Somebody Did Their Homework
A twenty-year-old finds a deleted message on her boyfriend's phone, and the man is comparing quotes.
0:00 / 10:18
Somebody Did Their Homework
Episode guide
Three stories this morning, all posted in the last day, and in every one of them somebody did their homework on another person instead of talking to them.
A twenty-year-old finds a deleted conversation on her boyfriend's phone: he has been asking a private investigator what it would cost to follow her. A man is shown the group chat where four of his girlfriend's friends have been going through screenshots of his texts. And a boyfriend enters his girlfriend's three-year-old son into a LEGO competition, then lists five of the ten prize slots as sets for himself to keep at his own flat.
These are anonymous posters' accounts, paraphrased so nobody can be identified. A Reddit post is one person's version of events rather than proof of every claim in it, and a comment section is a crowd of readers reacting, not a verdict. Where a poster reports what somebody else said or did, this piece repeats it as the poster's account, and no outcome is added where the source does not provide one.
The quote
She is twenty and he is twenty-five, and she opens the post by saying she has never cheated. She then says she is not going to pretend she has been flawless: near the start of the relationship she unblocked a man she had hooked up with before, and she did not tell her boyfriend that she had a history with one of her friends. She calls it horrible.
She says he told her he had forgiven her, and that he has raised it at every opportunity since.
Last week she went to a bar with a friend, and she had invited him. He did not come, and as far as she can tell he did not raise it with her either. What he did was go looking for a professional. She found a deleted conversation on his phone, and she posted it in full.
The investigator opens with a pitch about proof of infidelity and ideas to share. His first reply is that he would like to know the pricing. The investigator then offers two products — cloning the target's phone, or surveillance, following her and taking photographs. His answer is the one that has stayed with me all morning: "Thank you but I found better pricing elsewhere." 1
Confronted, he moved through three explanations in one sitting: it was an advertisement he clicked and his number happened to go in and they happened to message him; then it was a paranoid episode. She notes that he has no condition that would explain paranoid episodes, unless you count smoking, and she also notes that he would not attend couples or individual therapy for the whole relationship, though he is now in therapy and telling her how much she means to him.
She is not claiming to be the wronged party from the beginning. She crossed a line a year ago and says so, and she describes walking on eggshells since, trying not to trip that distrust again. But the two honest answers to a broken trust are forgiving it or leaving. What she found was a third: a year of auditing, and then a quote for photographs.
The committee
He is thirty-one, she is twenty-nine, and they are six weeks and five dates in. Over dinner they are joking about how awkward they were at the start when she laughs and mentions "the debate" about whether he was genuinely nervous or only pretending to be.
He asks what debate. She has a group chat with four friends and she sends them screenshots — not accounts of her dates, screenshots of the conversations — and she pulls it up at the table because she thinks he will enjoy it.
Some of it is funny: him asking her out, him suggesting restaurants, him attempting to flirt.
Then he sees a message he sent after their third date, in which he said he had not dated much since a difficult breakup and sometimes overthinks things because of it. He had not asked her to fix anything; it was simply something personal he decided to hand her. That message was screenshotted too, and the friends had a conversation about it. One thought it was sweet that he was honest. Another suggested he might not be over his ex. 2
He went quiet, then said he was not thrilled about personal messages being passed around. Her answer was that her friends are her support system and that everyone discusses the people they are dating with their friends. He agrees with the principle — he talks to his best friend about dating too — and draws the line at the difference between saying "I'm not sure how she feels about me" and forwarding somebody's exact words for four people to pick apart.
She apologised, and she seemed genuinely surprised that he minded. What he wants to know is whether a boundary is reasonable and how to raise it without sounding like a boyfriend cutting his partner off from her friends. The distinction available to him is between being close to your friends and keeping a file on somebody who is not in the room.
The fine print
Her son is three. Her boyfriend is not his father, which she states at the top of the post because it turns out to matter. A toy store was running a competition: enter a child, and the prizes are LEGO sets worth up to fifteen hundred dollars, with up to ten sets listed by name and product number.
He entered her son without asking her. The entry form carried a checkbox confirming that the person submitting was the child's parent or guardian, and he ticked it and wrote his own name. She says that is not what made her angry.
Five of the ten sets he listed were for himself — not sets to build with the child, but sets for him to build and keep at his own apartment. His explanation was that he wanted to get as close to the fifteen-hundred-dollar ceiling as possible, and he had a plan to enter the boy in a second competition at a different store and list only sets for himself there. 3
She says she was angry enough to be physically shaking, and that she did not shout, swear at him or call him names. She told him she was livid; she also says she thought the original idea was lovely, that he wanted to win her son LEGO, and that she would have agreed to it if he had asked her first.
Then she does what posters on that subreddit so often do: she mentions that she is autistic, that she struggles to judge whether her reactions are proportionate, and asks whether she overreacted. The two problems she identifies are exact — he signed a guardian's consent for a child who is not his, and he spent half of that child's chances on himself — and she raised both at normal volume.
One question for your group chat
One man priced up surveillance on his girlfriend and compared quotes. Four friends built a case file out of one man's messages, with a theory about his ex attached. And one man read the small print of a toddler's LEGO competition and came back with five sets for his own flat.
None of them was confused about what he was doing, which is what makes the three so easy to pass around. All of that thinking went into a person rather than into a conversation with one.
So: who in your life has clearly done their homework on you? Not the friend who knows the story — the one with dates, screenshots and a theory. And when you found out, did they tell you themselves, or did you find the notes?
References
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