On weekdays, with my daughters tucked safely in bed, my husband Ben and I usually get up around 10 p.m.
I always shoo him away first (he takes longer in the bathroom than me) while I stay downstairs under the pretext of being busy. And I do turn off the lights and prepare the breakfast table for the next day.
But when I’m sure the bathroom door is firmly closed, I’ll move on to my main task: unplugging your phone from the charger and entering your password.
Unbeknownst to Ben, I have my routine down to an art; I will first review your WhatsApp messages (including those that have been archived), looking for unknown or abbreviated female names and suspicious emojis.
Then I’ll check your text messages, before checking your emails. If I have time, I look at his private messages on Instagram and Facebook, and who he follows, so I can block them as necessary. While he may be a doting husband and father, I don’t want ideas getting into his head.
Normally I never find anything out of the ordinary, but I know I will sleep more peacefully after doing this clandestine check. When I hear the noise of the bathroom, I charge his phone again and run upstairs.
By now, you probably think I’m a paranoid wife committing a serious intrusion of privacy. However, I’m not the only one who does this.
A recent survey found that 36 percent of women in my age group (36-44) look at their partner’s phone. And rightly so! Because the same research found that 11 percent of men said they had something on their phone that they didn’t want their partner to see.
A recent survey found that 36 percent of women ages 36 to 44 look at their partner’s phone.
While I generally trust my husband, I don’t trust other women. Ben is a handsome man, with a lot of charisma and an easy way of making women feel good about themselves. He does it innocently (I think) but it’s certainly a catch.
My moral compass might prevent me from sleeping with a married man, but I know there are plenty of women who don’t share my views.
And most issues don’t start suddenly. The friendship and ease of conversation between two people that precede an eventual affair are built over time. That is why it is good to be attentive to messages that indicate this early emotional bond.
I’m 39 and Ben is 37, and we’ve been married for five years. We live in the counties and I work from my home gym as a personal trainer while Ben works in the city, which means that at best I only see him a few hours a day each week. I have no way of knowing who he talks to the rest of the time.
We get along well and rarely exchange a cross word, which I attribute to Ben being a good father to our daughters, ages two and four, and a thoughtful husband. However, our work and family commitments mean we’re too exhausted to do much in the evenings or weekends – and that includes sex.
Whereas before we made love up to four times a week, now we do it twice a month, if that. While I wouldn’t say Ben is unhappy with our diminished sex life, I know from the fact that he makes silly insinuations about going to bed early that he misses it.
That’s why I keep my guard up when it comes to other women.
Although Ben is unaware of my phone checks (and frankly, I know he would be horrified), I feel like my past actions gave him fair warning.
We met when I was in my early 30s, when he started chatting to me in a pub and ended up in mine that night. After a month we were joined at the hip. When, five months later, he told me that he was in love with me and wanted to be exclusive, the first thing I did was ask him to check his phone.
Stunned, he handed it to her without saying a word. Even today I shudder when I think about what I found. I read dozens of (admittedly old) messages from ex-girlfriends and one-night stands. I was shocked.
It was clear that, before we met, Ben had been shamelessly flirting with multiple women at once. So I thought it best to eliminate all temptation and systematically blocked and deleted the numbers of any woman who seemed to be anything more than part of my family.
You might think I was exaggerating, but I know men (I have four brothers and they’ve cheated on me in the past), so I didn’t feel guilty at all. Ben was amazed. But when I told him I’d only keep his numbers if he wanted to sleep with them again, he threw up his hands in defeat. And when I pressed him about his past behavior, he sheepishly confessed that he had never been faithful before our relationship.
On the surface I took it as a sign that he loved and respected me enough to tell me. But my inner voice was another matter.
However, my strategy clearly worked, because within a year he proposed to me and we were married six months later.
One of my conditions was to be able to check their emails as well. I have all their passwords carefully written down on my phone.
Ben told me that he asked his male friends and colleagues what they thought before agreeing. Apparently, the consensus was that my behavior wasn’t that out of the ordinary; his boss even told him, ‘a happy wife leads to a happy life, Ben!’ It was while I was pregnant with our oldest son that I started doing nightly sweeps of his phone.
Although I had withdrawn from our social life, Ben still had the occasional drink after work. Of course, my hormones made me feel more paranoid than warranted, but I wanted to know if there was even a hint that something was wrong.
In general, my spying has not discovered anything, but there was a serious scare.
I had just had our second daughter and felt extremely vulnerable. Then Ben started staying out late, attending networking events, and coming home later than agreed.
I could see that he was receiving messages from a woman he didn’t know setting up lunch dates at fancy restaurants. All my senses were on red alert.
I didn’t want him to know that I’d been checking his messages, but I finally exploded and asked him if he’d like to stay home while I went out to lunch with a strange man.
It turned out that the “third party” was a recruitment consultant; Ben was receiving dinner and a glass of wine for another job at a rival company. In my defense, if he had told me, I wouldn’t have had to call him names I’m not proud of. On that occasion, we both overlooked my blatant attempt to cover up my spying.
Nowadays, he still has to socialize frequently for work, so I keep checking his messages to reassure myself.
You’d think I should be done with all this spying by now, since Ben hasn’t given me any reason to doubt him. But the experiences of my friends (many of whom also secretly check their husbands’ phones) have taught me that it’s important to remain vigilant.
A girlfriend discovered that her husband was sending messages to an old flame. Another realized that her husband had been “texting” another woman in bed while she was sleeping. We all know that the main cheating accessory is not a best friend who provides an alibi, but your phone.
However, as hypocritical as it may seem, I don’t share my own passwords with Ben. And I would never leave my phone lying around for him to check.
Why should I do it? As I work alone from home, I don’t have colleagues to chat with in the office or friends to meet up with during my lunch break, so I see my phone as a place to be “me”, which sometimes includes ringing I’m gone with my friends about my husband (before quickly deleting my rants).
I would be very angry if Ben had the audacity to spy on me. I am the one who keeps family life together; You have no reason to assume that I am anything other than the innocent party.
But I see no reason to change my own behavior. I would never stop working for Ben, despite all those networking events. So the way I see it, since he knows pretty well what I do at home all day with our daughters, this is just a way to level the playing field, without leaving me resentful.
And if I keep my eyes peeled for any warning signs, if he ever considers gambling, I’ll be able to nip it in the bud. Which is the best for both of us.
Nessa Henderson is a pseudonym. The names have been changed.
As told to Samantha Brick