I’m a 47-year-old divorced dad. Met a 26-year-old woman nine months ago. Things have been great except for one thing: My girlfriend won’t give me access to her phone. When we met, I explained that I have trust issues due to the actions of my ex-wife (multiple infidelities, lies, gaslighting), and that I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone who hid things from me. After three months, I shared my phone’s passcode with her because I have nothing to hide. I expected her to do the same, but she said she wasn’t ready. At this stage we had already said “I love you” to each other and we were discussing moving in and her first meet with my kid. I don’t understand how she could be ready for those steps but not for the very first step I discussed with her when we met.
I finally checked her phone using the passcode I’d watched her enter many times. I didn’t find evidence of cheating, but I did find a group chat with her friends where they discussed my wish to have her passcode. Her friends described me as “controlling” and urged her to break up with me. (One said I wasn’t attractive enough to be this controlling?!?) Not once did my girlfriend tell her friends why I needed to have access to her phone: my painfully traumatic divorce experience. She also never said that I had disclosed this as a condition of getting serious when we first met. I confronted her, and now she’s furious with me for invading her privacy. For my own part, I’m furious that she didn’t make any effort to defend me to her friends. She has threatened to end our relationship. All I wanted from her was the same degree of transparency I had already given her myself.
Privacy And Sexual Security
Did you have a question?
P.S. I don’t wanna pour poison in your ear — I don’t wanna make you any more paranoid than you already are — but you do realize that people managed to hide things from their partners (debts, affairs, second families) before smartphones came along, right? So, while having access to your (next) girlfriend’s phone might make it harder for her to cheat on you, it’s not gonna infidelity-proof your (next) relationship. People can have affairs without creating digital trails (affairs can be analogue), PASS, and they can keep a burner phone at work. And while you’re free to ask your (next) girlfriend to surrender her privacy because your (last) wife cheated on you, most women will — quite rightly — regard that demand as a red flag, and very few will forgive you and take you back (much less see you as the victim) if you violate their privacy the way you violated your (technically) current girlfriend’s privacy.
I get it: Your ex-wife cheated on you, she lied to you about it for years, and made you feel like the crazy one for suspecting her. All the while, the evidence that you weren’t crazy was sitting on her phone. That’s going to leave a mark. Given your history, PASS, you can ask your (next) girlfriend to be a little more considerate and, when you’re feeling insecure, to offer reassurance. You can also apologize to your (next) girlfriend in advance for the price she’s paying on account of your ex. But you can’t ask your girlfriend to sacrifice her privacy on the altar of your lying ex and/or your acrimonious divorce. That isn’t fair. And you certainly don’t get to violate her privacy and then demand that she defend you to her friends.
P.P.S. I’ve been with my husband for longer than your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend has been alive, PASS, and I don’t have his passcode, and he doesn’t have mine. Because we’re both entitled to some privacy — even from each other, even after all these years. And while I haven’t asked him about this, I assume he sometimes complains about me to his friends, PASS, just as I sometimes complain to mine about him. While I don’t like to think about what he may have said to his friends, I am, in a weird way, grateful that his friends are willing to listen for him complain about me. (Still! After all these years!) Because if he didn’t have that outlet — if he didn’t have someone to vent to — we might not still be together.
P.P.P.S. From the twenty-year age gap to the assumption that making an unreasonable demand at the outset makes you the victim when that unreasonable demand isn’t met… it’s entirely possible this is a fake-ass-rage-bait question.
I’ve been married to my husband for ten years. We’re both gay men in our early thirties, good sex life, and happily monogamous. (Monogamous gay couples exist, Dan!) About a year ago my husband met a guy who is gay and single and a furry, an interest of my husband’s that I do not share. I’ve always made room for his interest in the furry scene — he attends furry events and parties on his own — and I’ve never worried he might be cheating on me. But the way my husband lights up around his new “friend” has me concerned. They recently took a weekend trip with some of my husband’s long-term platonic furry friends that I couldn’t attend. This bothered me, since it felt like my husband was introducing his new boyfriend to his friends. And since they got back, it does feel like something is different. My husband insists nothing happened and says I’m inventing drama and I’m being irrational and insists he’s just mentoring this boy. Even if that’s the case, I feel like this connection has crossed the line between a close friendship and the kind of emotional affair where someone is getting all their needs met outside of their marriage. I don’t want to become the crazy and controlling spouse who demands that his husband stop seeing a friend. But I also don’t want to wake up one day and realize our marriage slowly died because I kept telling myself I was being irrational.
Feeling Understandably Restless
P.S. We’re not on PrEP because we are monogamous. When we do have sex, it’s usually just JO and oral, but I do bottom for my husband once or twice a month.
There’s so much smoke here that I think you’re entitled to check whether there’s actually a fire — which, in your case, FUR, means taking a look at your husband’s phone. Now, snooping is always wrong… because of course it is… with the exception of cases where the person doing the snooping discovers something they had a right to know. Call it the Snoopers Paradox: snooping is only okay when the snooper finds out about something they had a right to know… which they only found out by snooping… which is not okay… except when it is.
You and your husband have agreed to be monogamous, you’re not on PrEP, and presumably you don’t use condoms. That raises the stakes. Your husband can have close friends, furry or otherwise, but when a new friendship starts looking like a romantic relationship — weekend trips, private jokes, a perceptible shift — and your husband responds to your concerns by calling you irrational, I think you’re entitled to some answers. In your shoes, I would snoop.
P.S. I get it, I get it: monogamous gay couples exist. But are you really the best messenger at the moment? I mean, it sounds like your monogamous relationship — or at the least the monogamous part of your relationship — may have blipped out of existence.
Is it okay for your boyfriend to lie to you about hooking up with his ex? I’m a 32-year-old woman, boyfriend is 29, we’ve been together two years. He’s into bondage (sub) and I try but it doesn’t arouse me, which low-key ruins it for him. He expressed interest in getting tied up by a professional rope top at an “event.” I said that would be fine, and he made plans to go to this “rope thing.” I assumed it was some kind of public shibari demo but when I asked him for details and whether I could join him, he got evasive. I snooped through his messages. I know that was wrong, but I discovered the person he’s going to get tied up by isn’t a professional. It’s his ex. (Who is kinky and into bondage and teaches classes.) And it’s not a “rope thing” (a public event), it’s a private play date. They’d actually been communicating for months. He’s furious that I violated his privacy, and I’m furious he lied to me about planning to have a sexual experience with his ex. He says he wasn’t going to cum with her (which I saw in his text messages), as if that makes this somehow not sexual. But I’ve seen what being tied up does to him and even if he doesn’t get off, he’s going to be hard the whole time. The play date is cancelled, he’s contrite, and he has acknowledged that what I did (snoop) isn’t as bad as what he was planning to do (cheat). I don’t want to break up with him, but I don’t know where we go from here either.
Boyfriend Omitted Necessary Details
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