I Snoop Through My Partner's Phone -- And So Do Lots Of Other People

There’s something about me that not everybody can get on board with, and if I’m to be honest, I can’t say that I really blame them. I mean, it’s not my strongest of characteristics, and it involves me always wanting to be “in the know” out of fear of missing out.

No matter how shameful it may be to admit it, I am a super-duper nosy person.

When I’m at the doctor’s office, I peep through the hospital-like drawers just because I’m itching to know what’s inside. Not to steal anything, of course—it’s just pure curiosity. Curiosity that kills the cat if someone were to walk in and I had to pretend I wasn’t doing anything, I might add.

I’ve always been this way. I used to go through my friends’ stuff at their houses when I was younger, my mom’s belongings, and even my teacher’s desk on rare occasions, and I’m not even sure why. I’m not proud of those things, that’s for damn sure. And now that I’ve grown up, it’s something I have somewhat carried with me into adulthood. (Some might suggest that this is something I could or should work on in therapy… and they would be right.)

It may go against a lot of couples’ better judgment, but I snoop through my partner’s phone.

It’s not because I don’t trust him, because I totally do. We don’t have joint Facebook accounts like “SallyAndSam Wilson” where I monitor his every move or anything like that. It’s just that, from time to time, as I already stated, I can be incredibly nosy.

You see, you’re able to find out a lot about a person from the contents of their cell phone. I’ve been with my husband for seven years, and though he can talk my ear off from time to time (or all the time), there are details about his life that I can only piece together after reading them off of his iPhone.

Like the mundane fact that he had to make a Wal-Mart run for work supplies during the day. Or that he and his mom had a small tiff earlier that week which they already resolved that very same day. I can figure out who he has been talking to, what he has been looking at, and where he has been just by simply taking a gander at his phone… and I make no apologies for it.

I’m not exactly sure why I care about these subtle, and what some might call boring, things in his life, but I do. As much as you might think this is me being a wife who doesn’t trust my husband, it’s really just me being curious. If you can believe it, it’s my way of caring about what’s going on in his life. Maybe I go about it in a backwards sort of a way to some, but as it would turn out, I’m not the only one.

According to one survey with Whistle Out, 50% of respondents said they were guilty of looking at their partner’s phone, with 78% of those participants admitting to checking text messages first thing.

I think for so many couples, checking their partner’s phone breaks a layer of trust. In my opinion, though, when you’ve been with someone for such a long time, that means you don’t hide a single thing from one another. We aren’t joined at the hip, and we do allow details about our lives to fall beneath the cracks of everything that’s much more important, but our curiosity doesn’t hinder our relationship.

My husband doesn’t care if I look through his phone, just like I don’t care if he has the random urge to look through mine. He’s caught me browsing through his history more times than I can count, and when he does, he always gives me that, “AHA! I caught you!” type of look.

He’ll usually say something along the lines of, “Enjoying that phone, are ya?”

To which I reply, “Sure am.”

We all have different boundaries and differing expectations of privacy from relationship to relationship, but this is something we are both okay with happening in our lives.

We may not be the perfect couple by any stretch of the imagination, but there is one thing we do have, and that is total trust. We are honest with each other to a fault. Which means there’s little to nothing we don’t know about one another.

We know each other’s passcodes by heart, and we use them when needed. If my phone dies while my husband is home, I pick up his phone and use it for whatever I may need.

It may go against what some call “socially acceptable,” but this is something that works for us. We are entitled to our privacy, and if one of us felt like it had been breached, we would figure out a way to put up more boundaries. For now, I’ll continue snooping through my husband’s phone, and he’s free to snoop through mine.