I regularly check my husband’s phone. Here is why

Hi, everybody. I’m 27, he is 29. We have 2 small children, a boy and a girl, 4 and 5. We have been married for 8 years, since we were 19. Before that, we were friends. My husband is an amazing man, a good person, and I know I am lucky to have him in my life. <br><br>We are very close. As in extremely close. I know this may sound old and traditional to a lot of people here, but for us, marriage really is forever. We have that level of mutual respect and love for each other for it to feel that way. <br><br>We do not identify as “traditional marriage people”. We are just two people who care about each other. We are both feminists. We both work, take turns cooking and cleaning, and do our fair share of parenting. We equally contribute to the household. We are each other’s best friend. <br><br>However, I do check his phone daily. I do not snoop in the sense that I go into his phone and start digging through his texts, emails phone calls, deleted messages or voicemails. That’s just too weird and time consuming. I simply take his phone, open Messenger, and scroll through to make sure I am the only woman in there. <br><br>I do not care about his guy friends, but I do care about whether he is talking or sexting with other women. I feel like I have the right to know this type of information. I feel like I need to know it to feel safe in our marriage. <br><br>We have come a long way in our marriage. We have been together for 11 years and we have had our ups and downs. We were young, we made mistakes and we learned from them. Originally, my need to check his phone came from incidents that happened in the past while we were dating and when we first got married. He sexted with other girls and I found out about it. It was also a huge problem when I was pregnant. I was so stressed fearing he was cheating that I developed severely high blood pressure that put my life and our baby’s life at risk. <br><br>Since we got married, we have not had any big fights over other women. There has not been a single incident like that in years. Still, my anxiety does not go away. I still want to make sure no other women are in his phone. But I don’t want him to know. <br><br>I know he will feel like I don’t respect him or trust him. I am sure he will feel hurt and frustrated. Marriage is supposed to be about trust, and for me, it is. But I need to feel safe and secure. I have worked too hard to get to where I am now to let it go to waste because I trusted someone blindly and they lied to me. <br><br>I don’t want him to know because I don’t want to destroy the marriage and our family over a bad habit I have because of my past trauma. Every time I find out my husband was sexting with other girls, it feels like my world is crashing down. I feel so humiliated and nasty that I don’t ever want to go through that again. <br><br>I feel like if I ask him to let me check his phone on a daily basis, he will feel emasculated, insulted, and hurt. We are happy together. We have a healthy marriage and relationship. The last thing I want to do is destroy it. <br><br>That’s why I keep checking his phone.