President Obama is/was a Doper? 
I supposed I should reply since the question was directed at me, but really, Asimovian and Tom Tildrum beat me to it.
Since this stuff is all about trust issues, I find it very interesting, from a psychological perspective, that rather than leaving a partner they didn’t trust, they resorted to snooping first. It does indicate a lack of trust in him/herself.
Simply put, if you don’t trust your partner, either you are untrusting, or your partner is untrustworthy (or, possibly, both). Either way, your relationship is not in a healthy place. It doesn’t matter which one it is, the end result is the same.
Basically, if there is lack of trust in a relationship, the relationship isn’t healthy. At that point there are really two options: you work with your partner to rebuild trust, or you leave. You cannot build trust by violating it. If you get to the point where you are willing to snoop, you have in essence already made the decision that you won’t work to save the relationship – by snooping you sabotage any effort either of you might have made to build a trusting relationship. So why not just leave with your integrity intact?
Snooping is a symptom, not a cure. It’s an indication that something is deeply, foundationally wrong with your relationship, and it doesn’t really matter if the source of the problem is you or your partner. If you both choose to communicate openly, the relationship may still be salvageable. Once you get to the point where snooping happens, the trust and the relationship are already dead, and you can’t salvage it. The snooping was just the final nail in the coffin; the corpse is already cold.
This isn’t really any different than everything else I’ve said to this point. It’s about making choices. You are not in a “perfectly good” relationship if you do not trust your partner. You are, in fact, in a pretty shitty one. If you still want a good relationship with this partner you do not trust, you have to talk with them and sort out the trust issues – regardless whether those issues stem from your partner’s behavior or your own insecurities. If you do not choose to do this, your relationship will not get better, or more trusting, all by itself. Snooping will not help you in this process. You will still have to talk with your partner.
Asmovian, you and Kaio have explained this perfectly (and more eloquently than I have the ablility to.)
What Kaio said I agree with. I am not a snooper but one time I did. I already sensed something was wrong and I couldn’t get the truth out of him. What I did was listen to his answering machine when I was feeding his cats while he was on business. I am glad to this day that I did it but I wish he could have leveled with me from the start. I think he wanted me to listen to it because he felt I did not trust him. He was also grooming another woman to take my place and I found out way more then I ever needed to know.
Snooping is a symptom of the problem. Sometimes it can be the only way to get answers but it is better if you confront the person and they come clean. I apologized to him for snooping but he never apologized for cheating. It just put an end to a very bizarre relationship.
Some people I think are afraid to tell the truth but it always comes out in the end.
This isn’t necessarily the case. There are situations where I believe snooping is justified.
One of my old friends was having issues with his girlfriend. She was very secretive, evasive about her whereabouts, out till all hours, etc. She wasn’t behaving like she normally behaved, and despite his efforts, she wasn’t communicating about what was going on. So he snooped, and found out she was hiding a serious gambling addiction and had an issue with alcohol.
As it turned out, the gambling and drinking stemmed from an undiagnosed mental health issue. When she was confronted with concrete evidence of what she was up to, she agreed to seek treatment. She got help, their relationship recovered, and they are now happily married with kids. Had he ditched her because they weren’t communicating, things would have turned out very differently for both of them.
As a general rule, you shouldn’t violate your partner’s trust by snooping. But things sometimes aren’t so black and white.
This. I think everyone who wrote that a relationship where one partner was having trouble communicating was “dead” or not worth staying in should re-read this post.
I don’t think there’s any hard and fast rule about when snooping is justified. But what I do think is that if you discover through snooping that the person WAS hiding something that they should have been upfront about, they have no right to get all offended about you snooping. I HATE when people try to turn it around like that! (Note to self: Stop watching Cheaters. That shit is annoying.)
If, however, they discovered you were snooping, and they really weren’t doing anything wrong, then they can get as indignant as they want.
Some people snoop anytime they can, and that’s not okay. People who snoop only occasionally usually have good reason to be suspicious, so then it’s much more likely to be justified (although in a lot of cases, the person ALREADY knew the answer before they rifled through your stuff/called Cheaters/whatever, so then they should have just admitted the truth to themselves before breaking and entering or looking like an idiot on TV).
I see much oversimplifying, spouting of buzz-phrases, and assumption-making, on both sides but more on the “limiting” side (the anti-snooping side in this case). Most of them have already been addressed. Here’s my own perspective:
I think it’s silly to expect everyone to be operating under the same codes and assumptions. “Faith” doesn’t really register as a virtue for me, as it’s often tied up in willful ignorance (I’d rather just work with evidence, probability and critical thinking), and precedence doesn’t matter much to me either. Since I’ve got nothing to hide, I don’t really care what my SO looks at, even just for curiosity’s sake. I get curious about anything and everything, myself; I’ve got a really active brain. Not to say I like to snoop on people - I can be curious without satisfying it immediately if it could annoy someone or is not appropriate; that’s part of the nebulous “respect” for me. Instead I often ask what might seem like totally random questions about my SO’s past, priorities or philosophies, which he answers, which usually ends up with newly gained knowledge, however trivial, and us having a laugh. I’d Google him without a problem if I honestly thought I’d find anything interesting; I really don’t give a shit if someone here calls it “creepy” (also quite a nebulous term nowadays), it’s not a creepy situation to me because I don’t think you have to be obsessed for it to occur to you, and it takes 5 seconds.
My SO has pretty much made the whole of his life available to me, gradually, over the time we’ve been together. We’ve both established our boundaries by now, some by asking, a few by inadvertently testing, and we’re cool sharing with each other, which is important to me. Not all discoveries have been awesome, but I don’t regret any of them. If he started pulling our openness back, changing his priorities and getting weird if I inquired about it, I’d be stupid not to wonder if something was wrong, and also stupid to assume everything was irreversibly wrong.
On snooping, I personally feel that it’s not impossible to come upon a situation where the benefit of snooping outweighs the negatives without the relationship already being over. In such a case, I guess I’d likely do whatever I’d have to to get the swirling thoughts to quit (I brood constantly, am incapable of purposefully forgetting about things, and am prone to anxiety ‘echoes’ driving me nuts. I understand this about myself). I go with my own feelings on things, not what anyone else with a logically limited point of view of me says I should feel.
I don’t assume clues indicating a possible reason for snooping automatically indicate complete relationship breakdown already achieved and set in stone.
I don’t assume that for anyone to have a relationship at all, one can’t think one’s SO even CAPABLE of doing a bad thing, lest trust (often an onus placed on the truster, rather than the trustee, which I certainly don’t think applies as much as others here do) already be disintegrated. In fact, I think it’s dumb/kind of insulting to consider anyone incapable of anything (unless they physically are).
And I certainly don’t assume that the reality inside everyone else’s mind is the same as mine. I don’t agree with lots of people here about what defines a relationship as “working”, what a snooper must mean by snooping, whether all moral transgressions are completely equally detestable, the definitions of subjective concepts like “respect,” etc. Much of it comes down to scope I find too limited.
There’s one anti-snooper response I can get on board with - that other relationships aren’t their problem, but that they personally couldn’t tolerate it. That’s fine with me. I could start making assumptions that they must be close and secretive because they do terrible things, cheat, etc, that the great importance placed on privacy is rhetoric to condition other people to do their bidding and keep them safe from getting caught, or that they have weirdly rigid priorities because of mental immaturity - but I won’t.
'Cause it’d be silly. And believe me, I have my own things I’m perfectly rigid about when it comes to relationships.
And on that one thing, we are all in perfect accord.
Someone described a relationship where he felt driven to snoop to soothe his anxieties and stress and gnawing doubts as “otherwise perfectly good.” Which, to me, is like saying, “Well, sure this rowboat has a fist-sized hole in the bottom, but other than that it’s perfectly good.” True as it may be that there’s only the one flaw, that one flaw is such a whopper that it kind of overshadows everything else.
And the problem isn’t the misery of what you described as “the swirling thoughts,” it’s the fact that they can’t or won’t address that misery together as a team and put it to rest once and for all, instead of leaving it to fester and keep cropping up again and again and again. The swirling thoughts would be enough for me (life is too damn long to spend it miserable and stressed all the time), but if I were that unhappy and my partner had no inclination to help me deal with that (changing his behavior, getting me counseling or anxiety meds if I had psychological issues, something beyond telling me to get the hell over it)…well, at that point you don’t need to snoop to figure out that person doesn’t give a shit about you. I just plain don’t get what it is that “works” about a relationship with someone who doesn’t give a shit about you, whose behavior makes you anxious and stressed and full of gnawing worries about what they’re up to.
It’s not that either of you is necessarily a bad person, it’s that you don’t appear to be compatible people. If your partner is cheating, that’s a big obvious incompatibility. But if they’re not, and you just need more reassurance and transparency than they’re willing or able to give…that’s a pretty damn big incompatibility, one that will ultimately make you both miserable. But for some bizarre reason people feel weird about breaking up over that sort of incompatibility.
I was suspicious of my husband… so I logged into his email account while at work one morning and my suspicions were confirmed. He was having an e-affair with another woman (a hot, steamy one, and also one in which he bared his soul and spoke with daily). From the emails, it was clear they were setting up a meeting (they lived 3 hours apart), at least that’s what I gathered from the emails talking about birth control and how excited they were to jump in each others arms.
My blood drained from my body. I got up and left work, met my husband, just to have him tell me it was all just a “fantasy” and it meant nothing. I am still with him and still don’t have proof of whether or not they ever met. That was 18 months ago, and I still don’t trust him, and I’m still haunted by it. We are together because we have 2 small kids to raise.
Anyway, the least of his concerns was that I snooped. He’s been trying ever since that day to salvage our marriage, and has not ONCE brought up or cared that I got into his email account.
I’m a paranoid freak now. I snoop on him constantly. Such is the life of a scorned woman. I wish he’d do it again so I’d have a more solid excuse to leave him.
This is a mis-reading of what I wrote. CrazyCatLady sums it up nicely. As for “faith”, what I meant by that is: do you trust your partner or not? If not, will it really make you happy to stay in an untrusting relationship?
It’s okay to break up because you’re incompatible. You don’t need to wait until you’re so miserable that you start actually sneaking around and hurting each other.
You are miserable and paranoid. You don’t trust him and snoop constantly. You know for a fact that he was having an emotional affair and planned on having a physical affair and you need him to do it again to leave? 
Here’s the part I don’t get, because it seems to me that snooping doesn’t accomplish anything. For example, let’s say you’re suspicious, you snoop, you find something that confirms your suspicions, whatever they may be… great, you can leave the relationship, confront them, get them help… whatever is called for.
Now let’s say you’re suspicious, you snoop, and you don’t find anything… now what? It won’t alleviate any distrust, because maybe your SO is just better about hiding that he’s cheating or has other problems, or maybe you think it’s one thing but it’s really something else. Now you’re in a worse situation where you have a false negative.
Or imagine that you were completely wrong, and you snooped. Wow do you know if you snooped hard enough or not? Will not finding anything REALLY alleviate the distrust? Worse, you have now violated that person’s trust, and even if that person is innocent, the fact that you distrusted them in the first place should have been a sign that something was wrong in the relationship before you made things worse.
So, what does it accomplish? You either confirm your suspicions, and do something about it, or you don’t, but you still have a fundamental problem in the relationship because you didn’t trust them to begin with. So, it seems to me, that if you feel like you need to snoop, you should just skip that step and go right to the part where you do something about the problem.
And really, it’s not about the snooping itself, it’s all about the violation of trust. In fact, the only part that bothers me when I have been snooped on, other than the violation of trust, is that the majority of the time, the stuff I haven’t shared is not mine to share (ie, I won’t share what another friend told me in confidence).
Seriously, if you’re concerned about something, just talk about it. The only way snooping will make it any better is if it absolutely confirms your suspicions, which it probably won’t most of the time. You could just as easily have a conversation and, maybe they just didn’t think to share something that makes it all make more sense, or maybe there’s a small problem that you can work on without trashing the whole relationship, or maybe you’ll figure out that you can’t trust them and just bail.
I have never, and will never, snoop. Hell, even when it was expected that I would snoop and it was “okay”, I didn’t. Whenever I’d felt the desire to do so, I just raised my concerns, and if I didn’t feel like they were addressed or the problems that were revealed were something we could work on, I’d figure out what to do from there.
That all said, I think all bets are off in a relationship like parent/child. Yes, ideally, there should be trust there too (well, we all know how that goes), but it’s not an equal relationship, nor should it be, and the parent has greater responsibilities. Still, even in that case, snooping shouldn’t be done willy nilly because you will damage that trust. So, sure, if you think your kid is abusing drugs or whatever, it may be necessary, but I would discourage routine snooping in favor of more direct approaches.
The devil you know and all that… Plus there’s always the hope that it was a wake up call for him and he’s truly sorry and will actively not get into that kind of situation again. Sometimes you swallow pride for the sake of the kids. Not saying it’s wise, but it happens.
Yes, but the point is that RedBloom is continuing to snoop “constantly”, causing her to regard herself as “a paranoid freak now,” and wishing “he’d do it again so I’d have a more solid excuse to leave him.” Snooping didn’t solve her problem, and it is now exacerbating her anxiety, to the point that she’ll never be satisfied even if she never finds anything. She’ll never come back to the point of trusting him because she doesn’t want to, and frankly, they’d all probably be better off by separating, as at this point there isn’t anything he’ll be able to do to make up for this transgressions (even if he wants to).
Stranger
Also, I’ll reiterate: snooping is a symptom, not a solution. Once you get to the point where you’d seriously consider snooping a viable option, it’s a big red flag that tells you your relationship is so broken that not even you think it can be worked out honestly. So why, for god’s sake, won’t you listen to yourself?
If i meant to address what you wrote in particular, I would have quoted it. I DO ask my SO about things rather than snooping. I’m just also writing down what I feel about snooping and faith and trust in general.
And ugh, Redbloom, that sounds awful! I’m really sorry for you. I have to agree with CCL; I don’t think I could stay in that relationship. He might not be mad about your snooping, but it could be because you taught him not to save emails 
Kaio, I’m starting to feel like you haven’t read most of the posts in this thread. I’m just going to say this again one final time:
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Snooping does NOT mean that your relationship is already broken. It means you need information about what may be going on before you can make a decision and you haven’t been getting it the usual way. Why risk throwing something good (which may, at this point, be experiencing some problems) away because you think, without proof, that something, who knows what, is going on?
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Why wont you listen to yourself? Becase (a) not everyone feels like their relationship is already broken beyond repair when they decide they have to snoop to get answers (it may be or it may not be) and (b) not everyone is as confident as you may be that their sixth sense is always correct.
This is not hard to figure out.
kidneyfailure, chalk it up to an agreement to disagree. Kaio isn’t missing your point any more than you’re missing Kaio’s, and there is no problem with reading comprehension (nor is the accusation necessary). There are those in this thread that think being willing to take part in an activity the partner is unaware of and wouldn’t approve of means the relationship is already irreparably harmed. There are those who don’t think this is true and that doing so can save a relationship, or bring it to an appropriate and necessary end. I don’t think there’s really much hope that the two sides are going to come together on this.
If I disagree with what you feel is appropriate, it isn’t going to change how you conduct your relationships, and the reverse is just as true. The only real difficulty I see at this point is that those of us who are anti-snooping don’t want to end up in a relationship with someone who thinks that snooping is sometimes (or always) OK. But here, the reverse is NOT true, so far as I’ve been able to discern from this thread. Some of the people who believe that there are appropriate times to snoop might not mind being with someone who is anti-snooping.
Actually, that’s a question in and of itself. For those of you who think that snooping can be the right call, if you were having a random conversation with your partner, just talking about each others thoughts and such, and your partner asked you if you ever thought snooping was OK, would you say “yes”? If your partner responded by saying snooping was never OK, how would you react?
Ok, fair enough. I retract most of my last comment (save for my explaination of why people would snoop and it not always being symptomatic of a relationship of which there is no hope of salvaging. I still stand by that). Agree to disagree, indeed. Apologies to Kaio if my words went over the line, I just feel like I’ve been saying the same thing over and over again.
For those of you who think that snooping can be the right call, if you were having a random conversation with your partner, just talking about each others thoughts and such, and your partner asked you if you ever thought snooping was OK, would you say “yes”? If your partner responded by saying snooping was never OK, how would you react
I would say “sometimes,” or “yes, but only in certain cases like” such-and-such. If my partner said it was never ok I’d ask why she felt that way and I’d explain why I felt as I do…which is suppose is what we’ve all been doing here in both threads all along. And no doubt, as is the case here in this discussion, I doubt my SO and I would be able to come to a complete agreement on the matter.