands weren’t attached then they’d become lost too. Nope, the missus is getting the entire bag.
As far as thoughts go, I have used that as a conversation starter on a drive someplace. I don’t mean to be intrusive.
My wife has 1 purse, made out of blue jean material, and is at least 20 years old, and she has “repaired” it many times over the years.
If she drops it onto the table it does like what my nutsak would do if I dropped it on the table. It would splay outward flatly in all directions with a couple bumps scattered about.
She once told me to get her glasses out of her purse and after groping around in the multitude of “things” I just handed it to her. This was about 15 years ago and I haven’t touched it since and she knows better than to ask.
Privacy? I have nothing to hide but I live by the rule, “Do unto others as you want them to do unto you.”, and I expect, no, I demand, that everyone else do the same.
I just hand her purse to her when she asks me to get something out of it. Not that I have anything problematic in it but I’d be pissed if she rooted around in my wallet. I do the laundry ( she does most of the cooking and cleaning), one day she did a couple of loads and started moving everything around. I told her unless she was taking over the job to leave it alone. We’ve had a couple of sharp conversations about boundaries. I was 64 when we married and had been single since I was 50, I usually have a very good idea about what I want to do and how I want to do it.
I was taught that a man never goes into a woman’s purse except for maybe am emergency. It isn’t gentlemanly.
Now a husband or wife has the right to go through their spouses stuff, but that does not imply that they should in other than extreme cases. People should have their private spaces respected.
Vonz-90, I beg to disagree that a spouse has a right to go through the others stuff. Except where specifically allowed, I think one should stay out of others peoples possessions. Caveat- any money I find in the washing machine is mine. I will admit that I may have some issues in that area, across the board I’m a “leave my stuff alone” sort of person.
I think you miss the caveat. It is a balance of two factors – openness between spouses and respecting the other’s privacy.
To give an example, it would annoy me if my wife dug through my desk to be nosey, but if she did the same thing to find the spare keys to her car because something happened to her keys it wouldn’t bother me a bit.
I’ve never met a man who is comfortable going into a woman’s purse and, frankly, hope I never do. Personally, I have a couple of reasons I just hand my wife her purse when she asks for something from it: 1) I tend to get snappish when frustrated and the few times I’ve ventured into those Black Pits of Despair I’ve always ended up getting frustrated at being unable to located the requested item. 2) Even when I avoid getting snappish I can’t resist making snarky comments about the chaos, which causes snappish comments from her. 3) On the few times when I actually found the target item I’ve always been chastised for “messing things up”, although how you can mess up a garbage dump is beyond me. Nowadays I just hand her the damn thing and say, “This is a job best left to a professional.”
My wife would never ask me to get anything out of her bag. I can’t find the ketchup in the fridge on the top shelf, why would she expect me to find anything in her bag?
Forget it, guys. A woman’s purse contains a chaos field, and it’s activated by the Y chromosome. You’ll never find what she wants you to find. Don’t do it.
I came up with an answer to a woman asking me, “What are you thinking?” I give her the blankest look I can and say, “I can’t say I was really thinking anything. I was just…in the moment.” If she doesn’t like that, too bad.
“I was wondering how one would get blood off a ceiling fan without getting fingerprints on the speed control on the wall.”
Author T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) wrote a short story called ‘Bluebeard’s Wife’ about a woman who was married for years to a man who told her to stay out of one room of the house…so she did. She had sisters who were always putting their noses in everything, and it drove her nuts, so when her husband asked for some privacy, she gave it to him. And didn’t find out about the previous, murdered (nosy) wives until he died.