Q: I’ve been with my boyfriend for two and a half years and we have a great relationship—or so I thought. Last week, I snooped on my boyfriend’s browser history and I don’t know what to do with what I found. I’m a longtime reader and Savage Lovecast listener SO I KNOW WHAT I DID WAS WRONG. I believe my actions were driven by 1. lingering trust issues (a while ago, I found out my boyfriend had been looking at Tinder since we’d been together, though I don’t believe he ever messaged or intended to meet anyone) and 2. my general anxiety/depression, which seems particularly high one year into the pandemic. Now, to what I found: my boyfriend has been looking at random women on Facebook—not people he’s friends with, or people in his immediate network, so far as I know. And then he clears his activity log. What do you think this means? Where is he finding these names/women? Is he using these pictures to masturbate? Should I raise the issue with him or just feel shitty about invading his privacy? He gives me no other reason to not trust him, I should say, and he seems like a pretty open book. (Everyone in my life who knows him agrees.) However, I can’t shake the fear/paranoia that he’s living a double life and I don’t want to be blindsided. I would appreciate your insight.—Sincerely Nervous Over Online Pattern
So you snooped, SNOOP, and what did you find out? Something you didn’t need to know—your boyfriend isn’t cheating on you, he doesn’t have a secret second family in another city, he doesn’t spend every other Friday duct-taped to a sling in a gay sex dungeon. All you know now that you’ve snooped that you didn’t before is . . . well, all you know now is something you should’ve known all along. Your boyfriend, like most people’s boyfriends (mine included), likes to look at people on the Internet. If you have no other reason to suspect your partner is cheating on you, SNOOP, then you’ll have to do what everyone else does and give your partner the benefit of the (very trivial) doubt here. Discretely checking out the hotties on the street or on Facebook or even on a dating app is not cheating. Masturbating to images, mental or otherwise, of other women or men or nonbinary folks isn’t cheating. What you found is not, by itself, proof that your boyfriend is cheating or plans to. So your snooping is not, I’m sorry to say, retroactively justified, which means you’ll have to shut the fuck up about it.
Also, there are lots of ways to define “things going right” after sex. Whether you had sex on the first date or sex after dating for three months, if the sex was bad and you didn’t enjoy it—if the guy was inconsiderate or unhygienic or not invested in your pleasure or all of the above—never having to see that guy again would definitely count as “things going right.” v
