I 33F checked my partner’s 37M phone after he disappeared for 3 days, ignored me, then i found out he tried to hit on another woman.. according to him the real crime is my checking his phone?
I (33F) have completely hit my breaking point with my partner (37M), and I need an honest outside perspective because the level of gaslighting and deflection is completely unreal.
To be clear about the "snooping" narrative he loves to push: the very first time I ever found anything shady on his phone, I wasn't even snooping. He explicitly asked me to go into his phone to find a specific photo for him. That was how I stumbled across the initial red flags in the first place, which completely broke my trust.
Fast forward to now. He recently went completely missing for 3 straight days. He did not come home, turned his communication off, and ignored me the entire time. When he finally resurfaced, my gut was screaming at me that something was off, so I checked his phone.
I found a massive paragraph he had sent to some random woman. In the message, he was pouring it on thick, telling her she had made his life better than it has been in a long time, calling her a gem, telling her she is gorgeous, saying she is a great hugger, and saying he hopes to hear from her soon. She never even replied to him.
I took her number and messaged her directly from my own phone to ask what happened. She told me that while he was gone ignoring his own home and family, she had bought him food, sat with him, and chatted with him. Then she explicitly told me that he tried to make a move on her, but she rejected him. (I will post screenshots of the texts in the comments).
When I confronted him with all of this, he showed zero remorse, didn't address vanishing for three days, and didn't address attempting to cheat. Instead, he exploded on me, flipped the script entirely, and claimed that me violating his privacy by looking through his phone is far worse than anything he did.
This is not a one-off situation. This is part of a sick, ongoing pattern of betrayal and gaslighting that he constantly tries to dismiss by blaming me:
He has a history of constantly using Locanto to look up women in whatever area he happened to be in.
In the past, when I caught him, I found videos on his phone of him masturbating while saying my sister-in-law’s name. When confronted with that grotesque violation, his excuse was that he made those videos "to teach me a lesson for snooping."
He has a continuous habit of constant lying, vanishing, emotional neglect, chaotic personal drama, and complete deflection whenever he gets caught doing something shady.
Every single time he betrays my trust, he weaponizes the concept of "privacy" and turns my reaction into the crime so he never has to take accountability for his own disgusting actions. He genuinely believes that checking his phone to confirm what he is hiding makes me the villain here.
i'm not saying checking his phone was the right thing to do but when all he does is lie and deflect... is he completely out of line using my snooping to deflect from serial cheating and twisted behavior?
TL;DR: The first time I ever found anything on his phone, he asked me to look for a wiring diagram. Now he disappeared for 3 days, ignored me, and sent a huge message hitting on a woman he met while gone. I messaged her directly and she confirmed he tried to make a move on her and she rejected him.
When confronted, he completely deflected, ignored his attempted cheating and vanishing act, and claims me checking his phone is far worse, following a long history of Locanto use, compulsive lying, and making twisted sexual videos to "punish" me for snooping.