(originally posted July, 2006)
A rather prevalent topic lately among both my friends and the various discussion groups to which I belong has been “snooping” and the questions of whether it’s ever acceptable, and if so, under what circumstances. Having lived the scandalous and insane life I have, I will say that I have both been the snoop, and been snooped on, but honestly, for me – at this stage of the game, if there’s any serious snooping to be done, then it’s time to go.
One person in my main e-mail listserv spoke of a female friend whose significant other locks his cell phone and PDA so nothing can be accessed when those devices are in the house. The same gentleman, by contrast, said that his wife has all his passwords/passcodes for everything – email, voicemail, etc. I think those are sort of extreme examples. I’m admittedly more of a middle of the road kind of girl. I’m not going to voluntarily give some free and unrestricted access to all my personal email and such, not because there’s anything there that I’m hiding, per se, but just because it’s personal. I don’t NEED to know my s/o’s email passwords and such! I value my privacy and the privacy of others very highly. I’m laughing to myself now because I remember trying to sneak open somebody’s medicine cabinet just to have a peek at what was in it and feeling REALLY guilty for having done so.
There are so many ways to snoop, some more egregious than others. There are companies making MILLIONS of dollars off programs designed to record computer keystrokes, and various and sundry other types of equipment designed to catch the people we supposedly love and trust in the act.
So… back to the more deliberate act of snooping…looking back, I have to say that when I made the decision to go looking through my s/o’s email or IM that he’d inadvertently left open, I should have realized at that point that it was the beginning of the end, no matter what I found. I feel like this – when you go looking, most of the time you know you’re going to find something, and you have to be fully prepared for a) what you’ll find, b) the response of the other party to having discovered your little espionage and c) deciding how your discovery impacts the instant relationship going forward.
There are many different ways that this can play out. What if you don’t find anything and then your lover finds out that you’ve been through his/her things, and on that basis feels that the trust is broken and decides to end what was otherwise a good relationship? What if your worst suspicions are confirmed but for whatever reason you feel unable to distance yourself from the person? Now you’re stuck in a rat bastard situation with egg on your face, getting dogged and KNOWING you’re getting dogged, but chalking it up in the L column and looking the other way. Is it better to live this way, with bile rising in your throat half the time being ARMED with the information you so painstakingly sought, or to be somewhat blissful in suspicious ignorance? (That’s a question that each of us must answer individually…)
I was once in a relationship where there were some situations present of which I was aware and about which I was definitely not thrilled. I spent a great deal of time in his home, alone, and he left everything everywhere. It would have been a snoop’s paradise. Business cards, contacts scribbled on little pieces of paper, small personal thoughts and notes… Even when he’d go out of town for weeks at a time, I was still left with his keys. On one occasion he asked me to retrieve some stuff he needed while he was away on a military exercise and I was really not trying to have my hands in all his stuff like that – but he TRUSTED me – he trusted me to enough to give me the truth even when it was ugly and painful and somehow having the benefit of informed decision making made things a little more palatable. There were times when he left the place scattered to death and I always tried to tidy up some while he was away. I had access to paperwork that could have rendered me capable of bringing his entire world to a screeching halt. I packed it away in an orderly fashion without having made any notes for future reference, and got it the hell out of my way. There were times when just in the business of BEING there I saw things that I didn’t like, but rather than taking said observation and parlaying it into some kind of character assassination (and using it for a reason to turn over every sheet of paper in the house), we always found a way to talk about it.
Needless to say, at one point he had another guest in the house who didn’t feel the same way I did, and of course the minute he left home for work, you guessed it, she tore the place apart and they spent what should have been a lovely holiday bickering over all of her “finds”. All I could do was shake my head and wonder in general how is it that so many of us find ourselves sucking up so much crap from other people, but that’s a whooooole ‘notha blog.
So, the question begs… when it is ever OKAY to snoop? (and I’m talking about grown-folks-on-grown-folks crime, not parent/child-type ish, because I feel like anything that I give birth to, and have supported is subject to search and seizure of personal property given a display of untrustworthy behavior) Do you feel bad afterwards for breaking trust even when you discover that your reasoning was on point? For me, the linchpin of any relationship is trust, and if I can’t trust you (either to do right, or to trust me to do the same) more often than not, then we have a serious problem.
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