When you get married to someone, you pledge to be their partner throughout life. Sure, life can have a few bumpy roads along the way, but when you trust someone, it's a lot easier to get through those hardships together.
One woman learned the hard way that some of that trust might not have been there before marrying her husband. She asked Reddit whether or not she was wrong to react to the news that her partner had actually run a background check on her before making their marriage official.
"We've been married for 3 years and I only just found out recently that before we got married my husband ran a background check on me and my family," she started, wasting no time getting into her story.
She found out this news accidentally.
That may have led to even more hurt feelings. Not only did he do this, but he kept her in the dark about it. "I found out because we were on vacation with his family and they were doing things I had no interest in participating in," she said. "So I stayed behind."
"He let me borrow his laptop because I left mine at home," she continued. "I made a folder with my name and I was searching for it when I found another folder with my name. The folder was full of reports on me, my family (including extended family) and two of my childhood friends." That, in itself, must have been quite the puzzling find.
She did what anyone would do and read as much as she could.
In doing so, she realized that she, herself, was learning a lot about her friends. In fact, it was information she almost felt bad about. "I read as much of the reports as I could before my husband and his family came home for the day. At first, I was just hurt he would do something like this without talking to me first," she said.
"As I read more and started finding out things about my family and friends that I never even knew, I started to get angry," she admitted. "It's hard to put it into words, but I felt like I had gone cold all over — but also, like it wasn't me reading these things." Stumbling across something so major must have brought out all the emotions.
The second she saw him, she couldn't hold it in.
It's tough to try to predict how you'd react to something like this. But in the case of the original poster (OP), she chose the screaming route. As it turns out, this type of practice is seemingly normal in their family. "When I saw my husband, I exploded on him in front of his family. At first, he tried to say it wasn't a big deal and his cousin chimed in to say it was normal and he wasn't the only one who had done it in their family," she wrote.
"When he saw I wasn't calming down he tried to get me to go into our room so we could talk about it privately," she said. "But I told him I wasn't going anywhere with him and I was leaving. My husband told me to stay and he would sleep somewhere else or he would leave, but we were staying in a house owned by his parents and it felt weird for me to stay and make him leave, especially since his family were there still too. I ended up staying at a hotel for the night and we both flew home shortly after that cutting the vacation short."
She wanted to know whether or not her reaction made sense.
It was a big reaction, but at the same time, it seems like an extremely sensitive thing to hide. For a few Redditors, like LorianLady, one of the oddest parts of the story is the fact that he did a check on everyone. "I can MAYBE, in VERY SPECIFIC circumstances, understand doing a check on someone before you marry them — just in case some kind of scam is going on," they wrote. "But then why would you need to keep the info? Why were so many other people included?"
Spare-Article-396 also thought that including the friends seemed a little strange. "I don't think it's super unusual to do a background check on someone, but the fact that it’s your family, extended family, and friends leads me to believe that this is some YOU-level stalky BS, and I'd freak out too," they wrote. Surely if her friends knew they were included, it'd make their relationship with OP's husband strange as well.
Many felt like it'd be hard to rebuild trust after something like this.
A lot of the questions the husband needed answers to could have come from normal conversations, as TheGingerCynic pointed out. "He did these checks before you got married, married you, and you only found out by accident," they wrote. "So it seems like he never planned on telling you what he'd done. So much for trust in the relationship. If he had concerns, he should've talked with you about them, and spent time actually getting to know the people close to you."
In short, it seems like there's a limit. Doing a Google search before taking the plunge might be one thing, just out of curiosity. But to have an entire background check on your wife and the people she's closest to may be going a little far.
Most people agree that the husband definitely crossed a line.
Not only did he try to control her feelings on it by telling her it's no big deal, but he kept things a big secret. "I met my now husband online and my mom told me about two years into us dating that she had googled him in the beginning, 'just in case,'" explained HeyItsJuls. That’s it. "I can see how my mom would want to check up. But that is so far from what OP's husband did it's not even funny."
While this story demands an update, hopefully OP's husband apologizes to her. What he did was quite upsetting, and it makes sense for her to feel weirded out that he spent so much time investigating her and her family. Let this be a lesson — usually, talking to someone is the best way to get the information you need.
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