At the tail end of a New York winter, I returned home from a weekend girls’ trip and climbed into bed with my then boyfriend, who had spent the previous two days unsupervised. He left for work at 7 a.m. the next morning, kissing me goodbye with the kind of tenderness that makes you forget a man’s capacity to lie. Two hours later, I woke up to find his laptop sitting beside the bed, fully charged and practically begging me to open it. (I think anyone who says they’ve never snooped is either a better person than me or simply less observant.)
We had been dating long enough that I knew all his passwords, not because he shared them with me, but because men type in passwords as if no one else 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 can remember the exact messages I found, which is unfortunate because I’d actually love to forget them. One text from my then boyfriend to his roommate read: “Please don’t tell Eileen.” The roommate responded, “I don’t want to get involved, but if she asks me, I won’t lie.”
That was it. The messages were vague, completely devoid of context, but still enough to send my nervous system spiraling.
My heart started pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. My hands were shaking. Every few seconds, I thought I heard keys jingling outside the apartment door and imagined him catching me mid-investigation, hunched over his laptop—which, in hindsight, probably should’ve been my first clue that what I was doing was wrong.
But also? I was right.
Several months later, after I constructed an elaborate lie about “hearing rumors through the grapevine”—because there was absolutely no way I was admitting I’d gone through his computer—he finally confessed that he had drunkenly cheated on me and brought another girl back to his apartment while his roommate was home. The roommate, apparently, had a stronger moral compass than my boyfriend did.
Looking back on all of this, I realize I should have immediately packed my things, blocked his number, entered my healing era, et cetera. Instead, I stayed long enough to transform into the psychotic, jealous girlfriend who could find evidence of infidelity in the way someone made eye contact. That’s the worst thing about betrayal: It turns you into a person you don’t even recognize.
People love 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 have now been on both sides of the equation. I’ve been the jealous, possessive, phone-checking girlfriend, and I’ve also been in relationships where I felt so secure, I genuinely did not care who texted my partner at 2 a.m., or where they were when they weren’t with me.
The difference, I realized later, wasn’t actually me.
I remember asking a recent ex why I never felt jealous with him. I never went through his phone, never checked his computer, whereas in previous relationships, I could’ve been recruited for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I once knew an ex-boyfriend’s Instagram search history better than I knew my own Social Security number.
My ex looked at me and shrugged. “Because I don’t make you jealous.”
It was such a simple answer that it almost irritated me, but he was right. There are people who create chaos and then blame you for reacting to it. And then there are people who move through a relationship in a way that makes trust feel easy.
