*Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series. You can read the introduction here. 

“I’m just going to take a little peek.”

I kept telling myself that every time I dealt with doubts of infidelity. When we broke up, the end of our relationship also marked the end of my obsession with his phone.

Because let’s be truthful. There is no “little peek.” There is, however, a massive doubt within us that’s holding us back and we would do anything to put it to rest. There are fears and worries that force us to go behind our partner’s back and snoop instead of resorting to open communication.

Sharing our fears and doubts with our partner makes us vulnerable. Sadly, we think vulnerability is a sign of weakness. It puts us at a higher risk of getting hurt, so we’d rather hurt ourselves through snooping than be hurt by someone else through direct communication.

“A little peek” turns into an obsession because there’s something we’re looking for in the phone. We’re either looking for betrayal or for validation.

Looking for reassurance that our partner is faithful means there’s distrust in the relationship—which also means there are bigger issues at play such as a lack of open communication or a lack of friendship. Because partners who have strong communication skills can always articulate how they feel or what they need and those who have deepened the friendship in their relationship know who their partner is.

Sometimes even if we don’t find anything suspicious, we insist on snooping because it’s betrayal we’re really looking for. In other words, we look for ways to relive a past negative experience. A previous partner might have betrayed us or we might have had a parent who was a cheater. Human beings yearn for familiarity, and so recreating the same scenario over and over again (regardless of how toxic it may be) brings us comfort and security.

When we unlock our partner’s phone, we unconsciously unlock the past with it. In the introduction of this series, I wrote that getting over my ex was easy. I keep thinking that maybe it wasn’t him I was in love with; it was my childhood trauma. My childhood wounds had resurfaced when I discovered that he was cheating on me. I was in love with my dysfunctional patterns, and my obsession with snooping on his phone was my unconscious way of re-enacting the past.

Looking for betrayal is problematic because we might not always find it. When I scrolled through my husband’s likes and comments on Facebook when we were first dating, I didn’t find betrayal, but I did find validation. I wanted to make sure that our relationship was okay, but that, too, was a problem because it meant that I wasn’t okay.

When we seek validation, it means we are struggling with a low self-esteem, a fear of rejection, or a fear of abandonment. Again, when we don’t know how to communicate those fears or are afraid of sharing them, we might check our partner’s phone to dispel our emotional fears.

I spent such a big part of my life struggling with self-esteem issues. If I’m not secure in myself—if I can’t trust myself—how can I trust my partner? It comes as no surprise then that we want to check our partner’s followers or likes if we think we’re not pretty enough or lovable. Every single day we act on what we think we deserve in life. If we think we don’t deserve our relationship or our partner, we will keep looking for trouble until we find it—and eventually prove to ourselves that, yes, we are “unworthy”…and “unlovable”…and “ugly.”

Be it betrayal or validation we seek, at the end of the day what we really want is safety. There are many ways to build emotional safety in a relationship without having to snoop.

I’ll share the second reason tomorrow.

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