Is an open phone policy good for your relationship? It ended mine…

Secrets to a happy marriage? According to a recent* study conducted with 2,000 couples who have lasted more than 10 years, it all comes down to regular sex (seven times a month), taking an equal load of the domestic drudge (ha!), and sharing the same sense of humour (perhaps, in this case, mirth at the previous answers).

So far, so predictable. The one outlier? Having an “open phone policy”, which, for the uninitiated, means agreeing you can look through your partner’s phone. And they yours. Messages. Browsing history. Bank transactions. Moaning WhatsApps with your mates. Ev-er-y-thing.

The news makes me a little anxious. Because my phone is a window into the deepest darkest recesses of my brain that I don’t want anyone, least of all my boyfriend, to see.

The creep of influence our small, sleek smartphones have had on our love lives is undeniable. It extends to everything from how we find love to how we can lose it when we get it thanks to endless phubbing (choosing to focus on your phone not your partner) and the potential for a hotline to an affair. So, setting ground rules around how we use phones has become an essential part of today’s relationship hygiene.

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Joanna Harrison, a couples therapist and author of the book Five Arguments All Couples (Need to) Have: And Why the Washing-Up Matters, says: “I think that ground rule setting around phones is now an essential within a relationship. Because if the way your partner uses their phone is problematic or hurtful to you it’s a scab that is going to be constantly picked at.”

When I got married in 2003 my ex and I had brick phones and they didn’t constitute any kind of threat to our relationship. They weren’t good for much beyond playing Tetris and very basic messaging. In fact, so time-consuming was it to type one sentence, that if you tried to flirt with someone, chances are you’d die of old age before any consummating could take place.

Back then my ex-husband and I knew each other’s passwords, and as tech progressed and our phones were upgraded, we kept the same passwords and could have, at any time, looked at each other’s phones. But we didn’t. Because we had total faith in each other. So, before they were a thing, we had an open phone policy. Until we didn’t.

It was seeing messages flashing up on my ex-husband’s phone home screen that made me feel anxious about his relationship with a colleague.

A few days later, after having never looked in his phone before, I looked closer and saw his message history with her was wiped. I voiced my concerns and they were dismissed. After that, he changed his password and got an additional phone. It was everything I needed to know, and more evidence was quickly discovered. Devastated is an understatement and the rest is relationship history.

So, going forward, do I need to upgrade my relationship phone policy with my new boyfriend, which is currently firmly closed? Harrison, ironically, posits that perhaps an open phone policy can be symptomatic of a happy relationship because “it indicates a healthy level of trust between two people.”

Which unnerves me a little, because do I trust my boyfriend? Yes. Would I want him looking through my phone? No.

Because now, unlike in my married days, our phones contain so much more information. Banking, health, emails, a browser history that reveals my penchant for googling people’s ages. And the tech makes it so easy to jot down notes and messages, so I have reams of words that are incredibly personal, intimate, and thus exposing.

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OK, so what Harrison is saying here is that the gold standard is that you have access to each other’s phones (a gesture of true trust), but you never feel the need to look – but imagine what they would find if they did?

I’m not even talking about affairs. The truth is my mates and I often say things about our partners we wouldn’t want them to read. But sometimes you just need an outlet for what is bugging you that day.

Luckily, Harrison endorses this kind of letting off steam and says it might even help rather than harm a relationship, because you’re airing frustrations in a supportive community. But you can see how quickly unsupportive it could become if your other half even got a whiff of what you were saying.

Harrison concedes that mystery is a good thing in a relationship too. “We need some independence from each other so that there are two different people who can interest each other rather than being a single entity. And what if we were buying a lovely present for our partner or planning a surprise party?”

If having a surprise party being organised for you is the best-case scenario for wanting phone secrecy, the worst case is surely cheating. There’s a reason many of us have a fear of the phone – it’s because messaging accelerates and legitimises intimacy – thus aiding and abetting infidelity. It’s just so easy to drop in kisses by “accident” or flirt in a way you wouldn’t in real life.

Harrison agrees: “I do think that messaging is exciting and creates a momentum of its own; certainly, my experience across couples of all ages is that that is how betrayal often gets going.”

That was my experience, which leads me to believe that an open phone policy won’t save your marriage from an affair, because if the intent is there, then there will always be workarounds.

And even if your reasons for snooping are more pedestrian, ie checking their Amazon habit, I still think that an open phone policy should be approached with caution. The chances are you are going to misinterpret messages, feel affronted by the chats with their mates, and miffed at the memes that they’ve viewed that are against your moral code. Plus, you can’t unsee things. You have to deal with them and, as one colleague recently found out, someone’s browsing history can open up a world of pain.

The simple fact is you cannot control other people. Monitoring their phone won’t mould them into exactly who you want them to be. Instead, it will probably foster a destructive feeling of mistrust.

No, I believe your phone and phone secrets are not for sharing.

Speaking of which, *lowers voice*, “Hey Siri, how often should a couple be having sex?”

*The survey of 2,000 couples was conducted by ITVX to launch the new ITVX drama Love & Death

Follow @lifesrosie on Instagram, author of How to Heal a Broken Heart