I’ll never stop SNOOPING through my husband’s phone at night

On weeknights, with my daughters safely tucked up in bed, my husband Ben and I usually head up around 10pm.

I always shoo him up first – he takes longer in the bathroom than I do – while I remain downstairs under the guise of pottering. And I do turn off the lights and prepare the breakfast table for the following day. But when I’m sure the bathroom door is firmly locked, I’ll turn to my main task: unplugging his phone from his charger and keying in his passcode.

Unbeknown to Ben, I have my routine down to a fine art; I’ll go through his WhatsApp messages first (including checking any that have been archived), scanning for any unfamiliar female names, or abbreviated ones, and any suspicious emojis.

I’ll then go through his texts, before scrolling through his emails. If I have time, I look at his private messages on Instagram and Facebook, and who he’s following, so I can block them as needs be. While he might be an adoring husband and father, I don’t want him to get ideas in his head.

I never normally find anything out of the ordinary, yet I know I’ll sleep more easily having done this clandestine check. When I hear the flush of the loo I pop his phone back on charge and bolt upstairs.

At this point, you’ll probably think me a paranoid wife committing a grievous intrusion of privacy. Yet I’m not alone in doing this.

A recent survey found that 36 per cent of women in my age bracket (36-44) look through their partner’s phone. And with good reason! Because the same research found that 11 per cent of men said they had something on their phone they don’t want their partner to see.

While I do, as a rule, trust my husband, I don’t trust other women. Ben is a good looking man, with bags of charisma and an easy way of making women feel good about themselves. He does it innocently (I think) but he’s undoubtedly a catch.

My moral compass might prevent me from ever sleeping with a married man, but I know there are plenty of women who don’t share my views.

And most affairs don’t start on the spur of the moment. The friendliness and conversational ease between two people that pre-dates an eventual affair is built up over time. So it’s good to be on your guard for messages that indicate this early emotional bond.

I’m 39 and Ben is 37, and we’ve been married for five years. We live in the shires and I work from my home gym as a personal trainer while Ben works in the City – meaning I only see him, at best, for a few hours a day in the week. I have no way of knowing who he talks to the rest of the time.

We get along well, and rarely exchange a cross word, which I put down to Ben being such a good dad to our daughters, aged two and four, and a considerate husband. Yet our work and family commitments mean we’re too exhausted to do a great deal in the evenings or weekends, and that includes sex.

Where once we made love up to four times a week, now it’s twice a month – if that. While I wouldn’t say Ben is unhappy about our diminished sex life, I know from the fact he makes silly innuendos about getting an early night that he misses it.

That’s why I keep my guard up when it comes to other women.

Though Ben doesn’t know about my phone checks – and, frankly, I know he’d be horrified – I feel my past actions did give him fair warning.

We first met when I was in my early 30s, when he started chatting to me in a pub, and he ended up at mine that night. Within a month we were joined at the hip. When, five months later, he told me he was in love with me and wanted us to be exclusive, the first thing I did was ask to go through his phone.

Stunned, he wordlessly handed it over. Even today I shudder when I think about what I found. I read dozens of (admittedly old) messages from ex-girlfriends and one-night stands. I was appalled.

It was clear that, before we met, Ben had unashamedly been having dalliances with several women at a time. So I thought it best to remove all temptation – and systematically went through blocking and deleting numbers of any woman who looked to be anything other than family.

You may think I was overreacting, but I know men – I’ve got four brothers, and I’ve been cheated on in the past – so I didn’t feel guilty at all. Ben was astounded. But when I argued he’d only keep their numbers if he wanted to sleep with them again, he flung his hands up in defeat. And when I pressed him about his past behaviour, he sheepishly confessed he’d never been faithful before our relationship.

On the surface I took it as a sign he loved and respected me enough to tell me. But my inner voice was another matter.

However, my strategy clearly worked, because within a year he had proposed and we married six months later.

One of my provisos was being able to go through his emails too. I have all his passwords carefully noted on my phone.

Ben did tell me he asked his friends and male colleagues what they thought before agreeing. Apparently, the consensus was my behaviour wasn’t that out of the ordinary – with his boss even telling him ‘a happy wife leads to a happy life, Ben!’ It was while I was pregnant with our eldest that I started doing the nighttime sweeps of his phone.

While I’d bowed out of our social life, Ben still had the odd drink after work. Granted, my hormones made me feel more paranoid than it warranted, but I wanted to know if there was even a hint of something amiss.

By and large, my snooping hasn’t uncovered anything, but there was one serious scare.

I’d just had our second daughter, and was feeling extremely vulnerable. Then Ben began staying out late, going to ‘networking’ events and coming home later than agreed.

I could see he was getting messages from a woman I didn’t know setting up lunch dates at posh restaurants. All my senses were on red alert.

I didn’t want him to know I’d been checking his messages, but in the end I just exploded, asking him how he’d like to stay at home while I went out for lunches with an unknown man.

It turned out the ‘third party’ was a recruitment consultant; Ben was being wined and dined for another job with a rival firm. In my defence, if he had told me I wouldn’t have had to call him names I’m not proud of. On that occasion, we both overlooked my shameless attempt to cover up my snooping.

Today, he still often has to socialise for work, so I keep checking his messages to reassure myself.

You might think I should have packed in all this spying by now, given Ben has given me no reason to doubt him. But the experiences of my friends – many of whom also secretly look at their husband’s phones – have taught me it’s important to stay vigilant.

One girlfriend discovered her husband was messaging a former flame. Another realised her husband had been ‘sexting’ another woman in bed while she lay sleeping. We all know the main accessory to cheating isn’t a best mate who’ll provide an alibi, but your phone.

However, as hypocritical as this might sound, I don’t share my own passwords with Ben. And I’d never leave my phone lying around for him to look through.

Why should I? As I work from home alone, I don’t have colleagues to chat to in the office, or friends to meet up with on my lunch break, so I view my phone as a place to be ‘me’ – which at times includes sounding off with my girlfriends about my husband (before swiftly deleting my rants).

I’d be very cross if Ben had the audacity to snoop on me. I’m the one holding family life together; he has no reason to assume I’m anything but the innocent party.

But I don’t see any reason to change my own behaviour. I’d never stop Ben working, despite all those networking events. So the way I see it is that – given he pretty much knows what I am up to at home all day with our daughters – this is just a way of levelling the playing field, without leaving me feeling resentful.

And by keeping my eyes peeled for any warning signs, then should he ever consider playing away, I’ll be able to nip it in the bud. Which is what’s best for both of us.