Most of the women I’ve lived with have kept journals. Ok. All of them.
My first girlfriend kept her journal secret, and that bothered me a lot. It probably should have. She was having an affair with another guy (I knew about this, but she described it as a summer fling, even though she received phone calls from him on a monthly basis). In any case, had I been able to read her journal, I might have been prepared for what happened when she broke up with me. Then again, maybe the misery would have just stretched out longer.
My next girlfriend didn’t care at all. We’d had a long and intimate correspondence before we got together. Intimate in the sense that we spoke about everything in our lives, not in the sexual sense. I would read her journal occasionally, but not that often. She was keeping it for her daughter, whom she had given up at birth. If her daughter ever sought her out, she wanted to be able to show her what her life had been like at that time. Perhaps to explain her choice.
When her daughter eventually did find her, she let me know. I think she emailed me. Or maybe we met—she was living in my wife’s hometown. She told me that she planned to give the journal to her daughter. I’m not sure why she told me—maybe because I played a role in it. I asked her if she planned to keep a copy, and she acted as if she’d never thought of that. I told her I thought she should keep one.
A few months later, a large package arrived in the mail from her. I opened it to discover she had made a copy for me, too. I was a little befuddled, because I hadn’t asked for a copy, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted it. To accept it (and I had no choice about that now) would mean I would have to be respectful of her gesture. That meant I would have to read it. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to.
I started reading it, and then I started skipping forward to the parts about me. I didn’t figure in it nearly as much as I thought I would. Anyway, I read about half of it, and it was just too tedious to go any further. I failed my duty, I guess. I haven’t talked to her since then, either—I don’t know why. Maybe she hasn’t gotten in touch with me, and she was always the initiator of these contacts.
My third girlfriend also kept a journal. Like the first, she kept it secret. I don’t know for sure why she did that, but maybe she was of the opinion that is was just for her, and not meant to be read by anybody. It was the place where she worked out her thoughts, as if it were her therapist. It bothered me a bit, because I felt that I was being shut out of something, and I wanted to know her better. Perhaps I should have insisted, because we started growing apart, and eventually we broke up when I met my wife. There was a bit of overlap in those two relationships, but she must have been ready to deem it over, because she moved out within a week. Maybe if she’d shared the journals, we would have done things in the proper order.
My wife keeps a journal, too, and I am allowed to read it if I want. She keeps it, she says, for our children, as a kind of reminder of what we did. I don’t think she puts any deep inner feelings into it. She’s of the belief that that stuff is for us, and a way of sharing. Not for a journal to be kept private. Of course, since I’m free to read it whenever I want, I don’t read it.
So, in thinking about this, I guess I come down on the side of sharing with your husband. Privacy, even if it is innocent privacy, may raise suspicion of secret thoughts. It could be as simple as the idea that you prefer paper to talking to him. However, if he is free to read it, he might not crack it open once.
I do have one other small comment. You phrase this in terms of whether he should be allowed to read it. It made me feel like you were thinking he might have a right to read it. It’s your journal and your life, and rights or allowing have nothing to do with it. It’s what you want that counts. If you want to share, then share. If you don’t want to, don’t.
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