Cate Blanchett, I think you’re fabulous and everything, but after this revelation we can never be friends. So, you know, sorry.
There are two friends I never email. I love them both and email is one of my favourite forms of communication with my girlfriends because with small kids around, you don’t always get to sit down and have a good yak on the phone. But these two, no way. Both of them, you see, share email addresses with their husbands.
And frankly, I think that’s absurd.
In fact, I’ll go further. I think it’s a flagrant breach of the female friendship code. When I text you or email you or communicate with you in any way, I assume that our communication is between us. Your husband may be a lovely bloke and all but if I wanted to say something to him, I would.
But I don’t. I want to say something to you. And I want to know that the only person reading what I write is you.
To me, sharing an email address is completely mystifying. I understand joint bank accounts. I understand sharing a car and a bathroom and even an ice-cream. But in this world we live in where so much of our communication has moved from verbal to written, I expect some privacy when I’m talking to my girlfriends. Is that so unreasonable?
So clearly, I can never be friends with Cate Blanchett – no matter how much she begs – because she shares an email address with her husband. According to newspaper reports this week:
Blanchett, 44, says she does trust her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, but checks his correspondence because ‘he hates emails’.
The mum of three, who until last year ran the Sydney Theatre Company with Upton, said: ‘We work together and it’s a way of synchronising our lives. I can see what he’s up to – it’s not that I don’t trust him.’
Really, Cate? Really? I believe that she trusts her husband but I still find the whole thing really weird. When you get married you do not become one person. There are certain things that your friends tell you – or want to tell you – that they do not wish for your other half to know.
Are joint email addresses a breach of trust, or just a convenient shortcut?
