I Read My Boyfriend’s Messages and Never Told Him

When I first met my boyfriend, we became acquainted in a dimly lit room at Diva Haunt. Diva Haunt is a sectioned up haunted house that we both inadvertently decided to volunteer at for fun. The building was an old ballerina studio, so it was already a little creepy on its own. He was 28 and I was 22 at the time. I didn’t really find this age difference a problem.

We both had a lot in common, in a somewhat morbid way. He had recently lost his brother a year ago and my mom had passed away six years ago at that point. I didn’t realize this at the time, but the loss of his brother had made him somewhat self destructive. Before we met, after his brother’s untimely death, he had started to date his best friend. Who also happened to be a married woman. She was almost ten years older than him, had been married for a decade, and she was also feeling very discontent with her life.

Their lively affair only lasted exactly eight months, at which point she abruptly broke up with him and moved from California to Philadelphia. He was now the twice-heartbroken man in front of me, who is dressed as a pirate in a haunted house. I had seen him walking around before, sans-makeup and I found him incredibly attractive. I was dressed up as a “dark angel,” which meant that I was wearing a white dress, angel wings, black shadow makeup around my eyes, and contacts that made my eyes look like bLAck holes. You get the idea.

We sat on the floor of the former ballet studio (there was a lull in customers) and we talked about everything from poetry to our dogs to our family.

After we finished with our scaring volunteer work, he brought me back to my apartment on his motorcycle and screamed my name into the wind. It started off about as romantic as can be.

On our first date, he picked me up on his motorcycle again and brought us to the beach. He had remembered my favorite ice cream was mint chip and secretly brought us both pints of ice cream to eat while we watched the wind carry the water to the shore. It was a full moon, and the beach date felt like the scene of a romantic movie.

After a year of playful dating, I noticed he was a little less attentive and more secretive around his phone. I had never looked at it before, we only exchanged messages and sweet pictures to each other when we weren’t around one another.

One night, which happened to be Christmas Eve, I noticed he was being pretty despondent and really strange around his phone. I was wrapping gifts for my father and his parents, while he looked lewdly at his phone and gave me one-word responses. He went to my bathroom to shower before bed and I kind of seized the opportunity to look through his phone.

I didn’t have to search very hard. As soon as I swiped it open, his phone was already on the message section of the OkCupid dating app. I looked through his profile. It listed him as single, featured a profile picture that I had taken of him a few weeks earlier, and shared the interests we had shared with each other privately at the haunted house. For some reason, I wasn’t angry. I was just sad and felt like I should have expected it.

I want to preface this by saying it’s not an excuse, but I have a hard time trusting people. I find that most people are untrustworthy in order to protect themselves from blame or from getting hurt themselves. I felt like he had already been hurt and betrayed by his last partner, so he felt like he should be able to do the same thing.

When he got out of the shower, I was completely closed off to him. He had exchanged messages with five different women and some of them were sexual in nature. I was insecure, I felt guilty, and I couldn’t trust him anymore. Yet, it was the holidays. We had plans to exchange gifts with our families the next day and I wanted to see that through.

The holidays are over now and we’re still together . . . He seemed to open up to me again and became less despondent and I began to wonder if the infidelity was all in my head. I still feel guilty about going through his phone and haven’t done that since. But I feel like revealing it at this point will create another layer of distrust in our relationship. Even though I still think about those messages pretty often, I wonder if I should just let it go because I’m culpable of being dishonest too.