[Aretha Franklin]
R-O-L-A-I-D-S!
Put your relationship to the test!
R-O-L-A-I-D-S!
Lack of trust can give you gas!
Sockittomesockittomesockittome …
[/Aretha Franklin]
My apologies, Indygrrl … I should not be joking like that in your thread.
Just some half-time entertainment. The real show begins when she gets her guy to sign in as a guest and contribute to the thread. You know, to share the Straight Dope Experience. In the spirit of fighting ignorance, and all that.
You say you’re the same, but you’re admittedly going through a tough time. It’s quite possible that your behavior has changed and you don’t realize it. He gets a little paranoid and thinks that you’ve become more withdrawn because of something he did or just because you don’t love him anymore and he lapses in judgement and reads your email.
I think you two need some serious counseling before you get married. You’re afraid to tell him things, he’s paranoid about your relationships with others and you’re planning on getting married without opening up lines of communication.
Get yourself to a marriage counselor or pastor BEFORE you get married. Please.
To be honest, the part that most concerns me is this:
To me, this is a bigger danger signal that anything else: not that you waited, but that certain areas of your relationship are an inevitable source of a non-productive fight–we can only assume it’s non-productive if the same fight keeps happening. It means that there are issues here that are not being resolved, they are just being hastily patched over. I suspect it is because really getting to the roots of issues like that runs the very real risk of destroying the relationship–you both have to climb off your pedestal and get down nose to nose and really, really listen to the other person, see them as they are, and sometimes what you find is that you arn’t compatible. But if you don’t figure it out now,you could be having the exact same arguement, line for line, for the next fifty years–that’s a long time to be miserable.
So you need to stop fighting and start talking. You need to stop worrying about what is wrong and what is right, and start worrying about what you want and what he wants. Relationships aren’t about justice. If he only wants to marry a woman who wears purple sequined underware everyday, it makes no sense to try and convince him whether or not it’s logical: it’s up to you to decide whether or not the scratching and the chaffing are worth it.
No one ever won a relationship arguement by pointing out how the other person ought to feel. You both feel the way you do. See if there is a way to construct a compromise within those feelings–if there isn’t keep looking. Somewhere there is someone whose wants and assets dovetail with your own.
It sounds as though he’s not really sorry.
Either way, it’s not YOU who can repair this. It’s what he does that matters. He is the one in the wrong. That you are eager to rush past his egregious behavior and put things back together for him is a big red flag for me. You need to let yourself think about this for awhile–let what he did sink in, do the grieving you need to do (for the relationship that you thought you had), and then decide how to proceed.
You should also be aware that this kind of possessive and distrustful behavior is a classic “first sign” of someone who becomes an abusive partner later on.
Please, for your own good, do not ignore the fact that that his behavior screams “trouble.”
Well, that’s a pretty hefty accusation idn’it? I caught my old lady many years ago by snooping. We worked everything out, now all is cool. I would ask you to explain what you mean by “classic ‘first sign’” as I am neither possessive nor abusive. In fact, not at all distrustful now that the shenanegans have stopped.
Not sayin’ y’ain’t right, but I am saying you’ve made one hell of a character judgement on a guy who, until today, was deemd one helluva cool dude by his SO.
Almost the exact same thing happened to me–except, I was the one snooping. I used to have this close friend online, and then she gradually stopped talking to me and started talking to my husband. It got to a point she wouldn’t return my emails, but she was chatting with him every night. Then she started calling him. Then she started dropping cryptic clues in her livejournal about a man she loves but she can’t have.
Being a naturally suspicious and paranoid person, I checked his email one night while he was on the phone with her in the next room and found something in the sent email box that to my paranoid, insecure mind looked pretty goddamned incriminating.
So I did what any rational person would do at 11:30 at night. I threw on whatever clothes I could find, told him I was making a run to Wendy’s, and fled, not entirely sure I would be coming back. I sat in the parking lot at Stater Bros and cried and cried for about 30 minutes.
Then I came home and confronted him.
We hashed it out through a lot of tears and yelling etc but it eventually got sorted. I never told him I was sorry for going through his email though I regretted it every single day. Not because of the way it disrupted our lives, but because it was wrong and I shouldn’t have done that. I was deeply sorry and ashamed of myself and though he never changed his password, I’ve never even glanced at his email again. But I couldn’t tell him how ashamed I was because I just couldn’t find the words.
Fortunately, he forgave me, and I was clued into her situation and her True Secret Love (not my husband), so I calmed down and everything worked out. But I am thankful that he loved me enough to forgive me.
It may seem like a very difficult thing to do–forgive a breech of trust like that. He was able to do it because he loves me and he understands why I did it. Sometimes, you have to be the one to step-up and take the high road and offer forgiveness so you can start working on your relationship. Just my 2 cents anyway, for all that’s worth.
A friend of mine snooped through her boyfriend’s (now ex-boyfriend) email. Not once, but twice. After the first violation, the boyfriend suspected what had happened but never got a confession out of her, and he changed his password. Well, my friend managed to figure out the new password and just as soon as her insecurities about his fidelity resurfaced, she broke into his account again.
Now it turns out that the boyfriend was being shady. Specifically, he was fraternizing with women he shouldn’t have been, as revealed through his emails. But when my friend told me all this, she expected me to focus all my anger on all his crimes. I couldn’t. I was stuck on the fact that she snooped through his email, not once but twice. His cheating did not mitigate her spying, contrary to her opinion. My advice to her was to confess to him, to at least own up to her mistakes before confronting him about his. Even though when she did it was a big blow-up of accusations, denials, and hurt feelings, I think it was good that she was honest. He needed to know who he was dealing with just as much as she did.
If someone’s trust in someone is so shaky that they would do such a thing, why would they want to stay in the relationship? Seems like once you’d reached the point of snooping, all you’re looking for is for definitive proof of your inner convictions. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
Indy, once your anger has died down a little, ask your fiance how he feels about you. Does he think you’re trustworthy? What feelings prompted him to snoop? Was it something you did or did a sudden case of paranoia seize him out of the blue? I’m not saying that any of these things are mitigating factors, but if you want to salvage the relationship, it would seem that you’d need to figure out the root cause.
I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss him. Give him a chance to redeem himself, I say.
[Hijack]
“you with the face” – does that come from that pinball game?
[/Hijack]
I want to start by stating that my husband and I have been married for fifteen years, and we lived together as if we were married for two years before getting married. Both of us had several serious relationships before we were married, including at least a couple of near-miss marriages on my part.
One of my near-marriage relationships was with a man who had absolutely no respect for my privacy. If he even heard that I had spent time with another guy along, he threw a fit. After the first time this happened, I pretty much decided that this was NOT Mr. Right. If he felt he had the right to dictate who I was allowed to talk to, and under what circumstances, I realized that he would NEVER trust that any relationship I had with another man could be completely platonic. I walked away from that relationship with a lot of guilt about hurting him, but with no regrets about my decision.
My now-husband and I decided very early in our relationship that we had to trust each other completely. This was probably harder on him than it was on me, since he grew up believing that divorce was a Bad Thing, while I come from a third generation of divorcees (yes, my great-grandparents were divorced!, as were my grandparents and my parents), and by the time DH and I met, one of my siblings had already gotten a divorce. In other words, I grew up with the understanding that “lifelong” relationships wouldn’t necessarily last forever, while he grew up believing that marriage was For Eternity.
We have had a few trials in our marriage because of this. DH went through a period when he felt like he had to contact all of his former girlfriends and make his peace with them. This was very hard for me to accept and understand, but he never hid the fact that he was in touch with these other women from me, and I felt that it would be more damaging to our relationship if I were to refuse to give my permission for this endeavor, than it would be for me to let him get on with it and trust that he really DID want to stay with me. For my part, I went through a few flirtatious on-line relationships, but it was mostly just for fun, and I didn’t really hide any of it from DH.
There was also one time when I found out that he had a not-quite-innocent relationship with a fellow student. However, I found out almost completely by accident–he gave me a floppy disk (remember those??) and asked me to print out a document from it. I found a file with a suspicious name on the floppy, and read the letter that he had written to this other person. I asked him about it later, and he admitted everything about how he felt about this other woman, but also said that he had never acted on the feelings, or sent the letter he had written. I could only trust that he was telling the truth, but I’ve never had any reason to distrust him, either. Everyone (me included) has the right to fantasize, and to have friendships with anyone they want, as long as contractual rules of marriage are not broken. Today, I make a pointed effort NOT to read his e-mail or any files that he saves to the computer.
I think that what I am trying to say here is that if your SO really trusts you, he should not have been reading your mail, and he certainly shouldn’t be making threats about how this will affect your relationship with him. On the other hand, it couldn’t hurt for you to let him know about your friendships with other people (male and female) so that he doesn’t have any reason to think you are hiding something from him.
It’s not an accusation, it’s a statement of a fact.
Many people who end up being abusive partners start out with violations of trust and privacy like this one.
That doesn’t mean every single person who does this sort of thing will turn out to be an abuser, but it’s something to be mindful of.
Inigo, I didn’t take my username from a pinball game. “Hey, you with the face!” has always struck me as amusing. Don’t quite know where I got it from, though.
Update:
I got home last night, he had gotten me a bunch of flowers, etc. We talked, he came over, we hashed through all this stuff and decided that we both really want to be together even though we might wait quite a while before actually getting married.
He says he does trust me, and that he just went kinda crazy for a minute. I told him I know that I shouldn’t have been as friendly to my email buddy. Both of us are going to try to shape up.
I hope I haven’t painted him to be some jealous psycho, because he really isn’t. That’s why this surprised me so much, it was completely out of character.
So, Merry Xmas after all.
So, if it’s a statement of fact, I’m sure you have a cite for it, could you post that cite, please?
Sweetheart, you haven’t solved this. You’ve just put another layer of spackle on the crack.
You both need to talk–and even more, really listen. Stop with the “shoulds”–whether or not he should have checked your email, whether or not you should have been talking to this guy. It’s not about “shaping up” and doing what’s right–nothing is objectivley right or wrong within a relationship, it’s just what each other can tolerate.
You said earlier that you knew that you guys were going to fight. Nothing’s changed here. You are going to keep having this fight. From what you’ve said, having emotianally-resonant, flirtatious relationships is important to you. The admiration of a wide range of people is important to you. From what you’ve said, the idea of you being involved in emotially close, flirtatious relationships drives him batty. It grates on him. The snooping was a symptom of this much bigger issue that you are both ignoring. Now listen carefully.
You have every right to need these sorts of relationships outside of your relationship with your SO.
He has every right to need his SO not to have these sorts of relationships.
Neither of you are “wrong”.
What you are is incompatible in this area. This isn’t the end of the world: many relationships have areas of deep incompatability. But until you look at it like this, as long as you are worried about who is “right” to feel like they do, who is feeling the way they “should”, you will never, ever get to the root of the problem. So you need to quit worrying about whether or not he has “reason” to worry about these relationships, and he needs to quit worrying about whether or not you “should” need emotional stilulation outside of himself. You both are who you are. Might as well try and argue each other out of a fear of snakes or a dislike of mushrooms.
If you are going to stay together, you are both going to need to work out some real compromises–not just vauge promises to “shape up”. You both need to figure out what you ar willing to give up for the sake of the relationship, and what you are not willing to give up, and find some way to match these things up. I don’t know what those compromises might be, but you will have to find something you can both live with. But whatever they are, BOTH of you need to look at them not as what is fair or right, but as what you are willing to do for the sake of the larger issue–the relationship.
On a similar note, I don’t get what the big deal is with couples reading each other’s mail.
My husband and I don’t hide our email from each other, and even send email from each other’s account rather than turn on our specific computer just to send a quick message. (Our friends are used to this quirk and have learned to reply to the person signed at the bottom instead of automatically hitting ‘reply’ on the email.) Anything on my computer is available to my husband, and vice versa.
He’s very welcome to read my email, and I his … in fact, since we have all our friends in common these days, we often do just that. The idea that this could be a construed as a privacy violation or ‘snooping’ seems somehow sort of distasteful; it introduces an element of mistrust and a lack of sharing that doesn’t belong in a committed relationship. At least, not in my understanding of the concept.
Very well said, Manda JO. That’s *exactly * what it comes down to.
Perhaps you can find a middle ground, Indygrrl? Maybe come to an agreement where you get to still flirt with guys, but he gets free reign to monitor the goings-on so he can see exactly what you’re up to? Perhaps it’s really the furtiveness that has him worried more so than the flirting.
In having your flirty emails but also keeping it all secretive, it seems to me that you’re setting up an unfair situation for your fiancee. He has no way of knowing how serious the situation is, except for what you tell him - which isn’t much, as you’ve said yourself.
You’re expecting him to display total trust in you on the one hand, and yet displaying zero trust in him by keeping him in the dark. Worse, you’re making it seem like you have something to hide, and then getting angry when he comes to that conclusion and takes steps to ascertain the truth of the situation.
You’ve always struck me as being a *very * logical thinker, so I’m sure you can see the inequality there. Good luck with sorting out a solution. 
Meant no offence. There was this amusement park-themed pinball game in late 80s that had a dunking pool feature–there was a guy who’d taunt you and try to get you to send the ball his way. “Hey YOU with the FACE” was one of the lines he’d shout. My pals & I still use that line as a greeting sometimes.
To all those who have commented re: the update, I appreciate your concern. Trust me, we are working on it and communicating, as well as laying down some ground rules. A lot of it is too personal to get into on here and much too long (and boring for y’all) to write out.
I think things will be ok, not overnight, but I am confident in the relationship and the love we have between us. Nothing is as dramatic as either of us made it. We know we need to work this thing out and that it will take time.
Thanks for all the advice and support.