No, I really didn’t.
Keeping secrets, lying, hiding your mistakes, that’s what this is all about. Make all the excuses you want, but if you lie to catch someone lying, or sneak to catch someone sneaking, or have secrets to prevent others from having secrets, or mislead to find out if others are misleading, you are the one who isn’t trustworthy. It’s really pretty simple.
I’m pretty comfortable with that.
There is a lot I agree with here (except the lockbox for kids, I snoop on my kids and will as long as I’m responsible for them). But I suppose I “snoop” on my husband all the time. I don’t think we have much of a private life from each other. I don’t go through his email (I don’t go through my own), but if his cell is ringing and he isn’t in the room I answer it. I’ll open his mail (most of it I handle), unless it looks personal (it seldom does), and will sometimes open packages (generally not - but he does a lot of online ordering for the both of us, so sometimes I expect something for him is actually something he ordered at my request.).
Snooping seems like an odd thing now, when I follow my own husband on Twitter (and its the way I know what he is doing when he is out of town) or Google him (its how I know what interviews he gave, articles he wrote - he doesn’t always mention it). I’m not expecting to find evidence of an affair, or little packs of white powder, or receipts for extravagant purchases (I’d know about the last one almost the minute he did - all the finances run through me - I had to teach him to do online bills recently ‘just in case’ - he didn’t even know the password for the bank account.) But I do “snoop” - listen in, glace over his shoulder. I want to know what is going on in his life and we don’t always take time to talk.
In the Dark Ages when my husband and I were still dealing with trust issues at a problematic level I came to the realization that familiarity had bred, if not contempt, certainly a carelessness about respect of my husband’s personal boundaries.
I needed some work in that area and one of the decisions I made was to never dig through his stuff. So far, so good.
I could see this being a temptation with children and perhaps necessary if the child is young and impetuous enough.
And I can also imagine that the more inexperienced in relationships a person is the more inclined they would be to search for evidence of their ideas about another person. This would doubly apply to those of us who had parents or other loved ones we couldn’t trust.
At some point snooping and reading into the meaning of what one finds would seem to be to be a self-defeating behavior. If the mistrust is there already then something is off-track. Could be me and my (unfounded?) suspicion or it could be that I haven’t chosen wisely.
The goal would be, I think, to develop early an open conversational style where confusion about another’s motives could be discussed.
Ideally, as time goes on a person can learn how to make trusting relationships with others and then, as Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Trusting another has more to do with my own insecurities and confidence in my ability to handle them than it does about what the other person does.
Snooping helped me feel better about leaving my husband, helped me know I was not making a mistake.
Two weeks before I was scheduled to move out, I saw him rapidly change to a different web-page when I came into the room. He then got up and “went to play golf”. I found he had been in the Yahoo personals. Picked “male seeking female”, put in an age range and our city. His photo came up first, with the title “R U Ready for some FUN?”
So I knew HE had no intention of trying to save our marriage.
I never told my kids or his family what I had found, but my sisters and my brother knew.
I do have an authority that tells me what is right or wrong - my conscience and my moral code. These things exist independent of religion, you know.
pudytat, that would have been an excellent opportunity to go all, “Pina Colada Song” on him, except instead of laughing about it, you could have served him divorce papers. 
LOL
When I read what he wrote, I mostly thought: LIAR !! He claimed my income (3X higher) as his; said family was important; and “close communication from both sides is necessary”.
And his interests? Since when have you been interested in those things!!
Why on earth would you stay with a person you felt wasn’t respecting you? You don’t need to snoop to find that answer – it’s right in front of your face.
Because it might just be a temporary emotional thing that could be fixed or worked through instead of cheating which, in my opinion, kills a relationship dead.
If communication is dead, the relationship is dead.
Some people have trouble communicating their feelings and become distant and cut off communication during periods of emotional stress. That can go away or be worked on together if it’s due to emotional issues and not betrayal. Cheating cannot, as I just said above.
Tell her clearly that you feel shut out of whatever is going on, and that as partners she needs to communicate with you. If necessary, be explicit that communication is required for you to stay in a relationship, and refusing to communicate is a deal-breaker. If she still refuses, then communication is dead, trust is dead, the relationship is dead. If she can’t or won’t communicate with her partner, she is not in a good place to be in a relationship anyway.
You’ve obviously never been in a relationship with some emotionally-needy, someone you loved who has said to you, “I’m in a weird place now. I can’t express how I feel right now.” Is the solution to that just to dump them flat out? “Sorry, babe, you wont talk to me when I want you to. Obviously our relationship is dead!” :rolleyes:
Being in “a weird place” might entail a temporary breakdown in communication, but that does NOT mean that the relationship is dead. As far as I’m concerned, everything can be worked on in a relationship except cheating and violence.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if she’s cheating or if she’s just in a weird place. If the relationship is not working, despite opportunities to make it work, it really doesn’t matter why.
This is very simple: a relationship with someone who is “in a weird place” can work most of the time when the reluctant partner feels better about communicating, so you shouldn’t end that just on a whim. A relationship with someone cheating on you can’t be worked out (at least not IMO) and should be ended. This is the 10th time or so that I’ve said this.
*If you trust her why do you need the whole picture right now?
Because my assumption that she may be cheating might be wrong. Haven’t I also already mentioned that, like, 3 or 4 times in this thread and the other one?
*You already have all the information you need. *
Yeah, except if she’s cheating on me or not which, coincidentally, is the one single most important piece of information I’d need to make my decision about exiting the relationship or not.
Do I trust her? Sure, but her odd behavior is making me start to wonder. I tried to talk to her about it and got nowhere. So why shouldn’t I just dump this girl I have suspicions about and wont get any answers out of? I dunno…maybe because it might just be all in my head and I, y’know, love her? Because it would be stupid to make big, life-changing on a hunch. Are you always so sure of yourself, your feelings, and your ability to make the right choice in a stressful situation? If so, hat’s off to you because I’m not. Last I heard it was called being human.
Anyway, this isn’t even about me.
Well, in this hypothetical, it is about you.
You’re with a girl whom you know has trouble communicating when under stress. You ask her what the problem is, she says she’s not ready to talk about it.
Now, if you trust her, you let it go until she is ready to talk. Because you trust her, you can take it on faith that she will talk when she is ready.
If you don’t trust her, you start creating mental scenarios where she might be cheating. Once you get to this point, it doesn’t even matter whether she actually is cheating or not; you don’t trust her, and that is what will sink the relationship. This lack of trust is about you, not her. Trust is a bundle of gut, intuition, observation, and your own insecurities – but mostly is about making a choice to trust or not. Now, if you still want to try and continue the relationship, you can communicate with her honestly and tell her that this is kind of freaking you out. If you have a salvageable relationship, you can work through it together (by communicating, and being patient with each other). If she still refuses to talk, and you still can’t trust her, then you are a bad match. You clearly need someone who communicates better than she does. She needs someone who can trust her enough to give her space. It is not a character flaw to have different needs.
It is a character flaw to violate someone’s trust by snooping.
jsgoddess, you mirror my thoughts on this, I support you 100%.
No, I’m not assuming it’s immoral–I’m saying that it’s something I am absolutely not willing to put up with. By hiding it from me, you’re withholding information I need to make an informed decision about staying with your completely unacceptable ass. The same way that someone who is hiding an affair is withholding information you need to make an informed decision about staying with their unacceptable ass.
We can go around and around in circles with our responses to each other which, at this point, are mostly just repeating what has been said earlier in both threads. I’m going to take this discussion in a different direction. Call it a win for you if you want, I don’t care.
In light of your quote above I’ll ask you this: What do you make of the fact that just about everyone who had admitted snooping in this discussion has turned out to be right? I admit (and have always admitted) that I’m a flawed human being, including character-wise, but I think it says that something that snoopers almost always discover something secret going on.
It makes sense that the kind of people who snoop find themselves in relationships with persons who also cannot be trusted. You missed the whole point, kidneyfailure.
I know at least one private detective here, a Kiwi, the brunt of whose cases are foreign men who have gone back home and want to check up on their Thai wives/girlfriends. It’s a little different situation from what most people on the Board are thinking of, but it’s snooping all the same. They usually want to know if the girls have gone back to working in the bars despite being paid not to; they invariably have. Then there are the checks to see if they have other husbands and boyfriends; often not good news there either.
But I hear the private-dick (pun intended) business is suffering along with the rest of the economy. With fewer visitors, due to the economic downturn and our domestic political strife, there are fewer men getting into this situation, and so fewer clients for the detectives. A couple have actually had to close up shop.
Snooping may be bad, but spooning on the other hand…
That’s a ridiculously stupid generalization that doesn’t take into consideration any of the contexts that human relationships often happen in, nor any of the external factors that may have an effect on said relationships.
You all can go ahead and act like you have perfect, unbesmirched morals and look down on those who have the “character flaw” of snooping. Point is, though, that snoopers usually turn out to be right and the reasons for non-snooping given throughout the disucssion will often either end up making you stupidly throw away a good relationship because you didn’t understand a SO’s trouble communicating or making you sit there like a dumbass thinking everything is ok because your cheating SO can hide it well and you’re naive enough to just take their word for it even though you have your doubts.
kidneyfailure, I really don’t think most people are suggesting that their relationships are perfect while yours aren’t. What I’m trying to say that I feel like you keep missing (or are perfectly OK with, which is your right) is that snooping is a violation of a partner’s trust in you. If you personally are in relationships where snooping would NOT be considered a violation of trust, then this doesn’t apply to you.
I’ve never been in a relationship where rummaging through a partner’s email or text messages without her knowledge and consent wouldn’t be considered a violation of trust. You’ve mentioned a number of times that you and others who don’t have a problem doing this have almost always had your suspicions verified when you’ve employed this tactic. My response to that, which I think I mentioned early on in the other thread, is that I don’t think the end justifies the means. You keep suggesting that we of the non-snooping variety would throw away a perfectly good relationship because we avoided looking for solid evidence of our suspicions. I say again to you that it WASN’T a perfectly good relationship if my suspicions devolved to the point where I needed to violate my partner’s trust in order to get answers. And I just don’t buy that that’s going to happen as a result of some sort of temporary communication issues.
There are other steps in between “I am suspicious of a problem” and “This relationship is over.” Trying to talk it out with the partner being the first, of course. Consulting with family and friends and going to counseling are others (assuming the relationship is serious enough to merit such an effort without walking away from it). I agree with you that “sit[ting] there like a dumbass thinking everything is ok” isn’t a valid option. I just don’t think violating my partner’s trust is a valid option, either. Lots of other things I might try to resolve my fears or suspicions, but if I can’t work within the boundaries of the relationship to do it, then I’m not going to.
It’s an indication of lack of confidence in oneself. If one’s judgment is that the relationship has gone bad, at some point one ought to learn to trust that judgment.
Do you consider reading old posts on the SDMB to be snooping?
I once suspected someone of being less than honest in every post. I read a few of his old posts and learned that he was born on two continents.
And, strangely enough, our relationship ended on good terms.
Maybe he was born in Istanbul? Huh, ever thought of that?! 