The way you are quoting is making my eyes bleed but I’ll try to respond to the substance of your comments. I personally have never cheated on an SO because that would be well… wrong, but in my travel and interactions as a sales professional in this short life of 44 years I have met many men (note I did not say most) who felt cheating on their spouse was OK so long as they got away with it in a sort of “no harm, no foul” version of their own personal morality. This attitude was present in men ranging from multi-millionaires to hourly wage slaves, and oddly enough in men who otherwise, were exemplars of good character and intelligence. I don’t have stats at my fingertips but IIRC the current statistical incidence for married men cheating on their spouses at some point during the marriage is around 50% across time. Chris Rock’s comment that “men are as faithful as their options” rings true for many women because, for better or worse, that is what they have observed in their relationships.
It is my opinion that fundamental biological strategies play into this on some level with men wired to seek multiple matings and women wired to select the mate that will bring maximal genetic and personal resources to the table and stay seated there.
The “lazy and stupid” part comes from my intimate knowledge (as a man) about how badly “most” men suck at being stealthy, discreet cheaters and litter the landscape with evidence of their infidelity and go untouched because they have a willfully or congentially clueless spouse willing to tacitly, nobly or simple mindedly look the other way until you wind up with the classic “she was the last to know” scenario.
A women involved physically, financially and emotionally in a relationship who places her SO’s personal privacy rights above her “need to know” about the status of her relationship is either to admired for her ethics if the relationship succeeds or or pitied for her credulousness if it fails. Many otherwise ethical and intelligent women take a proactive stance toward following up on signals that their mate is not true by snooping, and each women has to make the moral decision where she stands on this continuum of “respecting privacy” at one end and “trust but verify” at the other.
First off, the quoting wasn’t intended to look the way it came out. I couldn’t get the thing to preview, and figured the coding was OK without seeing it first. So, the coding is messed up and I have no way of fixing it.
Second, I think it’s absolute horse shit to think it’s perfectly OK to rifle through someone’s private space because a woman needs to ‘check on the status of her relationship’.
Either you trust someone and don’t have to verify everything they tell you, or you don’t. And if it’s the case that you don’t and you’re reading their e-mail, swiping their cell phone to go through the numbers they have stored in it, checking in their wallet for receipts to see what they buy, then the relationship is already in a whole pile of trouble whether that person is cheating or not.
Since when did verification through dishonest means and snooping become preferable to open and honest communication by both parties? If I get a hint or a head’s up that someone’s lying to me, I talk to them about it. I don’t compound the deception involved in the relationship by digging through their stuff. Because chances are if they weren’t hiding anything to begin with, they will start hiding it once they realize I don’t trust them. And IMO, that’s a justifiable reaction to being spied and snooped upon.
So, yes, I think snooping is pretty unethical and absolutely would not do it for any reason. Because if a relationship’s not open enough to communicate when something like that comes up, then all the snooping in the world will not solve anything but only make things worse. It seems absurd to think that two people who can’t directly communicate and have to resort to deception and snooping will ever have a solid relationship.
The one who’s being snooped upon will feel their privacy was invaded and hide things even if they hadn’t already, and the one who does the snooping will get more suspicious and snoop even more.
Your point re the “downward spiral” aspect is acknowledged but, to a certain degree, this scenario (IMO) would require a man who was fairly sensitive about his “privacy rights” vis a vis his wife or SO’s peace of mind in a committed relationship, and for many (not all) men a snoopy wife or SO is simply part of the landscape of how male-female relationships play themselves out in the day to day real world. Many men, like myself, could really give a flying leap if our SO wants to make herself feel better by running through my wallet of reading my email. I might balk at being wired for a polygraph, but if snooping makes my SO feel more in control and secure about our relationship God bless her.
If that’s how you choose to live your life, fine. But don’t come around here and tell me that I’d be foolish for not snooping on my SO because ‘most men cheat’ and that if I just trust him, it’s my own damn fault if he does.
You obviously don’t have the same sense of privacy that some people do, and that’s your choice in how to live your life. Where you go wrong is turning your personal feelings about snooping, privacy and cheating into generalizations about how the gigantic groups ‘men’ and ‘women’ interact.
This is a general statement about relationships, not an ‘I don’t mind if my wife snoops on me’, and this is where I think you’ve gone wrong. You live your life the way you want, but don’t tell people they’re lying to themselves for living theirs as they want.
To each their own, but based on several decades of observing men and women interacting in real world relationships, I think my “generalization” about female snooping into their SO’s personal behavior being a standard operating procedure (and a fairly logical one in many cases) in the large majority of committed human relationships is an accurate one. Men may be sloppy at planning spotless assignations, but many are excellent face to face liars, and if a women is going to rely strictly on her SO’s say so that he is being true and not verify his claims… well that’s her decision.
I would be insulted by someone snooping on me when there’s no reason for them to do it. I wouldn’t want to be with a person that made themselves feel better by doing that as opposed to having a discussion with me about what they’re feeling. Think about the time and energy spent on snooping and the thinking that goes with it that could be used for more useful things. To each thier own.
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Christ you make it sound like she killed his mother or something. She looked in his email to scratch a curiosity she had after the relationship was over. What she did was wrong, but lets put things in perspective here, it’s not the biggest violation of personal space in the world.
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Looking through email.
Biting someone on the neck.
Slashing their tires.
If you think these are comparable, you need your head examined.
