The Digital World Of Cheating: Facebook, Gchat, Texting, Sexting - Part 1

Here's a situation we can all relate to: you and your friends are out on the town for the night and a guy approaches you. You're flirting and chatting and you even end the night with a little bit of making-out-on-the-dance-floor action. You're totally smitten with this guy.

Later that week as you're walking to class (and thinking about him), you receive an alert on your iPhone or Blackberry from Facebook: the guy from last weekend wants to be friends.

It's an exciting, yet, potentially dangerous exchange.

At first, it's how you two begin to communicate.  Every time you heard that bing-sound from Facebook chat you'd instantly hope it was him — and it usually was!

But fast forward the seven months you've been dating and here's your daily routine:

You wake up, check your e-mail, eat a banana, read Her Campus, check your Facebook and read on your newsfeed that Suzie Shmoo wrote on your boyfriend's wall at 10:32 p.m. last night.

"Suzie Shmoo. Who's Suzie Shmoo?" You think to yourself.

Your curiosity eats away at you, and after he leaves himself signed into Facebook on your computer, you snoop. And there's an entire message thread between your boyfriend and Suzie Shmoo.

"I'm really excited to watch The Social Network with you this Thursday night," she wrote in the Facebook thread. "Do you like red wine or white wine better?"

You're infuriated! He just told you tonight that he was going to a concert with his best friend Johnny on Thursday night, so you confront him. He's angry you snooped. You're angry he lied to you and has plans with Suzie Shmoo.

And you two break up.

Sound familiar? If so, you're not alone. And if this or a similar situation hasn't happened to you personally, Her Campus is here to help you if it ever does— or you can just read on to justify your own past snoop-like behavior.

We've heard the stories of over 65 collegiettes™ and talked to a relationship expert to find out if it's okay to go through your boyfriend's digital world, how to confront him about it if you don't like what you see, and how to recognize whether or not he's cheating.  We also talked to college guys about their thoughts on digital cheating.
Read on!

 
A Snooper's Tale

Snooping. It's controversial and raises many questions. Are you being dishonest by going through his e-mail without him knowing? Does that make you just as "bad" of a person as he is if he has been doing something behind your back? Shouldn't there be privacy in a relationship? I say this because I've been a snooper who has had these exact same thoughts.

There were a couple of times in a past relationship when I went through my boy's phone and Facebook. Why? I was curious and in our long-distance relationship I couldn't help but feel insecure at times.  Did I like what I saw? I guess. There was no Suzie Shmoo-business going on, but he was texting a girl he used to hook-up with before we started dating.

While it was "harmless," it bothered me that he was texting her behind my back. It also bothered him that I went through his phone without him knowing.

51 out of the 65 surveyed collegiettes™ admitted that at one time or another they've snooped. The most common snoop?  Going through his cell phone.  The second? Facebook.

Were these collegiettes™ happy with what they found? 20 said "yes" and 32 said "no."

Here are their tales: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

"Actually, at the time I suspected he was cheating and confronted him about it. He let me go through everything on his Facebook, granted he probably deleted things, but it ended up not being that big of a deal in the end." — Sarah*, sophomore, Arizona State University

"I chose to tell him [that I snooped] because it did kind of bother me. It was harmless, but he spends a bit too much time on his on-line gaming and that's what's irritating. I wanted to see what he was doing that was taking so much of his time." — Andrea*, senior, Western Michigan University graduate

"He was in the room with me at the time and when I did look around we merely laughed at all the posts as he told me about each one," — Mary*, junior, Michigan State University