I’m Bi and Would Never Share Locations With a Man

But with a girlfriend? Absolutely.

Years ago, I was having dinner with a friend when she wondered why her husband wasn’t home from work at his usual time. To find out where he was, she checked his location, which he’d shared with her. 

“What?” I said, completely weirded out. “You track him at all times? And he tracks you?” I was so disgusted, I couldn’t even find words polite enough to say out loud. Enmeshed! Codependent! Gross! Why didn’t they trust each other? 

I thought of sharing phone locations as a creepy, Black Mirror-coded, necessary evil to be used only as a safety measure — with your kids, for example, when they have their first smartphones and first subway commutes to school. You spy on your child out of love and anxiety and in case they lose their phone the way they shed their beautifully constructed water bottles. (Seriously, where do they go? Is there a raft of titanium thermoses bobbing along the Gowanus?)

I was married to a man at the time, and I couldn’t imagine sharing locations with him. It wasn’t that I thought either of us was doing anything bad. It was just that the idea of him knowing where I was at all times made me feel like screaming. What if he asked how much I’d spent at a cafe I went to in the middle of the day? What if he knew the kids and I were at the playground all day with the stay-at-home dad he thought I had a crush on, and had gone back to his apartment (for lemonade, I swear)? I didn’t feel like explaining every movement of my day. I also didn’t necessarily want to know where he was when, for example, he went out for drinks after work. It just didn’t feel like my business.

At the time I thought, How healthy, the way we give each other space! 

It was a new concept to me — trusting your partner as much as you trust your best friend.

Then we got divorced.