How Snooping Is Hurting Your Relationship

Why do so many couples confuse intimacy with needing to know exactly where their partner is and what they are doing? Esther Perel explains.

- Esther Perel

In your ideal relationship, do you hope you’ll tell each other everything? Chances are, yes. We’ve begun to believe that intimacy means we should be able to tell our partners anything, and that we have a right to know everything about their behaviours, thoughts, and feelings. ‘Where did you go?’, ‘Who did you see?’, ‘What are you thinking right now?’. We feel entitled to know all these things immediately and constantly. The result is that a lot of us confuse being close to someone with something more dangerous to relationships: surveillance.

In fact, our desire to know every detail about our partner’s life provides us with a false sense of security. We think, ‘If we were truly close, then he’d tell me everything’. What actually happens is that you have all this data about your partner, but the facts don’t necessarily give you true insight into him or her. Small gestures—Liking someone’s post, Friending, responding or not responding—can take on a much bigger, unintended meaning. We are bombarded with this surveillance data through social media, and we don’t know what is important or not important anymore. That has made many of us afraid of letting our partner have any privacy—we think privacy will cloak infidelity. Even worse, demanding to know all these little details invites a sort of parental mode—‘What did you talk about with your friends?’ or ‘What did you eat for lunch?’—these are things we ask of children. Instead of fueling desire and closeness, they turn our relationships into scavenger hunts. (A better tactic is to ask your partner, ‘What was great about your day?’ or ‘Did anything happen that made you feel down?’ That’s different from tracking their daily data.)