Suspicious Minds

Phones play an indispensable role in our lives. Whether it is ordering a meal or finding a date, booking an Uber, or buying on Amazon, we rely on phones to navigate much of our daily life. Above all else, phones remain a key to our social lives. Over the years, phones have uncoupled some of our favorite Hollywood romances. Reece Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, Sandra Bullock and Jesse James, Rihanna and Chris Brown are all rumored to have broken up after finding content on their loved ones’ phones that they were not expected to see.

But how suspicious are everyday people about what their partners have on their phones? And do they have anything to hide? There is a science to snooping; why do we need to know what we don’t want to know. The phone raid is a uniquely modern heist. Inside every person’s phone is a treasure trove of data in one single place: habits, thoughts, likes, routines, desires, purchases, contacts, and connections that tell us everything we want to know about a person, and plenty more that we don’t. Snooping on someone’s device is also a truly desperate, misguided act. Not because it’s a privacy violation at the deepest level — it most certainly is — but because doing so reveals a far more uncomfortable truth about human pairings. None of us really know anyone besides ourselves, and turning to a phone’s contents is a dangerous game that may not unmask more than the fact that we’re all just imperfect bundles of flesh, doing our best, without ill intent. It can be an innocent surface swim through a partner’s silly habits, or it can be a deep dive into the midnight zone, a place where no light has ever been shone into the human psyche. Shudder.

In a good relationship, though, this zone provokes either no discomfort at all or a comfortable co-existence with the unknown. But when you’re with someone you’re on the fence about, maybe because of a rocky start, rocky middle or rocky everything, maybe because of past dishonesty or multiple warning signs, the unknown is a terrifying abyss. Even when things are great, sometimes your curiosity or self-destructive impulses get the best of you, and before you know it, it’s 3 a.m. and you’re trying desperately to decode your partner's password.

The impulse to snoop is, of course, understandable. We are all amateur sleuths in one way or another. What women or men are looking for when they do pry so seems obvious: infidelity. But that’s not always it. Sometimes it’s just the desire to get into someone’s head and find out where they are, particularly if you feel distant or are facing heavy conflict. But the risk is high: Dive in, and you may find benign but uncomfortable truths or your worst fears confirmed. A phone’s contents, of course, are not a true indication of a person’s truest self any more than their record collection. It’s an imperfect mass of information. Still, a phone raider is looking for two things: continuity and consistency of stated activity and real activity. They want to know you are who you say you are, you do what you say they do, you feel what they say you feel.  But such bounty gives with one hand and takes away with the other. For everything you think you’re discovering by raiding a partner’s phone, you’re also opening up Pandora’s box of red herrings to grapple with, probably to your demise.

Snooping robs you of organic experiences; in fact, it only increases your anxiety and paranoia. And let's be honest, we have a ton of more important things to worry about. Can you imagine if we spent as much time on ourselves as we do on snooping on others? I know –mind blown. At the end of the day, it's important to remember that no one is perfect, including you. They say the first rule of snooping is to come at it sidewise, but at that angle, are you really getting a clear view? To honestly admit your fears to your partner is to face the problem head-on. Remember if you go looking for something hard enough, you’re probably going to find it.