A
female
age
41-50,
anonymous
writes:My boyfriend and i have just come through a very difficult time. I dearly want to believe he has changed like he says he has but he has lied to me a lot and the trust has gone. I know it will take time to get this back and im prepared to work at it as I do think we have something special.The trouble is Im never going to know whether he is telling the truth about anything. I just have to decide to believe him or not. The only possible way of knowing is by checking his phone (texts / messages etc). It would be easy for me to do this, I know that all my answers are in there and i would only need to do it once. However I also know that this could open a whole can of worms.Is this ever a good idea? I feel like at least then i would know for sure what is real and what is not and not waste my energies if he is still lying. But I also know that things can be easily misleading and I could get the wrong end of the stick without knowing the full story. Reply to this Question
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female
reader, Beautyinthedecay  +, writes (20 September 2009):
Snooping is a horrible idea. This is the thing, you can't ever stop him from doing what he's doing. By doing this you can make it worse. This of it this way, if you weren't doing anything that he wouldn't approve of, would you like to be accused of anything?
Even if he is doing something, you're bound to find out from people who know him, eventually cuz things like that always come back.
A
reader, anonymous, writes (20 September 2009): I used to snoop through my boyfriend's things, after I caught him lying to me about something. Basically I found out he was living a completely different lifestyle than he led me to believe. I can only tell you where I went wrong, and maybe you will be able to make better decisions than I did. I became completely obsessed with his past, and anyone he was communicating with, especially females. I looked through his myspace and email several times after the original lie came out. I felt justified in my actions at the time, because he hurt me. This is the wrong way to do things! It creates a cycle. My boyfriend really did seem to feel bad about lying to me, and he wanted to show me that he learned from his mistake. But by constantly snooping through his stuff, I was not giving him any credit for trying to be honest. All that did was teach him "Why bother? She isn't going to even TRY to trust me, so why should I continue making the effort?" My obsession caused him to resent me, to the point where even once I was getting it under control, if I wanted to casually ask about any female he was talking to, he became extremely defensive, which of course only hurt my feelings more because I was being shut out. It's a vicious cycle!My advice is to resist the urge to look at his phone, because if you don't find anything the first time, you will probably keep checking it again and again to see what he's doing. You have to take the risk of trusting him, if you truly want the relationship to work.
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