If You Look Through His Phone, You Have Major Trust Issues

You might sneak a glance of a text he's writing over his shoulder. Or maybe you try to catch his unlock PIN out of the corner of your eye. It's so tempting to conduct a little cellular espionage on your significant other. After all, this is the person with the most unrestricted access to your heart, and therefore, the most capable of crushing it.

The potential to hurt you more than anything in the world is a scary amount of trust to place in a person. So, yeah, that can be just a tad bit difficult for some people (Read: all of us).

And now, more than ever, our phones are basically living autobiographies. Anything you ever wanted to know about a person is contained in a five-inch rectangle: friends, family, contacts, interests, schedule, and probably Flappy Bird.

You've put so much of yourself at stake and there's a simple solution to find out if you made a smart bet. It can be hard to resist.

I can understand it personally. I broke up with an ex I was living with when she left a dirty email from another man up on our computer screen. It made me wonder if I should be more proactive about these things in the future.

But it's not the right to path to take — it never is. The reasoning depends on your particular situation, but there's always a better course to take.

Are you suspicious that he's lying or cheating? This is a straightforward one: you have trust issues. Any relationship expert will tell you that relationships are built upon a foundation of mutual trust. If you've lost your trust in him, you need to address that root cause.

Maybe you find evidence of his indiscretions and are vindicated, but what happens if you search his phone and find nothing? Now you're the person who cannot be trusted.

It's better to address the matter of trust directly with each other. Talk about why you're feeling untrustworthy. Make it clear that you want honesty, even if it means revealing it's over and there's another woman.

If you cannot reconcile this issue and trust each other again, then you're not going to have a successful relationship.

There's always a chance he's an amazing liar and stringing you along, but that just means you'll see other suspicious cracks soon enough. And when you keep finding reasons to lose trust, it's time to go. Wrong or right, you can't be with someone you can't trust.

It's also important to ask yourself WHY you're suspicious. Do you find yourself always feeling this way with everyone? Perhaps you need to look inward and determine if you have trust issues (although that's another article entirely).

Number three is the hardest, and worth leaning on friends to help you determine. But no matter what, when you find yourself distrusting of your partner, the answer is to TALK to them, not spy on them.