The Snoop Loop

Why am I so damn nosy? I've read my boyfriend's emails and checked his voice mail (and even though I've already told him that I do both, he's never bothered to change the password for the latter). If I were allowed to, I'd open his mail (only that's mostly bills, so it's not all that fun).

It's almost as if I can't help it. Does it have to do with me being insecure with myself, and thus I must find out if there's anyone else? If that's the case, then boy oh boy, did I lose. I've found things that make me go crazy.

Is there anything I can do short of a frontal lobotomy to not be nosy and kind of get over my insecurities?

—Adnap

Once you start snooping, it's harder to kick than a nicotine cocktail with a heroin chaser. It begins so innocently… You accidentally overhear a hushed conversation he's having with an ex. A few days later you're "borrowing" some cash out of his wallet and notice a slip of paper with a strange phone number (and no name) on it. Pretty soon you're rummaging through his nightstand, sniffing his laundry and pondering the purchase of one of those special body-fluid-illuminating lights like they use on all those CSI shows.

My friend (no, really!) Ainsley* has a history of this kind of behavior. Before marrying her husband, she ransacked his apartment—poring over journals, hacking into email accounts and changing the phone numbers in the rolodex of any woman he'd ever seen naked.

What did she glean? Prior to meeting her he'd had lots of sex with scores of different beautiful women. The pages of his journal contained explicit details of all his carnal deeds—details he never expected his intended to read, details she's probably never going to forget.

Much to her annoyance, she also discovered that he was deeply concerned that once they got married, she might get fat! The problem with finding out retarded—yet supremely irritating—crap like this is that you can't really come out and confront the person about it without looking like a sneaky neurotic freak.

What did she do? "I tortured him for a few weeks. He never knew what was up, but I got my revenge in many subtle ways."

Most people don't snoop as sport—the majority of us will only do so if pushed. My friend Julie put it best: "When I am secure and happy in a relationship, it doesn't occur to me to snoop."

Another friend, Brigitte*, became suspicious when her newly almost-famous husband went on tour with his band and suddenly quit phoning home.

"I had never been a snooper and always felt sort of sorry for women who felt compelled to do so," she told me. "However, after a few months of feeling like [husband] was not being honest with me, and not being able to get anything out of him—either because he was too scared or because he preferred to be a lying, cheating bastard—one sickening day, I decided to break into his email.

"What I found was correspondence between him and a girl he had slept with on tour. It was very lovey-dovey; lots of talk of how wonderful their night together had been and lots of talk about how much he wanted out of our marriage and how he would end it when he got back from tour."

When she confronted him, all he kept saying was, "I can't believe you read my email!"

Normally, snooping doesn't reap such horrific, erm, rewards.

"I found a file full of photographs from his first marriage," my buddy Sue* reports. "Including several photos of his ex-wife topless." Ouch! This is one of those gray-area times that admitting you were snooping may be worse than what you discovered—after all, who doesn't have a few naked-ex pics laying around?

Sue was having none of it. "I tossed him the handful of photos the minute he walked in the door after work that day, blamed him for causing me psychological distress, and charged him $50 per photo as compensation." He paid up, then found a much better hiding place.

My friend Rachel feels that checking up is her wifely duty. "I 'snoop' on my husband all the time," she remarks blithely. "It's the right of every wife. I think of it more like checking up on what he's doing out of my line of vision. No matter how much love and trust you have, with men, the only way you ever get the whole picture is—to quote Othello—by the ocular proof."

Rachel may have a point, but for all my myriad faults, rummaging through my man's stuff isn't among them. Probably because I still very viscerally recall the abject horror and humiliation I felt as a teenager, upon discovering my mother had read my angst-filled journal aloud to my entire family. So if you've tried addressing your suspicions and he won't talk to you about it, search on.

But if you find this is a pattern in all your relationships, you have to realize you're a bit of a wackjob—and you'll probably find out things you'd rather not know. Like say he got fingered in the backseat of his '72 Mustang, the same night he tried malt liquor and menthol cigarettes for the first time.

Oh wait—that was me. o

*Names changed to protect the sneaky.