By: Natasha Archary
Snooping on your partner often ends in tears. Sometimes, it’s best to let sleeping dogs lay and remaining blissfully ignorant to whether or not your partner is living a double life.
Because wanting to go through your partner’s phone, checking their home or car for signs that a third party has entered the equation is a sign that you have serious trust issues.
The Cambridge dictionary defines snooping as ‘looking around a place secretly to discover information about someone or something.’ But it could also include trying to get information about someone’s private life without their knowledge.
So, whether you’ve gone through your partner’s phone while they’re in the shower, or you’ve followed them to work just to make sure, they didn’t take a detour en-route, you could ruin the trust in your relationship, which may be difficult to recover.
Every individual has a right to privacy, even in a relationship
Privacy, even when one is in a relationship is a right that every individual deserves to have. This doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to keep secrets from your partner, but that having someone go through your stuff is an invasion of privacy.
Unless, they tell you it’s okay, you can have access to their phone or can snoop through their cupboards, you do not have the right to violate this boundary in your relationship.
Snooping on your partner can also lead you down a very precarious slope, one where paranoia sets in and you’re constantly questioning everything they do or say.
Going through their social media to see whose posts they’re engaging with, is another sign of snooping.
Also read: Feel Good: Befriending the other woman
Can your relationship recover from you snooping on your partner (or vice versa)?
Research by Sage Journals suggest that when one snoops, it incites various issues in the relationship and can lead to instability, conflict and exacerbate one’s decision to break up.
Especially if one is regularly snooping, which leads to heightened feelings of insecurity and frustration.
When one decides to find out for themselves if their partner is cheating, instead of approaching their significant other, it creates a communication breakdown which is not easy to rebuild.
Once the trust is broken, your relationship may be beyond salvation, so snooping is not the best approach in a relationship and does indicate an emotional immaturity that is less than attractive.
Also read: Best T In the City: Is secretly watching porn cheating?
