8 Women Reveal What They Learned Through Cybersnooping In A Relationship, And What They Did About It
1. WE MUTUALLY DECIDED TO DUMP HIS ASS
“My college boyfriend and I had been seeing each other for quite some time. He had come down to visit me for the weekend and had gone up to take a nap. As per usual, he had brought some laundry for me to do, so I ended up picking up his jeans too, which were on the floor. Suddenly, his jeans’ pocket started buzzing. Someone saved as ‘Boo 2’ was calling. I answered the phone, only to speak to his ‘girlfriend’ from back home! She was as surprised to hear my voice! Both of us talked about what was going on, and mutually decided to dump his ass!”
2. HE’S GAY
“I was really bored one day and started reading my boyfriend’s Facebook messages. There was a string of e-mails between him and some guy from…such a cliché…the gym. It was basically friendly, but a little flirtatious. It rubbed me the wrong way, but there was no concrete evidence of anything. Plus, I have a wild imagination, so I blamed it on that. I never said anything. We broke up for other reasons, but three years later, guess what? He’s gay.”
3. SNOOPING LED TO OUR DIVORCE
“I had just had our second child, and my husband was acting really strange. I had never snooped before; it never crossed my mind. My therapist actually suggested that I poke around and see what was up. So one day, I asked to borrow his iPhone. I was standing right there so he wouldn’t have one moment to erase anything. He actually tried to say, ‘One second, babe, let me just finish a few things.’ But I was like, ‘No, NOW.’ The second it entered my hands, he got a text from a woman, that read, ‘See you tomorrow’ with a kissing-lips symbol. I demanded he show me everything from her—immediately. And that’s when I found out he’d been cheating on me for a year. I read it all. Right there in front of him. Snooping led to our divorce.”
4. NOTHING WAS EVER PURE BETWEEN US AGAIN
“I started a Twitter account for my ex-boyfriend’s bar. He didn’t really know how to use Twitter, so I managed the account for him, updating it every few weeks. Eventually, I realized he had a bunch of direct messages. I was excited, assuming they were from fans of his cocktails! I opened the messages and…almost all of them were from women he’d met at the bar. One said something like, ‘Thank you for the after-hours tour ;)’ Another said, ‘Sorry I couldn’t meet you out…how about a rain check?’ I was sick to my stomach. These messages were the beginning of the end. Without mentioning anything to him, I started snooping obsessively on everything—his e-mails and texts—and I uncovered things that still haunt me today…. It took about one year for me to really walk away, but I just could not trust him again, and it was making me crazy to the point of psychotic. I found so much shady shit while snooping and snooping (something I became an FBI-like expert with), that nothing was ever pure between us again. Leaving him—which I recently did—was the hardest thing I’ll ever do. He wants me back and still denies ever cheating on me.”
5. THAT NIGHT OUR MARRIAGE WAS OVER
“I double-tapped on a message from that morning at 6:14 a.m. … Tammy, I miss you. Can you meet me? I know we shouldn’t have crossed that line but I am falling in love with you. We need to talk. … My lips parted, and a gasp too exaggerated to be mine came out of me. She was his classmate, a fellow doctor in training. I’d met her. She’d always been warm to me. I baked cookies for her Christmas party. I knew her well. [I printed dozens] of conversations…onto the floor, each page more agonizing to read than the one before. In messages starting with nicknames for each other and ending with love, he confided in her about our relationship….By the last page, I knew he wasn’t cheating on me; he was leaving me. Time crept, the sun tagged in the moon, but I sat paralyzed in pajamas. Until the front door slammed and his heavy boots bounded up the stairs.….I pitched the stack of pages at him. Screams, sobs, slammed doors. Then silence. That night our marriage was over. An affair I could forgive. A betrayal of his body, I could forget with time. But when he seemed so comfortable lying, I knew I’d question everything if I stayed.”
6. SAVED ME A LOT OF TIME, ENERGY, AND HEARTBREAK
“I admit it: I’ve stooped to snooping on boyfriends on many an occasion. Most recently, it was one guy’s personal journals, which he’d conveniently left in an unlocked trunk (how cute, he trusted me). We’d been dating long-distance for a while and I’d just flown in to see him, but still wasn’t sure how seriously he took our relationship….As I flipped through each notebook, scanning for my name—and, of course, any girl’s name—there was one that popped up again and again. Mia said this. Mia and I did that. Which would be fine if my name were Mia. But no….Soon after my diary-diving turned up an alarming lack of attachment to me, I extricated myself from the relationship. Peeping on his private musings, I reasoned, had no doubt saved me a lot of time, energy and eventual heartbreak…or had my surreptitious behavior blown any chance I may have had of making things work?”
7. I DIDN’T STICK AROUND
“I checked my boyfriend’s work phone one day and realized that he was having an affair with one of his colleagues. I was so angry at the time that I didn’t even think twice before screen-shotting their conversations and sending them across to his boss. I’m sure there were repercussions. I didn’t stick around to see them, though!”
8. HE KEPT HIS DATING PROFILE OPEN
“I just broke up with my boyfriend yesterday out of anger and frustration because he couldn’t quit logging into the dating website where we met each other a year and a half ago. We are both 27. Three months into the relationship, I found out he put up a new photo in his profile. I confronted him about it and he agreed to delete it. He later closed his profile, but my trust in him has been deteriorating since then. I keep checking back on that site to see if he has set up a new profile and I am sure he has used at least 2 different ones since the day he closed the old account. He didn’t put up any photos in those profiles but I was sure that they belong to him because the profiles just fit him perfectly.”
—June 
