One gentleman in a large focus group held in New York described how he caught his girlfriend cheating when her Gmail account was left open. He saw an open exchange between her and an old boyfriend and felt compelled to check it based on his previous suspicions. This led to the crowd of roughly 150 people generally agreeing when I asked, “So if someone forgets to log out, your attitude is If the shit’s open, I’m reading it?”
She was in fact cheating but agreed to end it with the old boyfriend. They worked through the issue, but it led to a dangerous downward spiral where he kept checking her e-mails, Gchats, and texts. The girl would change passwords, but he would crack them. Sometimes he found something suspicious, like deleted chats, and other times he didn’t. Eventually he found an e-mail that made it clear that the relationship with the old ex-boyfriend was not going to end as she had promised. They then broke up.
What was interesting was that even though the snooping ultimately helped him catch his cheating girlfriend, after that experience he felt in future relationships he would never snoop again. He felt that snooping only led to suspicion and paranoia that could break the fundamental trust needed to maintain a relationship.
His sentiment made sense to me after I took in all the stories in our interviews. So many people we interviewed told us that the slightest glimpse into their partner’s private phone or social media could spark an uncontrollable need to snoop and read more. One flash of an incoming text or e-mail from a stranger of the opposite sex or NBA all-star Scottie Pippen is all it takes to raise questions. People generally recognize that most of the time there’s nothing to worry about. Even so, it’s hard not to follow the trail once you find it.
In most relationships, the barriers to our private digital world break down without our realizing it. As a relationship progresses, a couple winds up sharing passwords out of convenience.
“Hey, honey, what’s the password on your laptop? I want to listen to that awesome Pitbull song on Spotify!”
“My password is ‘Pitbull’!” she replies.
“Wow, that’s crazy!”
Next thing you know, you’re listening to Pitbull’s hit album Planet Pit. Then a Gchat message comes up from a guy named [email protected]. You think to yourself, Holy shit. Armando Perez . . . That’s Pitbull’s real name! Why is he messaging my girlfriend?
Is your girlfriend having an affair with Pitbull? Do you read the Gchat message to make sure she’s not? Do you possibly violate your partner’s trust just momentarily to put your fears at ease? It’s a conundrum you didn’t plan on facing, but now you have to.
Snooping or accidentally getting a glimpse into your partner’s private messages isn’t the only way to descend into madness. Simply reading the messages posted publicly on a partner’s social media is often enough.
A woman in one of our focus groups described getting suspicious when another woman was being very active on her boyfriend’s Facebook wall.
“This girl was just constantly writing on his wall,” she said. “It was just like, Ugh, you know he has a girlfriend.”
She became agitated and decided to check his text messages, upon which she confirmed he was cheating.
Men and women also described partners getting upset when someone of the opposite sex was “liking” a lot of Instagram pictures or even seeing certain types of photos.
One gentleman we interviewed described how his girlfriend would get very jealous if she saw Instagram photos of him with other girls or other female users liking or commenting on too many of his photos.
“One time I made the mistake of liking a photo of this friend of mine in a bikini. All hell broke loose,” he said.
These are not necessarily new problems. Is a girlfriend getting upset that you liked an Instagram photo of a cute girl wearing a bikini any different from a girlfriend getting upset because you ogled a cute girl at the beach?
All the mundane misunderstandings and fights that we’ve always gotten into in our relationships get reinvented in weird and interesting ways in the digital world.
One gentleman, Sean, told us a tale that involved him getting suspicious of cheating due to a glimpse of his girlfriend’s social media at a very stressful moment:
My girlfriend was in a ski accident. I was in the ambulance with her and she gave me her phone to call her parents.
Afterwards, I looked down and I noticed that she downloaded Snapchat. I didn’t really know what Snapchat was. And all that I had heard about it was that it was an app specifically for sending nude pics.
So I checked, and there were like eight Snapchats from this one guy whose name I didn’t recognize.
And I was furious. But I didn’t say anything. Because she was in a back brace. Which seemed like bad timing.
And months later, we threw a party, and I met this dude. And he was gay, which was extremely reassuring.