The Tamesis
At the tail end of winter in New York, I got home from a weekend girls trip and crawled into bed with my then-boyfriend, who had been unsupervised for the first two days. He went to work at 7 o’clock the next morning, and the tenderness when he kissed me goodbye made you forget a man’s ability to lie. Two hours later, I woke up to find his laptop next to the bed, fully charged and practically begging me to turn it on. (I think people who say they’ve never snooped are either better than me or just less observant.)
We’ve been dating long enough that I know all of his passwords, not because he shares them with me, but because men type them in as if no one has eyes. (I also have incredible peripheral vision.) Within minutes, I was scrolling through his iMessages, ruining my own life in real time.
To this day, I still remember the exact messages I found out, which is unfortunate because I would actually like to forget them. One text my then-boyfriend sent to his roommate was: “Please don’t tell Erin.” The roommate responded: “I don’t want to be a part of it, but if she asked me, I wouldn’t lie.”
That’s it. The information was vague and completely devoid of context, but still enough to rattle my nervous system.
My heart began to beat so hard that my ears could hear it. My hands are shaking. Every few seconds I thought I heard keys jingling outside my apartment door and imagined him catching me in the middle of his investigation, hunched over his laptop—which, in hindsight, probably should have been my first clue that what I was doing was wrong.
but also? I was right.
Months later, after I made up an elaborate lie about “the grapevine”—because there was absolutely no way I was going to admit that I looked through his computer—he finally admitted that he drunkenly cheated on me and brought another girl back to his apartment while his roommate was home. Apparently, this roommate has a stronger moral compass than my boyfriend does.
Looking back on all this, I realize I should have immediately packed my bags, blocked his number, entered my healing era, etc. Instead, I stayed around long enough to turn into a psychotic, jealous girlfriend who could find evidence of infidelity in the way other people made eye contact. That’s the worst thing about betrayal: It turns you into someone you don’t even know.
People like to talk about jealousy as if it exists in a vacuum, as if people wake up one day and decide to become emotionally unstable. But I’m now on both sides of the equation. I’ve always been a jealous, possessive, constantly checking phone girlfriend, and I’ve been in relationships where I felt so secure that I really didn’t care who was texting my partner at 2 a.m., or where they were when they weren’t with me.
Then I realized that the difference wasn’t actually me.
I remember asking a recent ex why I was never jealous of him. I never went through his phone, never checked his computer, and in previous relationships I would have been recruited by the FBI. I once knew my ex-boyfriend’s Instagram search history better than my own Social Security number.
My ex looked at me and shrugged. “Because I won’t make you jealous.”
The answer is so simple it almost annoys me, but he’s right. Some people create chaos and then blame you for your reaction to it. There are also people whose approach to a relationship makes trust easy.
