Wendyl Nissen: Sharing online accounts gives me a syncing feeling

Cate Blanchett. Photo / AP

News that actress Cate Blanchett shares an email account with her husband Andrew Upton has caused a furore in overseas newspapers.

Apparently Blanchett's need to keep an eye on her husband smacks of a lack of trust in the relationship. In reality, it appears that her husband is a technophobe who hates emails. This way Blanchett can read them for him and presumably deliver them out loud in any accent of his choosing.

When I first met my husband he immediately signed us up for a joint email account. Email had just come into being and he reasoned that one account was probably enough for two people. Generously he named it paulwen@xtra.co.nz - sharing our names almost equally.

I found the concept a little odd and quite frankly very boring. Having to wade through his emails to get to mine became a chore so tiresome that I eventually gave up. There are only so many emails you want to read about opera performances one must not miss and endless lists of the best books ever written.

"You have 10 emails," he would say to me. "You should really read them."

My husband hates unread email about as much as he hates people who don't reply to emails within a specific timeframe - usually an hour.

"That's okay," I would say. "If they really need me they'll email me at work."

Eventually I just got my own email address, my own Trade Me account and my own life. My husband knows the passwords and I know his passwords too.

But that didn't stop him persisting in wanting us to have shared diaries. At about the same time as email emerged so did the concept that you could keep your diary "online". This ability to connect your email and diary on your computer was too much to resist for my husband. He fell in love with it from day one and to date has lost his entire diary to the ether 13 times.

About five years ago I gave in to his demands and tried the online diary thing. The day he managed to sync them was a life-changing moment. He was finally able to remind me not to forget an appointment I had every day.

And then he lost it. Not just his diary but mine as well. A wrong button pushed at the wrong time meant that he had deleted it. I went out and bought a paper diary that day and have not deviated since. They have other useful things in them like metric conversion tables and school holiday dates. And at the end of each year I put them up on the bookshelf knowing that one day I could pick them out again and relive each busy year over again. I didn't see my husband's need to synchronise our lives not just in life but in diaries as a form of control or lack of trust. If I wanted to keep my appointments secret I could simply set up a private email account and be done with it.

Recently, however, my husband bought a new iPhone 5S. To most women an iPhone is just a phone you use to answer calls, send messages and occasionally check email.

To men, and particularly my husband, it is a wonder. A thing to be stroked and admired. A device on which you can download things called apps which change your life in so many ways.

I have woken every morning since he got his new iPhone to him listening to tutorials about his latest diary app, his latest note-taking app and his latest shopping list app.

As I roll over bleary-eyed he tears himself away from the iPhone screen and I see the manic enthusiasm burning bright in his own super perky eyes.

"You just have to get these. We'll get you a new iPhone - that way we can sync. It'll make life so much easier," he said. "If you're out shopping and I remember we need milk I can update your shopping list while you are there," he said.

"Why wouldn't you just send me a text?"

"Text is so last year."

We were back at the beginning.