Healthy Relationships: E-Mail Breakups & Text-Message Squabbles
KEEPING ELECTRONIC TABS ON YOUR GUY
It's not only writing e-mails and texts that can make the relationship waters murky: Reading a person's private messages when you suspect that a friend or lover is hiding something is akin to snooping in a locked diary—a practice that can backfire. When 28-year-old Kim Ellis's husband began acting strangely shortly after she gave birth to the couple's first child, she decided to hack into his e-mail account. What she discovered were hundreds of steamy love notes between him and a co-worker (complete with declarations of ever-lasting love, explicit re-caps of "business" lunches and a detailed run-away plan). Kim demanded a divorce.
"Cracking password codes to sneak a peek at a partner's private messages signals big trust problems," says Newman. "While e-mail may confirm infidelity suspicions, it won't reveal any underlying issues leading up to it. Maybe the relationship ran its course. Maybe the affair can be worked through in counseling. Without knowing the core problem, there's no hope of resolving it."
Healthy Relationship How-To:
Confronting a partner about dubious behavior is hard, says Newman, but before breaking into e-mail, it's best to ask your partner face to face, "What's going on?" Don't fall prey to the technology trap. As we've seen in these three scenarios, where feelings are involved, technology is rarely the quick-fix it may at first appear to be.
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