AITAH for snooping and losing trust in my GF after what I found?
A Reddit user reflects on the fallout from snooping on their girlfriend of seven years after noticing changes in their relationship. What they found led to a deep loss of trust, even as their girlfriend and her circle believe the Redditor’s actions were unjustified.
Was the breach of privacy warranted, or did they cross the line? Read the full story below to decide.
‘ AITAH for snooping and losing trust in my GF after what I found? ‘
My GF (26F) and I (30M) have been together for 7 years. Up until about 6 months ago the relationship was great. Few argument, lots of love. But we had one issue that grew into a massive battle, which was my wishes to move to my home country for economic and happiness reasons.
To do this we would have to be married. She wanted to stay to be closer to her family (which I understand). After many discussions we almost reached a break up point, where she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to be with me anymore because I was unhappy in our current country.
She became very cold very quickly, and I became suspicious that it was not the country that was an issue but maybe someone else had entered her life. I asked her point blank but she denied it. Things became so weird between us and so my suspicions grew.
To be transparent, I did not believe her and began habitually snooping for the first time in our 7 year relationship (and I’m not proud of this, but at least once a day for approx 1 month).
As I say I am not proud of this but, we do not usually go on each others phones and like I have stated, this was the very first time in our entire 7 year relationship I have once gone digging. Sadly, I found some pretty gut wrenching things (at least in my opinion), detailed below:
1.A voice note to her best friend explaining how she felt like she was recently on a date with her boss and she felt guilty. 2.Multiple chats with ex partners, mostly benign but was unable to have a good read due to limited time.
3.Found she was habitually liking her exes pictures on insta (not ones of family or landscapes, there were straight up selfies etc). After finding the voice note to her friend, I decided to confront her about it and said she should come home from work early (but I lied saying a friend of mine saw them – but it was actually found thru snooping).
On her way home, she deleted the voice note and offered me her phone AFTER the voice note was deleted (I declined access to her phone at this point, I don’t know why). She explained it was a drink with her boss (whom she knew I was suspicious of) as her train home from work was late. Not a date.
Plausible but still weird it was described “like a date”. I had previously expressed some concern about this boss as she took a very late night ride with him after a work evening once which I didn’t feel comfortable with. He is of similar age to me.
Eventually I decided to come clean about snooping and told her I found that she was liking pics of exes and had messages between them. However, she refuted and explained there were no messages, it turns out she had deleted the messages entirely after she suspected I MAY want to go on her phone/snoop.
I told her that I knew they existed before but she had deleted them and she caved saying “I didn’t want you to misinterpret them”. I couldn’t read all of those messages so my trust took a big hit here. On the topic of liking exes pictures, she said there was nothing in it.
But the one that I really was hurt by was a like on this exes selfie (which was posted on my birthday). In her defence, I did ask her to immediately remove him from social media – which she did (but did so begrudgingly I must admit). Lastly – I asked to see her snapchat FYES section, she agreed.
At first my heart was warmed, as this appeared to be where she stored my “intimate” images. However, as I scrolled down she had a selfie of her and her exBF in there, taken 1 year into my relationship with her. This was during a Christmas party (he worked at the same company at the time).
The selfie was quite close, it looked like they were having a great time. I immediately went on the offensive and she looked like a deer in the headlights explaining it was just a selfie and nothing happened that night. I queried why would you hide it then?
She said she “knew it would upset me”, so I said if you knew it would upset me why take the picture in the first place? She had no answer. IMO she knew this pic was out of line, hence why she hid it.
Her friends and family believe me to be taking this way out of proportion and that actually she didn’t break my trust, but I broke her trust by snooping. My GF and her friends/family believe me to be in the wrong and she has done absolutely nothing wrong, even the selfie with her ex.
I’m sharing this now because I don’t know really if I’m in the wrong for thinking that these incidents were wrong… I’ve felt like my feelings were invalid and that perhaps some couples are actually ok with these types of actions.
Our situation at the moment is good though and we do seem to be moving forward but she is still unable to believe that I have lost trust in her. So AITA for losing trust in her over these incidents and snooping?
Here’s the feedback from the Reddit community:
Vampire_Dark10 − “It appears that you discovered she is not as reliable as her iPhone passcode.”
Emotional_Analyst115 − You discovered that she was emotionally cheating on you there’s no way around it. She was cheating on you. NTA
stiggley − The best revenge is a life well lived. Move on, live well. Enjoy the company of trusted friends. Emotional Affairs are still affairs. If she’s actively talking about sleeping with the boss she’s had dates with – then its already an affair.
She deleted everything because she thought you were going to look at her phone, so that was hiding the evidence and a breach of trust.
She admits that the affair with the boss would be a temporary fling and would want to get back to you – thats just abusing turst and relationship.
OkLettuce2359 − She will come back just make sure you stay strong and say no she broke your trust and being honest and faithful was to hard for her move on never look back. Delete her and block her on everything.
Hungry_Goose492 − It was enough for me to see that you wanted to move to your home country and she wanted to stay near her family. Y’all should have broken up right there.
Cybermagetx − Snooping is never wrong when the signs are there. Idc who that pisses off.
TaiwanBandit − Always trust your gut. Her and boss were a little too friendly OP. Now you can move back to your country knowing you tried to save the relationship, but she was not willing to make it work.
Ok_Risk_3271 − The relationship should have been over somewhere between the first three paragraphs.
sylbug − INFO: why didn’t you break up when it became clear that you’re incompatible? All this drama is nothing but an exhausting waste of time.
SpoofExcel − This is straight up fantasy-rage-bait. “I want to move country, she said no. And here’s a chaotic mess of words where she blatantly cheated on me in some way also I’ve still not moved to that other country”.
Also she knows I have found voice messages in the past and she’s somehow made a load of messages and sent them to “a friend” this creating more evidence for me to totally own her in this tale.
Do you think the Reddit user’s suspicions and actions were justified, or did their snooping create unnecessary tension in the relationship? How would you navigate trust and boundaries in a long-term relationship? Share your thoughts and experiences below!