When you marry, you and your spouse become a team, and a big part of this is trusting one another. If you believe your spouse is spying on you, all that trust can come crashing down, and while counseling may help, it is important to get a handle on the situation to help ensure that your parental and financial rights are protected from the outset, in the event that the spying leads to divorce.
Your Privacy
As a married couple, much of your privacy is likely shared. For example, many couples intertwine their finances and their schedules openly. In other words, your marital finances may be completely shared, and you may know where your spouse is at any given moment (due, for example, too tight child-based scheduling constraints). Nevertheless, you naturally have the right to your own private thoughts and actions, and while you might be happy to share this information with your spouse, you certainly do not want him or her to access it as a result of spying.
Spying Has Become a Whole Lot Easier
In order for a nosy spouse to spy in the past, he or she was limited to eavesdropping, intercepting mail, hiring a private detective (in extreme situations), or physically following the other person around, but those days are gone. Technology renders spying opportunities nearly limitless and exceptionally easy. Consider the following:
Your spouse can put a tracking device on your vehicle to know exactly where you go.
Your spouse can anonymously troll your social media and may glean far more information from it than you realize.
Your spouse can pick up your phone and tap into virtually everything you do and say in the course of your day.
Your spouse can watch your itemized phone bill to keep track of whom you are in frequent contact with.
Your spouse can track your online activity in the same way you can track your children’s.
Why Spy?
Spouses spy for any number of reasons, and none of them are good. Once trust has broken down to the point that spying becomes a thing, it generally spells serious trouble. Common reasons that spouses spy include:
In an attempt to control one’s spouse financially or socially
In an attempt to catch one’s spouse out in an affair
In an attempt to gather damning information prior to filing for divorce
Spying is often based on insecurity, and once spying commences, things often escalate from there. If you believe your spouse is spying on you, take the matter seriously.