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This is textbook emotional blackmail. If you take offense to his verification of highly sensitive and legally important information, I question if you actually want to be married.
That is not remotely emotional blackmail. It's perfectly normal to be upset when your spouse doesn't trust you and demands to check up on your behavior just in case you're up to something.
Not when it comes to legally binding documents. "Trust, but verify" is the way healthy relationships work. "Trust, but don't you dare verify" is the way abusive ones work.
No. A healthy relationship works on "trust". That's it. Not "trust, but verify" (which is in fact a lack of trust), not "trust, but don't you dare verify". Simply trust.
That would only make sense if you view trust as a binary. Typical usage treats it instead as a spectrum, with healthy relationships requiring less verification for the same level of risk.
Trust is a binary. While you may not extend trust to a person in all areas, for any given area, you either trust someone or you do not. There's no middle ground.
Credence is a probabilty measure, and even marginalizing it onto a single binary question gives you values on a continuum interval. Probability measures on a binary set are pairs (x,1-x), x∈[0,1], not binary values. Let's see if we can at least come to an agreement that there are more points along that interval than just the two endpoints:
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and I continue seeing no evidence to the contrary, I would believe her.
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and yet there was a suspicious death of someone she hated and circumstantial evidence pointing toward her, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me surveillance video, I would be pretty paranoid any time I saw a stranger who looked like her, but I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me video evidence and she had been weirdly missing during the time of death and her Google Maps timeline had an inexplicable gap, I would expect to believe her answers, but I would ask her a lot of questions.
If she'd said she could never kill anybody, but I had just walked in on her alone in a room standing over a dead body holding a bloody knife, I would initially believe her previous statement was most likely false, but in lieu of even more incriminating evidence I'd believe her "someone just dropped this knife and ran out the door, then I picked it up and wandered over here and found the body!" story.
If she was covered in blood too and I'd seen nobody leaving the scene as I approached, the story would have to be firmer for me to believe her, and the available evidence supporting it.
If also the room had a nannycam and its 4k recording showed her doing the stabbing, I would start looking to confirm my hopeful alternative theory that it was hacked and an AI-generated video uploaded, but until I found some evidence of that I'd believe she was probably guilty and I'd definitely be cooperating with the cops.
If I'd walked into the room just in time to witness her stabbing someone to death, I would end up asking a therapist about the possibility that I'd hallucinated the event, not just about trauma, but I'd consider the possibility that I'd gone mad too slim to say it was something I "believe".
If in the room was also a group full of people I trust who also witnessed the stabbing and who reaffirmed to me repeatedly afterwards that they all saw what I saw, I'd believe them, and it would take quite a bit later to convince me that I'd been having repeated distinct but coherent hallucinations.
So out of these 10 statements, considering my fraction of a point for statement 7 balances out the not-quite-a-full-point for 6 and almost-a-full-point for 5, my trust for her scores roughly a 6. In my defense and hers, I created a test that deserves a hell of a grading curve, and IMHO I'm pretty well calibrated at that "6". If I would believe her at even higher levels of this hypothetical I'd be too credulous; at lower levels I'd be too suspicious of her. It still seems fair to say I trust her, doesn't it?
I think some of our mutual friends and family would score a 5 here; IMHO my judgement of her character is better, but surely a 5 should be tolerable, even from family or someone very close? We shouldn't ghost or shun or disown anyone like that, right? It would still be fair to say someone trusts her, if they could watch a video that looks like her killing someone and say "we need to find the doppelganger". On this scale the cops' trust for her is only around a 1.9, and we could round that down to "don't trust her", but that's still a big step up from 0, right?
I don't think anyone should score a 10 here. They would be undeniably more trusting of her than I am, but would that make them better people than me, even to her? I wouldn't think a 7 was too gullible, but I also wouldn't think they were my moral superiors.
Trust is a prior credence. The more you have, the more contrary evidence can be survived by your posterior credence. There's no total order on probability distributions, so this is already a simplification, but even after oversimplifying: some people have a little trust, some have more, and some have a lot. Nobody who isn't utterly incapable of forgiveness (or of changing their mind) ever gets down to zero trust, and nobody who wouldn't stay in the Flavor-Aid line at a Jim Jones farewell party ever gets up to maximal trust.
I get that it's tempting to oversimplify. We don't even teach Bayes' theorem on discrete probability spaces in high school, much less how to compute or marginalize a posterior on an arbitrary probability space. So it's tempting to just reduce the options to either "I believe" or "I don't believe", and mostly that works well enough. The Pirahã mostly get by counting with "one", "two", and "many". Different strokes for different folks.
But please, don't try to turn oversimplification into relationship advice. There will be times when you or your partner are suspicious, about one thing or another. This will mean that you and they should ask and answer some questions, and ideally those answers will mean your trust for each other will increase (not from 0 to 1, but in that direction), because one of you was open enough to ask for reassurance and the other was understanding and open enough to provide it. This will not mean that your relationship is doomed.
Man, how did I forget to get "Your Soulmate will never make you feel untrusting or admit to needing help trusting you" on the list?!
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Are you married?
Let's say there was a test with 99% accuracy that would determine if you have had sex with someone else (maybe a genital swab of you and your wife that would identify bacteria from another women.) Your wife out of the blue demands that you take the test. The implication is that she suspects you have been cheating on her. You had a healthy relationship. You thought she trusted you. You never would even think of another woman.
Wouldn't this be off-putting to say the least? You thought you had one kind of relationship, one where it was you two, forever together, just you and her til death. And then suddenly it appears that she is in some other relationship, one in which you would cheat.
You're comparing this to your relationship, but when a guy wants this kind of test, probably it's not the kind of relationship that you likely have.
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Yes, I am married and similar emotional blackmail nearly changed that. No. Women do not deserve "trust" in this case since they are guaranteed such knowledge naturally. If you don't care enough about your husband to grant him the same privilege that biology grants you, you don't deserve him.
I do not have a natural guarantee that my husband is faithful to me. All I can guarantee is that I am faithful to him.
Also see my response here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3726/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/440420?context=8#context
Men and women stand equal in their lack of natural guarantees about faithfulness, but not in their guarantees about parentage: you can present him with a child and falsely claim it is his. He can't present you with a child and falsely claim it is yours.
If I came out of a coma or had some head trauma that caused me to lose some time, and my husband earnestly presented a child to me as my own, then I would believe him.
Remember the context here is putting your name on a birth certificate, something done immediately after giving birth. How exactly would a coma or head trauma lead you to incorrectly believe yourself to be the mother in such a case without a massive case of medical malpractice?
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You would have a hospital full of witnesses that you were indeed the mother to fall back on. That doesn't really go away even if you're completely assured it doesn't matter and that you would never check.
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I think most men would love that as an alternative to the wife seething in jealousy for months because she suspects he cheated but neither can prove their side of the argument. I don't think I'd mind at all, and would be delighted to establish the norm of wives periodically demanding such tests in exchange for the norm of husbands demanding paternity tests.
In short: trade offer accepted. Trust but verify, etc etc.
That isn't trust. Trust, by definition, means that you believe someone without verifying. "Trust, but verify" is an incoherent expression that would be more accurately stated as "I don't trust you so I verify the claims you make".
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But see! This is the problem here. It'd be a sign that your wife is currently seething in jealousy! Your relationship is forever changed whether the test happens or not.
Let's look at the different worlds:
World 1: Wife does not ask for 'fidelity' test.
Possibilities:
World 2: Wife asks for "fidelity test"
Possibilities:
The possibility where your marriage is happy is gone now. Your marriage is different and you can't go back.
Given the responses from the Male Motte, the most I can say is that male and female intuitions on this topic are just diametrically opposed.
You've never had a woman pull the "I'm mad because I had a dream where you cheated on me" thing? Many women seethe in jealousy all the time for very little reason (and perhaps often secretly enjoy it for its own sake - jouissance). "Sure babe, q-tip my dick and send it to Labcorp" would be a very satisfying response, even if it doesn't address the deep underlying psychological cause of why she's mad about dreaming that you cheated on her (which, 90% of the time: she's bored/stressed/unfulfilled and subconsciously decided starting drama would be a fun distraction).
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For the record, I don’t think these intuitions are very much opposed at all on a male/female level. Everyone wants their spouse to trust them. This site just selects for a very particular type of person.
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Not really. It could be a phase for her. A momentary lapse in unconditional trust is not a thing that must ruin relationships, and I don't believe in unconditional trust anyway. What, if your husband one day starts giving off every single sign that he's cheating on you, basically everything other than straight up you catching him in the act, you wouldn't be jealous? As the other poster said, in today's world the man's unconditional trust risks him much more than the woman's, besides.
The problem is your wife is suspecting you're unfaithful. That is a problem! Yes, once that problem is there, then you have no recourse but to solve it.
But in this thread it seems people are recommending men make a habit of asking their wives for paternity tests with every child even if there is no real reason to be suspicious. And I can tell you, it would not go over well and neither should it.
You're trying to eat your cake and have it too.
If there's no real reason to be suspicious and it's just "I'm supposed to do this anyway", then the wife would be wrong to take it as meaningful distrust, and shouldn't.
If there is real reason to be suspicious, then he definitely should be asking, and she would be in the wrong to take offense at the possibility which by hypothetical is realistic.
Not all wives are like you, by the way. I didn't ask for a paternity test and don't snoop on my wife's phone, but this is directly related to the fact that she wouldn't object if I did. Likewise, my wife wouldn't ask me to take the fidelity test, and this is directly related to the fact that I'd happily take it to ease her concerns.
Sure, I'd be a bit concerned that she felt a need to ask in the first place, but the next step for individuals worthy of the trust is "Of course I'll help you verify, and you absolutely have the right to expect verification".
I feel like people are responding to something I didn't say.
What I did say: I would be ok with paternity tests becoming common place and routine as just a normal part of a hospital birth. In such a world, there is no reason to take offense. But in this world, a specific husband asking his specific wife is obviously offensive to her.
What I am responding to is stuff like this comment, where people feel like every father should ask this of his wife at every birth before agreeing to be on the birth certificate, regardless of any evidence of cheating.
If you ask your wife for a paternity test... your relationship is going to have problems after. So don't do it unless you already have problems.
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I think it's more that people who were in an unhealthy relationship have a warped sense of what is acceptable. Like you, I would be very upset if my wife demanded a proof of fidelity out of nowhere (say if she wanted to randomly inspect my phone to make sure I didn't have any untoward text messages on it). That isn't something which should happen in a healthy marriage, and if it comes up at all, the marriage has problems.
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