Your partner’s phone is private (& that’s a good thing)

There are a lot of things I find harrowing about heterosexual culture, and one of them is the expectation – not universal, certainly, but not uncommon either – that both partners have full access to each other’s phones. The very thought makes me shudder.

I hear about this most often in the context of cheating – either in the aftermath of an actual affair, or in the hypervigilant haze of an imagined affair looming on the horizon. Often, it’s a woman posting about her boyfriend: “I just don’t trust him, so I look through his texts regularly to make sure he’s not cheating on me.” The boyfriend might or might not have agreed to this overstep. Sometimes it’s a woman posting about a boyfriend she doesn’t even have yet: “Is it reasonable for me to require an open-phone policy in my relationships going forward? My last partner cheated on me and I can’t go through that again.”

(To be fair, there are also tons of men who enact this type of surveillance against their girlfriends and wives – to say nothing of the fact that queers can have control issues too – but I don’t hear about those other cases as often. Perhaps it’s because men are seen as more prone to cheating, and so straight women may feel more justified in surveilling their partners; perhaps it’s just that men’s “ownership” and surveillance of their female partners is more normalized in our patriarchy than the inverse.)

I understand the impulse to spy on your partner. Trust me, I do. In my most terrifyingly triggered states, I have narrowly resisted the temptation to flip through partners’ journals, rifle through their nightstands for evidence of betrayal, and (yep) read their texts. The only thing that kept me from doing so, apart from the fear of being caught, was the deep-down knowledge that it would only hurt me and my relationship. These impulses to snoop are understandable, especially for those of us who have lived through partners’ lies, excuses, and affairs, but acting on them can cause way more damage than it heals.