Mistrust and "Trustability"

Dear Dr. Dennis,

In my search for help I came across your website and read some of your articles. I am hoping you can help me.

My boyfriend and I have been together for a year and a half. Once, early in our relationship, he left his email open and I snooped. I saw several emails he had sent to women who had posted personals ads, and some responses. I confronted him and he got really mad at me for snooping and denied having done anything wrong. I felt guilty for snooping. I accepted his claim that he wasn't cheating on me.

Since then, I have become a regular snooper and have seen things that disturbed me. I posed as someone else online and had a conversation with him in chat where he asked me to meet him. He didn't know it was me and when I confronted him with it, he told me that he used situations like that as part of a fantasy. I was very hurt and angry and nearly broke up with him, but I love him and wanted to believe him. He said to me that he wouldn't believe me if the tables were turned and that he would understand if I broke up with him. I didn't break up with him.

But by this time I'm feeling mistrustful and snooping every chance I get. He was still chatting and talking with women online about meeting, but as far as I knew hadn't actually met anyone. Then he started chatting with a woman who lived very close to us, asking her to meet him, for a walk or something.

One evening he called me and wanted to know when I'd be home from work, said he was feeling antsy and needed to get out. I knew what was up! I had introduced myself to this woman online, hoping she would say something to indicate if she had met him. That night I chatted with her and she told me she had just got home from meeting a guy she’d met on the Internet. I confirmed the name of the person she had met and asked her if anything had happened. No, no kiss, nothing. I confronted him with it when he got home.

Neither of us has a lot of trust for the other right now. We both value the relationship, but neither of us knows the first place to start in rebuilding trust. I will tell you that he has emphatically stated that he has not cheated on me. I honestly don't know if I should believe him or not. In the face of the lies he's told me it's really hard to.

Please blast me with whatever you've got; I know I've been guilty of wrongdoing here, as well as him. I just don't know what to do to save the relationship.

================

Hello!

I have a rule that I teach my students: any information, no matter how devastating it may be that is discovered during the commission of a crime is inadmissible. Prying into someone else's privacy is a huge crime that you should be very ashamed to admit! If you don't feel you can trust this guy, what in the hell are you doing with him in the first place? Is that really the kind of relationship you want? I'd sure hope not.

Do you see how this action has hurt rather than helped your relationship? Frankly, I don't see how you can ever fix it. The only possibility (and it's a small one) is that you both sit down, decide you want to be together in some form or fashion; either exclusively, or not, and then come up with ways that the other person feels will assure them in order to reestablish trust again. In other words, you shouldn't tell him what you need to trust him, nor vice versa. Instead, you should come up with ways that YOU'LL change in order for him to gain trust in you, and he should do the same for you.

However, I think this is a waste of time. The amount of damage you've both inflicted on each other here is so huge I just don't think you two can ever get over it. Further, it's obvious that you both want different things. He doesn't want to date you exclusively and is actively looking for other women. You apparently DO want to date him exclusively and are sneaking around behind his back in order to try to make this so. Your goals don't match, and I think it's time to move on and find other people whose goals DO match yours.

This stems from a mistaken belief that you can actually "own" another person. You can't - even if you marry them! They are still free to do anything they please. You've got to get over this idea if you ever want to have any sort of successful relationship.

I hope this serves as an important lesson for you. If you start feeling like you need to snoop in someone else's private business, you should start seeing big red flags all over the place. Something is seriously wrong with your relationship and you'd better get it fixed right away - either within you or the relationship itself - or simply move on.

One final note: if you decide to move on and find someone else, don't make that person responsible for what's going on here. This new guy isn't the cause of all of this. Take each relationship on its own merit while learning from the last.

Best regards...

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Have a love, relationship, sex or man/woman question? I answer all email. You can write to me at dwneder@beingman.com for answers. For more information about my books, "Being a Man in a Woman's World" (volume I & II), and other products visit: www.beingaman.com. Check out the discussion group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/beingaman.

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