Real life | 27 September 2012

Some years ago, I had a boyfriend who left himself logged into his Facebook account on my computer. When I sat down at my desk after he had gone to work I was confronted with the screen he had left behind which contained a long list of messages. ‘Oo, goody,’ I thought, ‘suddenly I seem to have acquired lots of friends who have sent me lots of messages.’ Facebook was still in its infancy, you see, and I had never had a message on my account before. I was really excited.

It wasn’t until I started clicking on the messages that I realised they were all from blonde women I didn’t know. The top one was from a particularly fruity young lady chiding me for ripping all the buttons off her dress the night before. ‘How rude,’ I thought. ‘I most certainly did not pull her clothes off in one go and give her a good…Oh!’I was reading his Facebook messages, not mine.

Quite in spite of myself — for I could not have executed a deliberate Facebook hacking in a million years if I tried — I had managed to discover that, while I had been sitting waiting for two hours in a restaurant the night before with an expensive birthday present for my boyfriend, he had been delayed, not by a business meeting, but by a lady with a set of remarkably transient buttons.

Here’s the thing, though. I logged off straight away, without reading anything else, and rang him to tell him the relationship was over. I don’t believe one should read other people’s private messages, even if one can and even if one needs to because one’s boyfriend is a bodice-ripper.

So I am in a bit of a quandary, because I’ve just had a row with the builder boyfriend during which he has thrown back in my face something which he read in my emails.