[ul]
[li]Is she Hot?[/li][li]Does she have money?[/li][li]Does she put out?[/li][/ul]
If the answer to any one of these is “yes”, you should probably stay with her.
If the answer to any two of these is “yes”, you should definitely stay with her.
If the answer to all three of these is “yes”, what does she want with a mug like you? Send her over here. 
Hey, I’m a female, and I don’t do this. Hell, I’m married and I still scrupulously respect my husband’s privacy. He’s shy about his doodling and designing, so I never leaf through his sketchbooks. I don’t open his mail or pick through his file drawers.
I’ve had people over to housesit before. I have one friend whom I would never ask, because I just know she’d dig through everything. But most friends, I trust. Then again I also don’t have that many interesting secrets.
This doesn’t address the OP but I wanted to add a data point to how “typical” certain behavior is for the vaginally-blessed
I, personally, would never go snooping through someone’s things without their express permission (and then it’s not really snooping, is it?) But if someone did it to me I wouldn’t freak out about it, either. This is partly because I really don’t have any secrets and I’m damn near impossible to embarrass, so there’s nothing anyone’s going to find while snooping around that would be a problem. “Yup - that drawer’s full of porn and sex toys. I guess you shouldn’t have looked in there if that bothers you, eh?” Heh…
If I found evidence that someone had been snooping I’d definitely ask them about it, though. I’d do it in as non-confrontational a way as possible. Knowing me, I’d grin and ask, “So, find anything interesting?” and make it very clear I wasn’t pissed off or anything. If I got a dishonest response, though, I’d break things off immediately. I can take someone snooping around in my stuff, but I absolutely can’t tolerate being lied to or deceived. But hey, that’s just me…
I admit I’m a snooper. I realize it’s a bad thing but I’m not sorry for 95% of the times I’ve done it. I usually do it when I’m in a long-term relationship and I suspect that something is being kept from me. And every time I found something that was kept secret that I had a right to know about. The times I’ve done it with someone I hadn’t been going out with the person for long I do feel bad about.
My theory as to why this behavior is more typical of females: Men are typically less forthcoming about personal information. The more secretive a guy is the more likely I am to snoop.
Well I do think you should talk to her about it and set clear boundries for her and personally my boundry for her would be out of my life.
Just becasue she had a bad boyfriend in the past does not give her any right to be a bad girlfriend now. After all if her past boyfriends were OK would she still be with them?
Of course I’m so paranoid I’m wondering if the bottle thing was a set up so she could be alone in your place.
Here here! From the male side though. My wife never looks at my lyrics or music I’m working on because she knows how freakish I am about someone reading/listening to one of my works in progress. In fact, there’s a song she’s been dying to hear now for a long time now [haven’t recorded the lyrics yet. She could just walk right in and read my sheets or que it up, but doesn’t. Wow what a woman! 
As to the OP: You HAVE to have mutual respect of privacy. If your girl has any character at all, she is going to know how, or will need to learn fast, how to handle honest confrontation. Why tiptoe around the issue when a simple, loving, honest conversation with her will answer SO many other questions at the same time?!
a) How she handles confrontation
b) How honest she is
c) How much the relationship means to her currently
d) How much YOU mean to her currently
e) How much ‘buy-in’ she has into your relationship
You’ve got an excellent analysis opportunity here! Use it.
Dump, dump, dump.
Pronto.
I’m female, and like many other women on this board, I don’t snoop. I consider that a pretty major breach of trust.
The chick you’ve been dating has made it clear that you can’t trust her. Do you really want to get involved with someone like this?
I talked with mrs eNiGma about this on the drive home last night. I told her your predicament, and what I had said in response. Her reaction was that her first instinct would have been to dump her, pending no ‘come clean and repent after confronted’
It was their fourth date. It doesn’t matter why. Apparently you do not understand the ethical principle involved.
Add me to the list of women who does not snoop. Not even medicine cabinets nor my daughters’ diarys when they had them.
Well, i told my girlfriend about this thread, and her advice is “Dump, dump, dump.”
She is also, for the record, extremely pissed off at anyone who thinks that this sort of snooping behaviour is somehow “natural” for women.
I don’t know what’s gotten into me here, perhaps I’ve watched too much TV, but I wouldn’t be so hasty to dump her. This reminds me of an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie meets a guy who she’s still in the “feeling-out” process with. She’s got this theory that single people past a certain age are freaks and since she’s past that age so she questions herself. The guy is also past that age (I think it was 30 or 35 or something) so she questions him as well. Eventually she gets downright paranoid. He seems too good to be true so she starts snooping through his stuff for any sign of abnormality. In the middle of the search, her new beau walks in. Busted. She just stands there with this goofy look on her face not knowing what to say. She knew what she did was wrong and did it anyway. Afterwards she felt horrible for it. I know SATC is just a TV show, but real people make real mistakes too. Do you feel this is a sign of her not being trustworthy person in general, or is this more of a stupid blunder? If you feel she can’t be trusted, dump away. If not, give her another shot. Either way, you need to talk to her about it and find out why on Earth she thought it would be a good idea to look through your stuff. And ftr, I don’t condone snooping. I’ve never done it, ever, but I don’t think that in 100% of snooping cases, the person is necessarily completely untrustworthy. Good luck with that, Indy.
Did I just write Indy? Heh, I meant Inky, of course.
I just saw Nine 1/2 Weeks on HBO again last night. You could handle it like Mickey Rourke:
Call her while she is in your apartment and casually ask if she has been snooping. Tell her you know she wouldn’t, because she is a good girl and only naughty girls would do such things. When she breathlessly confesses to snooping, tell her “Shame on you” and hang up.
When you come home, demand that she hike up her skirt and put her hands on the wall. Tell her that naughty girls deserve to be spanked.
Apparently, what happens next is that she acts furious, but then allows you to make angry hot-monkey-love to her! Complete with panty-ripping! I mean, how cool would that be?!
…What?
It does matter why because maybe she wasn’t really snooping! Maybe she touch a few things but it doesn’t mean that she read them.
If you let someone you are dating use your bedroom and your house then you have to assume they will touch something! Maybe she dropped an earring that rolled under the bed and bumped into the nightstand causing it to unlatch. Maybe she was looking for something. Maybe she made a mistake. You don’t know if you don’t ask her.
So, did you dump her?