He is in the shower and his phone is sitting by the bed just screaming, “Just take a peek, just one little peek.” Or better yet, you have an urge to challenge your inner detective to see if you can guess his Facebook password. BINGO! You are good, first try and it might as well be a joint account because you are going to check it every day, as if the messages are also addressed to you. I think 99% of us are guilty of snooping on our partner at least once. And once, “once” occurs, it is an addiction that is hard to break because every time is the “last” time you are going to look. So, exactly what is our purpose for snooping? I mean majority of us do not leave the untrustworthy partner once we find what we were hoping not to find.
I have had several girlfriends, including myself, find things that we were hoping we would not find. We wanted reassurance that we had no reason to feel insecure or not trust our partner. But “When you go looking for trouble, you will find it” and our inspector gadget days were not trouble-free. Then to make matters worse, we collect enough evidence to support the doubts of deception and we argue and fight but still stay. The relationship then turns into an exhausting one that lacks the necessary ingredient for health- TRUST. Or, if we find nothing many times we keep snooping until eventually “ta-da!”
We blame him for his betrayal. We want him to reassure us that he messed up by apologizing repeatedly and making it up to us. Even if he does, we never really trust him again because we continue to snoop in hopes that we won’t find anything. The cycle continues, until he gets tired of explaining himself and having to constantly reassure us about our insecurities or we get exhausted from the constant checking up behind him. Or even worse, our threats to leave are not taken seriously because we never have or he loses respect for us because we know what he is doing and allow him to do it because we stay. The only purpose snooping served was the creation of an insecure woman in a diminishing relationship with an untrustworthy, angry man.
Now I do not condone cheating but I have learned if I am not ready to leave him then I do need to condone looking for reasons to make me feel insecure in our relationship. I have made two categories, (1) Doggish, never going to change men and (2) Good men who make an immature mistake. NO one wants to be in love, lust, or like with a man in the first category but it is sometimes hard to avoid because we only recognize this man with time invested. Even yet, snooping is not necessary to catch this man. “All that is in dark will soon come to light” and when you constantly lie and cheat you are bound to be caught. Second, I have been in relationships with who I would consider, good men; however, they were young and immature. Didn’t mean they did not care about me, it meant they were human and made mistakes. Mistakes that had I not been snooping I probably would never had found out about because I was always protected and prioritized in the relationship. But because I snooped, stuff that was nothing became something and eventually we got to the point of no return and he decided “not to return.”
In conclusion, IF YOUR SNOOPING HAS NO PURPOSE, THAN YOU HAVE NO PURPOSE SNOOPING. Why do you want to put effort into making a relationship worse? Time reveals a person’s true character and if you just sit back, observe, prioritize, and consistently improve on you there is no other outcome but for you to win. Even if winning means you did not win him. Next time you find yourself wanting to dig through his stuff ask yourself if you are really ready to do something with the information you find. Are you honestly going to leave? Or what the real underlying reason behind your need to snoop is? Are you not happy? Are you insecure? Once your security in your relationship becomes dependent upon constantly being reassured by what he is not doing through snooping or questioning him, your relationship is missing the necessary foundations for survival and happiness- trust, security, respect, and loyalty. Though, you might be able to make the relationship work for a while eventually it becomes draining and you lose what you were really not ready to lose.
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