Monday, December 5, 2011

Text Message Snooping On Your Lover's Phone

So, you are spending time with your partner and at some point they walk away for whatever reason (in a case of marriage it could be to shower, etc.) All of a sudden you hear his or her phone receive a text message… do you look at who it’s from? A survey in suggests that one in three people with a cell phone are text message snoops AND the consequences are often irreversible.

Once you give in to snooping once, you most likely won’t hesitate to do it again whenever the next opportunity arises. 73 percent of text message checkers have found out about things they wish they hadn’t and 10 percent ended the relationship because of it. “Flirting is age old, but the fact that it can now be tracked on your phone makes a nervous partner a paranoid text-checker,” Virgin Mobile author and relationship expert Samantha Brett said. She also advised that if you already snoop, to stop. Something I couldn’t agree more with; if you have suspicions about your partner’s actions, the best thing is to talk about it. Otherwise you may find something out of context and lose trust or cause problems over nothing. Real trust can take years to build up and only seconds to destroy.

While I feel that snooping is very wrong and will lead to issues in the relationship, I also feel that being protective about your own phone would be suspicious to your partner. A phone is very different than something like a journal or diary. A diary is personal thoughts and should never be intruded on by anyone. A phone however is used to communicate with people and because of that, by definition it is not a private thing. There is nothing I do and no one I talk to on my phone that I need to hide from my girlfriend, and that’s the way it should be. For this reason, I generally don’t keep a password on my phone and if I do, I have no problem with her knowing what it is.

This does not mean I agree with the idea or act of snooping, quite honestly I am very much against it, but having a secret password on your phone would display a lack of trust to your partner just as much as snooping itself. So, if you ever have thoughts about looking through your significant other’s phone, computer, etc., think about the consequences first. Personally, I would strongly advise against not to, it just isn’t healthy for you or the relationship.