Spying on your DP

[Andy1964]

I've read a few threads here and I'm very surprised that many posters advocate spying on their DP is they have suspicions.
It does not sit very well with me and seems moraly wrong. I was bought up to respect peoples privacy.

I can understand why the advice is given, but if you have suspicions then my advice would be to confront your DP. Either be sensible and talk reasonably about it or have a ding dong row about it, at the end of the day, one way or another your communicating.
Apart from anything else, if you feel the need to go through phones, E-Mails, Internet history, pockets, briefcases, bags etc there is something wrong with your relationship and this needs to be sorted out rather than snooping around.

Sure, us guys will at times lie to try and conceal the truth but we are thick creatures at the end of the day and WILL slip up but like I said, if you are at the snooping stage then the relationship needs sorting more than anything else.

Anyone else feel like this?

Discuss ;)

I'm begining to see why people do.

I was bought up not to go through a womans purse. To this day if my DW asks me for her purse I will hand her the handbag, not open the handbag to look for her purse.
If she tells me to take some money out to go to the chip shop, I hand her the purse even though she has told me to take the money.

Old fashioned I guess but then neither of us have anything to hide

I wouldn't go through a stranger's purse, or a stranger's anything. But in my house what's mine is my husband's and vice versa. Neither of us have anything to hide.

Andy1964 - I get the sense that in your moral code the right to privacy trumps the right to fidelity.

And to those who say 'if you have doubts the relationship is dead' - I can imagine what it's like to develop a niggling but indefinable doubt. It's really hard if you are not the cheating type to understand others who are. And if you have three kids, do you really just walk out because you have a vague suspicion that your hubby was not where he said he was three weeks last Tuesday? It's not so black and white. Many men remain very lovely to their current partners, they explain away little inconsistencies.

The purse thing is a bit of a red herring Andy, DH hands me my purse if he needs some change etc. and vice versa with his wallet, however I don't ask before I pick up his phone or laptop and neither does he with mine, we both leave our facebooks open pretty much all the time, we know each other's passwords for emails/whatever, I don't understand a high level of privacy within relationships ( but that's because we've been married forever) I can see how people who've had "other lives" before getting together could want privacy for example.
In some respects it's easier if a previously lax partner suddenly passwords protects everything, never lets the phone out of their site etc. but with someone who does that anyway, how would you know anything was amiss?

Don't read into my not going through my DWs hanbag of purse too much.
I was just trying to explain the way I was bought up.
All of our on-line activity is 'auto-fill' so that we can get to eachothers E-Mails, Facebook, forums etc.
Quite funny really as DW has made the mistake of posting on FB as me and vice verca, lol

well i agree with you Andy.
Although i have done some serious snooping in my time. And found out things that i never wanted to know.
DP and I are working through our problems, probably the worst one being he won't change his e-mail password, so if i want to access it i can...its like giving up smoking when you have fags on you!

Now i really wish i hadn't spooped, almost as much as i wish he hadn't broken my trust in the first place.
And bless him he is one of these blokes that would never dare go into my handbag!!

Andy, you can read my post if you haven't already. I found a condom wrapper in my dps luggage after returning from a business trip.

Now I confronted him straight away, he denied any knowledge of it. I then asked for his phone and went through the whole lot. I went through his emails and Facebook too. This was to protect myself, I needed to know if anything untoward was going on.

Now, I hope you're never in a situation when you're so desperate to know the truth like alltheywantisahole and the many others on here going through gut-wrenching times, that you are resorting to looking through their things.

I think that there are instances when other responsibilities outweigh your partner's right to privacy. For example, if you have reason to believe your own health (including sexual health) or the health and wellbeing of your family are being put at risk, or if you have reason to believe your finances are being put at risk.

One of the real probs with snooping I am sure isthat you will never be happy witht he answer - and will go again until you find the answer you are satisfied with. Putting people to the test is a painful and short alley.

and yes I second Snorbs ( again) - do speak for yourself Andy, not me as a fellow male.

DeePanCrisPandEeeven, for me it was never about putting my ex-H to the test, it was about trying to find out the truth. I knew I wasn't likely to be happy with what I found out, but I was glad I knew at least some of the truth and wasn't thinking I was mad or suffering from severe post-natal depression!

oh I'm not for a second denouncing it, Post. It's just fraught with stuff and can/could become a technique that gets transferred in new relationships if anxieties emerge. tis all.

Andy your stance is ok, of course it is

But you are assuming that both people in a relationship are reasonable people

You see, some twats (male and female) get a kick out of deceit, it's part of the buzz, the sleaze and the thrill

I would rather snoop and find out something that gives me power back

Nobody makes a fool of me, and makes me the last to know something (or at least does it more than once)

Probably some truth in the assertion that if you have to snoop, the relationship is already doomed. In my experience I could have just trusted my instincts and chucked out my husband without evidence because I felt instinctively that he might be being unfaithful. But without any evidence, which I had to snoop and spy for, I would have felt unjustified and uncomfortable with that. OK I felt uncomfortable spying too but at least it gave me the substance to say 'I'm not just crazy or paranoid, there is something going wrong here'. You see it wasn't that the relationship had died altogether - we were still very much together in other ways. It wasn't THAT obvious. More a series of suspicions. I almost spied in order to prove myself wrong but sadly I was right.

for the first 6 1/2 years i had no suspicions whatsoever about my ex , and then by sheer accident i found several messages on his phone from another woman, intimate ones, i sent a message to her asking why she was texting my husband, went to work, when i finished work and he picked me up he flannelled it and deleted them before i finished work so no proof, then a couple of days later thought hang on theres two voicemails he hadnt answered, thats how i found out it was match.com he was using, so left him to hang himself, waited till he was out for the day and went into his favourites and there it was all the messages to other women and he hadnt stopped even for one day,

so went mad again and was going to throw him out, he promised he wouldnt do it again, left it for a few months and then caught him with a supposedly broken phone in his hand texting a woman he is now my ex husband, so andy sometimes we women find out by accident and then go snooping

Relationships are based on trust. If there is no trust, there is no relationship.

Sadly, not everyone respects this idea and are dishonest.
Some would rather walk away before admit to bad behaviour.

And when there are years put into a relationship and also children perhaps - its hard to end a relationship on a whim or 'gut' instinct.
It's better to know the truth so that ending a relationship, especially when there is alot at stake, is the only option.

Like someone else said. You do not break up a family with young children purely for a hunch. Trust is important but if you read this forum you would see that most of the women who snoop have found something or seen something untrustworthy in the first place. They are usually convinced that 'DH is not like that though' and snoop purely so they can be sure of this or be justified in leaving the one that now suddenly seems untrustworthy.

For me it would also be a case of needing answers to my questions before I left the toe rag.