Seek and Ye Shall Find?

by Gwen Cooper — October 19, 2007

I think most people believe that it's easier now to figure out if your spouse or significant other is cheating on you than it used to be. Our world becomes more transparent every day--security cameras have popped up in places where we used to take privacy for granted; everybody has a cell phone and just about every cell phone has a camera, so it's impossible to know who's seen you where or what photographic evidence of what you were doing exists; emails are dated and time-stamped, and no matter how you delete them they exist forever on some server out there in the ether. Computers record every ATM we visit, every credit card charge we make. Looking through old bank records can provide a walking tour of where you were, where you stopped, or who you saw on any given day.

My theory is that all of this only makes it easier to confirm suspicions, not that it gives rise to the suspicions in the first place. Some people out there are just paranoid, I guess, but most of us--when we go looking for evidence of infidelity--have some reason to suspect it. And the things that give rise to our doubts are as low-tech as they ever were--a kiss that feels different than it used to, a distracted air around the house, one too many late nights "at work" or out with friends.

A good friend of mine recently discovered that her husband was cheating on her. It's the kind of story you've heard a million times, about a woman who one day looks through her husband's emails or cell phone text messages, and finds notes confirming a sexual relationship with somebody else. Most of her friends are sympathetic, but there's a certain amount of reproachful clucking that colors their sympathy. That's what happens when you go looking for trouble, they say. She shouldn't have been looking through his emails in the first place. Seek and ye shall find.

Well, the ethics of the situation aren't really my concern. Maybe it was wrong for her to go looking through her husband's emails, and maybe all of us would be happier if we knew less about what our loved ones were doing when we weren't around.

But I think she wouldn't have gone poking around in the first place if something hadn't raised some doubts. Maybe it was something intangible, something she wouldn't have been able to explain easily to her friends or even to her husband. But while most people will say that if you poke around long enough, you're bound to turn up something you won't like, I'm of the school that believes the only people who say that are people who have things to hide.

Seek and ye shall find. Maybe. But here's another old saying that holds an equal amount of wisdom: Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.