Caught DH snooping through my phone

[snoopyDH]

So a couple of nights ago I sent my DS a Snapchat before I went to bed then left my phone to go get ready for bed in the bathroom.

I come back and notice that a Snapchat call was made to one of my friends, I saw the time it was made and knew it wasn't me so asked my husband, he seemed to get angry but then denied it.
I wasn't mad, just kept saying that I knew it couldn't have been me and did he look at my phone. Again he kept denying it, telling me it was a glitch in my phone etc
I knew I wasn't crazy so I asked again, he finally admitted it.

Back story, I had a short emotional affair three years ago and he used to check my phone all the time, and recently I have been a bit withdrawn but I have explained my feelings to him and think I'm depressed (lockdown/isolation) and reassured him I'm not cheating again, it's just something I'm going through at the moment.

We had a bit of a row tonight before he went through my phone.
I have nothing to hide, I would never cheat on him again, but I understand to an extent why he wanted to check my phone but I am more so mad that he kept on denying it and refused to admit he did it.
Even after he admitted it he still wouldn't take responsibility for why he looked.

AIBU for being upset about it or because I have wronged in the past should I just suck it up?

I think fizzygreenwater and madcatlady summed it up well OP. Around 3 months after I found out by chance about a very old EA that went on for quite a while — my H said to me ‘how long do I have to wear a hair shirt for then’. I was fuming because the way I see it was ‘for as long as it takes’ . I actually do trust my H when it comes to anything similar happening again- I think it was a one off— doesn’t mean that I like to every now and then know my gut instinct is still working ok and I think you may have to live with that if you want the relationship

"Be honest though, if he did talk to you and say I want to check your phone every day , what would your reply be? Would you say yes sure, that's fine or would it make you angry? that is no way to live is it for him or you? but the reality is that he doesn't trust you fully 100% and he may never trust you 100% - that's the stark reality. You did what you did and you can't change the past"

Here's a challenge.
Ask yourself- do you love him enough and value the relationship enough and are so 100% confident in your own integrity and fidelity that if it came to it you are prepared LITERALLY to allow him to check your phone through and through every day.
If you have nothing to hide I would be provocative enough to say this is not an unreasonable thing to offer, at least for an agreed period of time (3 months? 6 months? up to both of you).
He doesn't HAVE to check it but you have a tacit agreement that he has the right every day to say please may i look at your phone.

The flip side is that he is not allowed to "nick pick" about messages or communications you might have sent which are genuinely innocuous (ie start complaining about your communications on unrelated matters etc because that might venture into controlling behaviour by him and be counter productive). But equally he gets to say when he checks your phone so he is not nervous you are covertly deleting / hiding stuff.

If you are 100% trustworthy and you really really value the relationship I think this would not be unreasonable.
Agreed it could not go on forever and a day as that again might venture into control freakery but I would venture to suggest he has the upper hand in saying how long he might need to do that for.

I am sure the poster lil will disagree with me on this but ultimately OP's partner needs to get to the stage where he really believes there is nothing and will be nothing "lurking in the shadows"

After all, you did not confess the EA to him willingly - he had to find the evidence and confront you which i think makes the trust thing even more difficult to rebuild.

But what do I know - my own exH had an emotional affair which I am pretty sure became physical on a business trip - I confronted him about it and he literally went upstairs and packed a bag and that was it. Subsequently he invited me to divorce him by solicitors letter which I did - although now years on I think I definitely did the right thing - but there was not even a discussion.

Maybe my ex was wiser than me in knowing EXACTLY how difficult any kind of betrayal (emotional or physical) is to come back from and he was "kind" enough to teach me that.

Don't under estimate how much work you have to put in if you really want this relationship to continue. And in light of your anger I really feel for your OH and the way your original post is drafted I do think your husband should leave you.

Sounds more like he’s happy with the thought of having her just where he wants her, totally controlling what she does, watching her every move while at the same time telling her there’s nothing wrong and that he’s happy. Yeah, obviously happy being able to hold this indiscretion against her for as long as he sees fit.

I'm not sure there is any indication he is watching her every move. OP has not said that. She admitted she had been distant lately.

I think he should leave you, tbh, because nothing about your posting here makes me think you get it. You want sympathy, you want other people telling you that you are the victim and your husband is a controlling abuser. You aren't prepared to do what he needs to sustain a relationship with you, the person who cheated on and lied to him- you think it is wrong that he would seek to check up on you even though you are a proven liar and cheat. If you think him checking up on you is UR, grow some ovaries and put an end to it yourself.

AlternativePerspective

"And it seems very clear he’s playing games. Snooping through her phone, and when she asks time and time again how she can make the relationship better he says that he’s happy with things the way they are. Sounds more like he’s happy with the thought of having her just where he wants her, totally controlling what she does, watching her every move while at the same time telling her there’s nothing wrong and that he’s happy. Yeah, obviously happy being able to hold this indiscretion against her for as long as he sees fit."

Errrr no to the above.

According to the OP her husband went into the bathroom and attempted to or managed to send a snapchat himself on her phone. This is not the behaviour of someone who is "controlling" OP.

This sounds like someone terrified, checking out whether a snapchat had been sent on his wifes phone, maybe whether she still has snapchat enabled, or even to someone (poor fella) he thinks in his wife's circle might be able to confirm that no, he is not going mad - there snapchat working just fine.
Then he denied having done it. More evidence of potential paranoia - what is going on here? why is my wife sending supposedly innocent snapchats in the bathroom? maybe people do send snapchats in the bathroom.

But if he had felt the confidence to come out of the bathroom and say to his wife "why are you sending snapchats in the bathroom?"it would indicate that either (i) actually there is quite a good level of trust here (ignoring the fact that her reaction was incandescent anger at him.....) OR (ii) that MIGHT indicate he is "controlling" his wife by monitoring her every move - but I certainly dont think it is automatically (ii).

I think it sounds like a game of cat and mouse which was first initiated by OP not by her husband unfortunately and that is precisely why the trust once broken is very hard to rebuild, especially in light of the anger by OP and the defensiveness by her husband.

your issue is the lying - tell him he can ask for your phone anytime b?ut that if you ask him and he lies to you how is that different to you lying to him

"He decided to go back, that was his decision"

this is a huge leap laden with assumptions.

It is very black and white to assume that everyone on the planet should just walk the minute they discover an affair and confront their OH.

Maybe you might be in a position to do that and have the trust in the fact that you have uncovered the whole story of the undisclosed affair your spouse had in secret, that you have the money and wherewithall to just walk out the door that moment, no emotional binds (children?),no concerns that the affair was a one off blip by your OH which might be recoverable from, and therefore you can just walk (with or without the satisfaction of a parting "high moral ground" brief lecture)

or maybe the husband thought the relationship might be salvaged,that if he just stays his wife might put in the leg work to show him why he should still trust her.

Wow! - I cannot believe you think all relationships just END at the instant moment betrayal is uncovered. Maybe they SHOULD end (and in this case I think the husband should have gone) but it is naive and feels somewhat judgmental of you of the husbands character to actually blame him for not running and never looking back the second he discovered the emotional affair.
Relationships can be far more complex than that - surely you know that?

But again, yes - I really do hope the husband packs his bags and leaves asap. Mainly because the OP's reaction was rage with what sounds like no attempt to understand why he did it.

And it seems very clear he’s playing games. Snooping through her phone, and when she asks time and time again how she can make the relationship better he says that he’s happy with things the way they are. Sounds more like he’s happy with the thought of having her just where he wants her, totally controlling what she does, watching her every move while at the same time telling her there’s nothing wrong and that he’s happy. Yeah, obviously happy being able to hold this indiscretion against her for as long as he sees fit."

I don't think so, I think he is uncomfortable talking about the issue (as people are.) Probably after 3 years, most of the time he does trust her. There's not some magic thing OP could do to change things.

He probably is also a bit embarrassed/guilty that he looked, as she wasn't cheating, he got it wrong.

But again, yes - I really do hope the husband packs his bags and leaves asap. Mainly because the OP's reaction was rage with what sounds like no attempt to understand why he did it.

@Bubblebu sorry but I'm not sure what post you have read? I never said I was in a 'rage' at all!
Sure I was annoyed but I also said I completely understood why he would do that.
I'm a pretty understanding and reasonable person despite how people think of me from knowing such a minimal amount of my life.

I also didn't send the Snapchat to my SON while I was in the bathroom, do people not read posts properly?
I sent a message to my 15yo son, put my phone down and I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed for the night.

He decided to go back, that was his decision. And while the OP needed to rebuild his trust her past doesn’t give him the implicit right to spend the rest of their lives holding her to account for that. If he can’t live with it then he should leave.

You don't just make a decision to try and continue your marriage after infidelity and then just have to snap back to trusting your spouse. It just doesn't happen. Trust me. It took me several years of trying to realise that it wasn't going to work out after my ex-H's affair. It has only been 3 years since the EA and it really seems like OPs behaviour was showing the same signs as when she was in an EA. Suspicion in such circumstances is a totally natural reaction and I doubt you'd be blaming a woman for being suspicious and trying to check things out in the same circumstances.

Of course privacy should be respected but rebuilding trust also requires transparency too. It sound like OP has realised that this is a scar that is going to remain on her marriage and, whilst it may heal it won't disappear.

If you completely understood why he would do it then the thing to do would have been to ignore it. To give him that. To not push and push for the answer you knew was the right one, because you knew it already, and more to the point you knew WHY.

You really want to earn that forgiveness and to SHOW him (not just say to him) that you get it? Then you would simply look, see it, nod, and look the other way.

That is you owning it, owning the situation as it is now which YOU created.

He has nothing he needs to own here.

@snoopyDH I’m glad you brought up the Snapchat message again because I thought everyone else was missing it. I’m also goING to go against the grain a bit here too because this feels weird to me.

Did he say why he called one of your friends?? How long was the call? Was it a man or a woman? What did they talk about? It would be one thing if he called your son because that was presumably the last person you communicated with. But instead he went searching for a friend of yours on Snapchat and then called them. That doesn’t sit well with me. That’s odd!

Did nobody else pick up on that?

@snoopyDH I think people just saw the words “affair” and “cheat” and went in on you. To me your husband’s behaviour was really odd. It’s partially understandable due to the affair, but this feels like it’s pushing the boundary.

"I also didn't send the Snapchat to my SON while I was in the bathroom, do people not read posts properly?
I sent a message to my 15yo son, put my phone down and I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed for the night"

OK noted.
But I guess with a background of mis trust in your relationship with your husband presumably husband observed you sending a message to someone then you left your phone in full view of your husband and went to the bathroom and then you were annoyed to realise he had been looking at your phone on your return
Your husband picked up instantaneously your annoyance hence the denials. If he knew you would not be annoyed he would just have fessed up to you straight away no?

Is the agenda more than you absolutely expect him to 100% trust you unquestioningly and never ever to someone encroach on your privacy - which is a more important agenda here than you earning his trust again? If the snapchat was to your son which it clearly was there is nothing to hide?

Does your husband equally absolutely expect you never to touch his phone?

As someone above has said, the one mystery to me is why your husband himself would try to use your phone to send a message to someone? Did you ask who he was trying to message on your phone?

It just feels to me like total check mate here - you want your husband to acknowledge there is only one thing going on and that is that your husband does not trust you and seems still to be looking for evidence. And that that is the problem for your husband because he does want proof that you are not doing something behind his back and from my own subjective point of view I would not blame him for wanting that. (Are you allowed to use your husbands phone without asking? Or does who he is in touch with not interest you? I'm not suggesting you should want to check his phone but that is the power balance I am getting - you dont really care who he is in touch with but he does care who you are in touch with and that is (in part?) born out of the fact that you betrayed him and he is still not sure of your fidelity and your fidelity is very important to him (and in a strong relationship his fidelity to you would also be really important to him).

Maybe i am reading into something i dont know about but it does sound like his denial was a knee jerk reaction to the above check mate and the fact he knew immediately you were annoyed.

[quote JingsMahBucket]@snoopyDH I’m glad you brought up the Snapchat message again because I thought everyone else was missing it. I’m also goING to go against the grain a bit here too because this feels weird to me.

Did he say why he called one of your friends?? How long was the call? Was it a man or a woman? What did they talk about? It would be one thing if he called your son because that was presumably the last person you communicated with. But instead he went searching for a friend of yours on Snapchat and then called them. That doesn’t sit well with me. That’s odd!

Did nobody else pick up on that?[/quote]
Could it be a name he didn't recognise and he jumped to conclusions? Forgive me, I'm not an avid snapchat user but perhaps the person's name was not immediately obvious, he saw lots of calls or interaction with this person and wondered who it was?

Doesn't sound like a good situation all round. Something has aroused her DH's suspicions. I don't buy that he is controlling or snooping without a hunch/gut instinct.