Struggling during first few days of break up!

Never confront a liar or cheater with evidence you got by snooping and invading their privacy. To Eric’s point, it negates what you found out because you got the evidence by illicit means. Kind of like in court, evidence from an illegal search gets thrown out, even if it’s proof positive the person is guilty. You know the truth, but you lose the relationship… although if they were lying and cheating the relationship probably wasn’t going to survive anyway, know what I mean? It was only a matter of time. His blow up and ordering you out are to cover up his guilt, because it sounds like from those messages he’s up to something shady. Whole thing stinks any way you slice it and you’re best off out of it.

I’ve only checked a BF’s phone behind his back once. I strongly felt he was being less than truthful about a weekend trip he was taking and I was absolutely right. It wasn’t business as he told me, he was meeting an old GF. And he was lying to her about the status of our relationship. I saw the proof positive in writing that everything he was telling me about the trip was a giant lie. Just to check, I asked a few innocent questions about details of the trip, using the information I’d found, and he lied right to my face. I dumped him the day he left on the trip, without telling him I knew or making any accusation. He was devastated. Sat and cried great big crocodile tears and told me how much he loved me and saw a future with me. I bit my tongue from saying that’s interesting because you told So-and-So that we were just dating casually and it wasn’t serious. He kept saying why, everything was going so well and I just said I don’t see this working out. Gotta tell you, that was way better revenge than letting on I knew what he was doing that weekend. He tried to reach me for another month after and I blocked him. Never said another word to him. He finally went away.

Would have been an entirely different conversation if I’d angrily confronted him about what I’d found in his phone. How I found out wasn’t the point. While I don’t recommend snooping, if you have a very strong feeling about something, chances are there’s a reason and you’re right to investigate somehow. Reading those messages saved me from wasting more time with a two faced cheating liar.

I also caution anyone reading this that you have to be 100% sure of what you’re seeing, because sometimes there are facts you don’t know or another side. In my case it was all there in black and white – he was coming to town to see her because he missed her and wanted to see if she missed him too. She asked him if he was involved with anyone and that’s when he said only dating casually, which obviously wasn’t what he was leading me to believe after 9 months of dating me exclusively.

If someone’s going to lie that big, that takes a certain kind of person and if you confront them with the truth, they aren’t going to break down and say, yeah OK you caught me and I”m wrong. It’s quite the opposite. They’ll turn it around on you and somehow make you the bad, guilty one.

The fact that he immediately told you to get out and changed his FB status to single tells me he was cheating, or going to cheat, and was looking for a way out of the relationship with you.

Last story – and sorry this got so long – I once had a BF who checked my phone behind my back and then confronted me. He totally misunderstood what he read. He came at me with some crazy accusations and I was really confused and said, what makes you think this?? And he admitted he looked in my phone. I started laughing and explained what he saw. He felt really bad, and spent about two days apologizing. It wasn’t a dealbreaker to me, it was more of a highlight of his insecurities. As it turned out, he had too many self-esteem issues for us to be able to continue dating, and we mutually agreed to call it quits.

Bottom line – snooping is a complicated thing, lots of gray areas.

There’s no two ways about it – going through someone’s personal property (versus going into something in a common area, or where the other person knows you would be) is an “illegal search.” If you feel you have cause to snoop there is one of two things going on – you have a big insecurity issue or you have very good reason to believe something’s going on behind your back. Either is very likely to spell the end of a relationship, unless it’s the rare case where you can work together through the break in trust and take the relationship to a higher, better place. For me, that’s what it boils down to and that’s what I’ve personally experienced on both sides.

I couldn’t disagree with some of these posts more. Every healthy serious relationship I’ve been in has been fully transparent – including phones. People who have nothing to hide, have nothing to hide. Absolutely if I had a partner who more than once accused me of something, broke into my phone and found nothing – that would be an unhealthy, not sustainable dynamic. But if partners begin to act shady and gaslight, I think you have every right to find out if your gut is correct. I don’t agree looking at a phone in its self breaks trust IF you find something. If you confirm they are cheating on you – there was no trust in the first place – only lies and deluding on their part. For an example, the two, several years long relationships I’ve had, we knew each other’s passwords. One guy I never looked at his phone without him once. The other began acting weird about his phone after a trip. Sure enough, after looking at his phone (which was not a gut wrenching decision because we had already established transparency as a hallmark of our relationship and given each the cell passwords) I found out he had been in several completely inappropriate convos with a couple of women – including sexual ones. After talking with him about it, he found zero wrong (for instance) with asking his coworker what her favorite sex position was via text and sending her kissy face emojis “when she was having a hard day”, asking a new neighbor if they were single, saying phrases such as “if I was single I would be pursuing you” etc (and lots more than this… but you get my drift). Meanwhile, other than the weirdness after the trip, his BEHAVIOR toward me was incredibly loving and we had an amazing sex life. But what I found, and his lack of remorse about it, was enough for me, as we had been talking marriage. IMAGINE if I had felt some arbitrary value to ‘trust’ him, and never look at his cell, and go forward with a marriage. We had been together two years at that point, were fully integrated into each other’s lives and I had no other signals. Bottom line – Trust but verify.