Don't try to hide it

There isn't any excuse for the foolish flirtation - or possibly worse - of the husband involved here.  But I find the insult to everyone's intelligence on the part of the wife to be more than a little annoying.  It's fine that she caught her husband out, but we're expected to believe that she isn't inherently suspicious when she spent more effort trying to break into her husband's phone than Bletchley Park did in cracking Enigma.

Even now I can’t explain what prompted me to pick up my husband’s mobile phone and trawl through his messages.

I’m not inherently suspicious and had no reason to mistrust him.

On the contrary, had you asked me to describe him I would have said he was dependable, loving and the least likely man in our circle of friends to betray his wife.

It happened on Christmas Eve and I was provoked, at first, just by idle curiosity.

Our two young sons were tucked up in bed, their stockings hung by the fireplace.

The table was set for lunch with family and friends the next day. Mark was busy in the garage.

I had flopped, exhausted, on the sofa and there on the coffee table was Mark’s swanky new mobile.

I had no real sense of purpose when I flicked across to his texts.

It was only when I realized I couldn’t access them because he had protected them with a password that the first glimmer of suspicion struck. Why would he do that?

I’m not particularly proud of myself, but at this point I turned amateur sleuth.

I decided I had to crack the code. I tried many possibilities — our birthdays, those of our sons, the burglar alarm code — but all were fruitless.

Each failure made me more determined and a little more uneasy: Mark had clearly settled on a configuration of letters and numbers that was far from obvious.

Finally, I got it. He’d used his mum’s date of birth. And as I scrolled through his messages I smiled to myself.

I can.  It's called: "she was suspicious, and apparently with good reason".  How is it supposed to be better that one "had no real sense of purpose" instead of bona fide suspicions as an excuse for breaking into someone else's device?  Now, granted, I harbor a genuine hatred for anyone touching my computer for any reason at all, (although I don't care if people use my phone), but regardless, I find it ridiculous when women attempt to pretend they aren't nosy, suspicious creatures who don't hesitate to pry into drawers, phones, computers, and devices.  And when caught, they inevitably try pretend that it was purely an accident that they were sticking their nose where it doesn't belong, about as credibly as the paedophile who attempts to claim that all the images he possesses are there for "research".

Now, I do think that a suspicious spouse, of either sex, has the right to request to see the other's telephone records or Facebook account, given the amount of affairs that have been revealed in such ways.  But that's as far as it goes.  Sometimes suspicion is warranted, but whether it is or it isn't, don't try to pretend that it is anything but what it is.

I'm also struck by a tangential thought.  If we are supposed to believe that an emotional affair is actually worse than a physical affair, doesn't logic necessarily dictate that one should simply go ahead with the latter if the former has already begun?