he said, she said: what kinda bullshine is that tiger woods?


This He Said, She Said was filmed prior to Tiger Woods’ Ambien sex "transgressions" and the subsequent release of his alleged voicemail message:

"Hey it’s Tiger, I need you to do me a huge favor. Can you please take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone and may be calling you. So if you can, please take your name off that. Just have it as a number on the voicemail. You got to do this for me. Huge. Quickly. Bye."

Should you trust blindly in your significant other, living in a "love is blind" world of "ignorance is bliss," or is it sometimes okay to say, "What’s mine is yours, so, um, show me yours… now!"

Image
SHARE

COMMENTS:

  1. I don’t think that emails and texts should be fair game for the partner to read, because it’s a part of each partner having their own life. Not secrets, or cheating, obviously, but private conversations with friends. What if your partner had emailed a friend to complain/vent about a problem with you, or get advice? That’s not something you want to or should read, but that doesn’t make it disloyal to you. The other day you posted about a need for continued independence and autonomy in a committed relationship. I think that this feeds into that. Not everything needs to be shared, and ot in the open.

    That said, I’m glad that it worked out for you two, on a LIMITED time-frame. I think that’s key. For some insecure women (or men), this type of behavior could be expected to go one indefinitely, and I think that’s not okay. That’s when the other person feels inherently not trusted, and it just erodes the relationship. Also when Phil said “just stop having all these issues” I think it showed that there is no clear way to get past trust issues, and I think he kind of proved Stephanie’s point that both partners can’t just cling to principals when the other needs a little extra support.

    Also it was nice to see you guys not arguing in one of these :) Nice t-shirt Phil :p

  2. I completely agree with Stephanie. I caught my boyfriend of 4 years cheating on me via a text message I found on his cell phone. As a result when I started dating my husband, I had some major trust issues. Thankfully he was very understanding of where I was coming from and wanted to do everything he could to help me get past that and help make our relationship as strong as possible. He was completely OK with me picking up his phone or reading a text that someone had sent him. Eventually that trust was built and (as Stephine mentioned) I no longer felt that I needed to do that.

    1. Ditto. Also had major trust issues and had we been in the age of email and texts I would have hoped my husband would have understood and let me peek if I so felt the need. Maybe I am glad the issue never came up, heh. Being married 17 years now we are doing great :)

  3. I just hope that Elin Nordegren-Woods doesn’t accept the “Kobe Bryant Special” in exchange for her (public) forgiveness and support.

    She can do what she wants for her family, but I’d be very disappointed if she’s the type of woman who can be bought with something sparkly.

    p.s. I really like the side-part, Stephanie.

  4. I don’t think it’s always about being insecure. Sometimes you just know something is up, therefore you look to either confirm or deny. If there is nothing I then can see it being an insecurity issue. But when you look and then get confirmation of your “something is up”, then I say go for go for it ~ snoop away. Current media topic on every magazine, radio station, tv channel is talking about it. To her I say “good for you”. She got her confirmation. What she decides to do with the information is up to her. I know what I would do!

  5. Stephanie, I get what you are saying in many ways and can see how I’d react the same way under the circumstances. I am curious, though- Have you ever had the opposite situation where you busted a man you were dating snooping through your stuff? I have and felt absolutely violated and was SUPER pissed about it. I’d be curious to know how many snooping females would accept it if the shoe were on the other foot.

  6. I don’t think it is always about insecurity. I also caught my ex-husband this way. I checked his email. He had a “friend” who had no idea he and I had gotten married months earlier. They had been flirting and arranging to meet up. This is the same friend that he told me he had to go and see (I wasn’t invited and it was in another city) because she had leukemia and “it might be the last time I see her!” I still don’t know if that was true or not. Don’t really care to.

    With my current husband, I admit I have checked before. But the longer we’re together, the less I worry. In fact, I don’t worry at all anymore. I figure if the same sort of thing happens again, I’ll eventually find out and then I’ll move to Greece and just have a nice string of lovers. Not going to marry again! hehe

  7. Wow. I agree with Phil and Kat (poster above) about this. If you have reason to suspect, then ask. If you don’t, but still need to read his emails and texts, no amount of that is going to allow you to trust yourself or your partner. If he really is cheating, he can always get another phone/email address…

  8. I gotta agree with Dawn on this one.

    I was never a snooper before I met my ex. In fact, I prided myself on the fact that I never needed to snoop with boyfriends and would give so much shit to any of my female friends who did snoop.

    Then I dated my ex…a chronic liar…a man who would lie about the dumbest, most pointless shit and it made me completely paranoid. I snooped. I didn’t just snoop, I completely raided his life. I even got into his bank accounts to see what type of activity was going on.

    Sure, you could say I was insecure, but not as a person, it was me being insecure in a relationship with HIM.

    I completely agree with Phil. I think it’s bullshit for any woman to ASK a man to allow her to view his private stuff. If he offers it’s one thing, but to request to read over his shoulder? Fuck that.

    While you say Phil made the right decision in allowing you to snoop through his stuff to prove he was faithful, I think it was a manipulative move on your part to use your past as an excuse for the desire to do snoop. You’re lucky Phil didn’t tell you to get lost.

    And while you say he made the right move and Phil says you evolved…well, perhaps he hasnt given you reason to question him, but lord help you if he does…b/c that shit is going to get uuuuuglay.

  9. You know what? I am with Phil on this. I think two individuals coming together in an intimate relationship need their own space (whether diaries, their own emails, friendships, etc). This “separateness” is where the really interesting energy comes from — what you don’t know about the person — then when you get together, it is really interesting.

    Otherwise, it gets kind of sexless and turns into a brother/sister companionate kind of thing.

    My BF now — I realized early in our relationship that he occasionally brought his BB into the bathroom with him when he showered, etc, in the morning, and I thought it was kind of funny as I had never seen anyone do that. Eventually I asked him about it, and wondered if it meant something I wasn’t figuring out, etc. Did it mean he had a secret family he didn’t want me to know about? Did he not trust me?

    He said that he had once been in a relationship where he came out of the bathroom and the woman he had been seeing was going through his emails, etc. Apparently he got dressed, picked up the BB and walked out, and it was over. (I guess she had trust issues or whatever.)

    So, I think I agree with Phil, and with him. If you want to know something, ask me, I will be as honest as I possibly can. But if I walked in on a BF, or husband, going through one of my diaries (and I have a lot of them), I would feel enormously violated. Much in the same way that I assume my BF would not go through MY emails…

    I also agree with an earlier poster — I am somewhat fatalistic, and if something is going to happen, someone is going to cheat, etc, that they are going to do it anyway, and you will find out eventually. If someone wants to be with someone else (especially in this world) they are going to figure out a way how to do it.

    Also, maybe I have more of a masculine mind, but I find that I tend to agree with Phil on most of the “conversations.” I think you are great Stephanie, and love your writing, and BEAUTIFUL photography but wow, sometimes you just talk so much, and it seems that you always have to have the last word, get your point across, win the argument, etc (and I say this with the greatest respect for your talent) that BOY, my head sometimes hurts just listening to it.

    But maybe bec I did not come from a family background where we talked about everything.

    But sometimes I think Phil is kind of a saint.

    And again — no disrespect!

  10. My husband occasionally lets slip something he found out from reading my Facebook page. He doesn’t have a facebook page, so the only way he’s seeing this is by logging into my account. It doesn’t bother me – in fact, I think it’s funny. He knows all my passwords and I know his, but I don’t think either of us regularly check each other’s accounts.

    The only issue I have (which is not a huge issue) is that he likes to keep his stuff separate from mine, as if we’re roommates. To me, it seems like he’s always prepared for a quick getaway. To him it’s his stuff and he just doesn’t want it intermingled with other stuff. Like, when his 401K statement arrives in the mail, he carries it up and puts it in a box in HIS closet, rather than in the file cabinet where all of my 401K statements and our taxes are filed. It’s weird – we have this big house full of my stuff mixed with the kid’s stuff, but hubby/dad has his own spaces that no one is supposed to touch. It just seems odd to me.

  11. I think if you feel the intuition to know and see all you deserve it. Let’s face it, a woman’s intuition is usually dead on.

    Great to see you and Phil sort of getting along :)

  12. Hi Stephanie,
    I’ve been following your blog for a few years now, however, never posted a comment.
    Did you notice that Phil never looks at you when he is talking (or when you are talking)? He does not even look at you when he is done speaking to check for your reaction. My husband only ever does this when we are fighting and it really freaks me out. I keep on telling him “could you please look at me when you are talking to me”. So when I look at your “he said, she said” footage I always get the impression that Phil is really annoyed. Doesn’t this irritate you?

    1. I wuold really like to see Stephanie’s response to this. I never noticed that before, but it’s true. Does he do this with other people, too?

  13. Does anyone else feel Phil is very entertaining? I imagine he has a great sense of humor and great personal confidence, to be doing public stuff like this when it’s not really his gig. He is endlessly rational and consistent while in a relationship with a verbal, emotional, intelligent “crazy women”. Highly entertaining. I always enjoy these segments. Reminds me of my 21 year relationship with my wife.

  14. HUGELY agree with you Stephanie on this one. In the beginning of my relationship I seriously doubted my partner because of my own past experience (as we all do) and I realized it’s a battle of FEAR vs INTUITION. Sometimes what we fear, we ‘think’ it’s intuition. We can be wrong. And it’s nice to be able to prove it to ourselves (sometimes through our partner) by getting that out of our systems and building that self trust and stronger ties with our loved one without LOSING them to learn a lesson. I was lucky enough to learn that he wouldn’t leave me because I did that. He just accepted my insecurity and did the same to teach me a lesson. *HA* We’re fine now :)

  15. Stephanie, I can see your side of this regarding the insecurity issue however I tend to agree with the earlier posters that it is not just about insecurity. I think you can be insecure but not invade your partners privacy. I believe it is a trust issue. I am an insecure person, have been most of my life but I don’t check my husband’s emails or texts, etc because I feel it would be invading his privacy. I know I would feel that way if he did that to me. I trust him and have nothing to be suspicious about. I think if one person has reason to suspect something is up then that is when checking their private stuff will be more likely to happen.

    In my opinion…bottom line here is trust…

  16. If there’s one thing I’ve learned by going through a very stressful past few years (with several more to go)and seeing how this stressful time has impacted my relationships is that when something breaks it’s usually because there were cracks there before, but there wasn’t enough pressure to reveal them.

    What does that have to do with today’s topic? well, that in my opinion a broader insecurity usually drives the need to check email, texts, etc of a partner who has otherwise not shown signs of infidelity. a past experience with cheating or loss may have driven the desire to check a partner’s messages, but as many posters here have attested, if one does not have larger self-esteem or trust issues that desire fades. their anxiety about fidelity was situational, based on past experiences, and once they see that the situation is not the same the checking urge is no longer relevant (and because they are not so overwhelmed with anxiety they are capable of seeing the situation objectively, and not through the lens of the past). if the checking urge does not go away then i’d wonder if they are a) actually in some sort of pattern of dating untrustworthy people or b) have a deeper issue about feeling good enough, want-able enough, trust, whatever, something that can never be comforted by checking messages because that just gets to the surface of the problem, not the source of the anxiety.

  17. Can I just say it’s so refreshing that you and your husband, Phil, don’t feel the need to agree about everything!

    I think if one partner is very persistent about boundaries and privacy, it provokes insecurity in the other. Ultimately, you teach each other to trust, which I think involves some sensitivity and flexibility during the learning process. In other words, I agree with you, Stephanie, for the most part.

  18. I don’t get the obsession with invading your partner’s privacy. You live with the damn guy, are making a life with him, are having sex with him, you have the god damn right to check his emails ever so often if you feel like it. Hopefully if your married to the guy, you are friends with him and if you’re embarassed to not find anything or care about what you find, you will sleep better. I trust my guy but I also believe if guys find themselves with the opportunity to cheat or very big egos or an imbalance of power, they will cheat. Same goes for women.
    So marriage isn’t a business. You won’t get fired for snooping.

    1. I would “fire” my husband if I caught him snooping. If he’s snooping, it means he doesn’t trust me. If he doesn’t trust me then what the heck are we doing being married to each other?

      1. This “doesn’t trust me” crap sound pretentious. I’d fire
        my husband for being so stuck up in his ways for not sharing
        a stupid email with me.

        I’m entitled to know if my husband becomes a porn addict while
        married to me. I’m entitled to know if he becomes a gambler/
        drinker/criminal/etc.

        So Excuse me for bursting your bubble, but you WOULD NOT
        SIT around and protect his privacy if you felt he were up
        to no good. Same goes for him if he thought you were
        getting laid by his best friend. And if you were to continue
        advocating privacy as essential to marriage while these
        things were going on, you’d be dumb. Sorry.

        1. Phew! sounds like someone’s hit a nerve here Carolina – angry much?
          Why are you so upset that some of us simply choose to trust our husbands/partners, and find the idea of snooping around in someone else’s private life utterly repugnant? Believe it or not, not all men are brainless cheats who can’t control themselves – that idea in itself is hugely disrespectful (however if this is the only kind of many you’ve known, then I apologise as that is very sad).
          Some of us are genuinely just confident enough in both our relationships and ourselves, that we don’t need to demean ourselves by lowering our self respect (or respect for our partner and relationship) and snooping.
          If I were you I’d check my spelling and grammer before I called anyone else dumb.

    2. I am not married, but if my BF was going through my “stuff” (my notebooks, diary, email, BB, etc) he would be out. Over. Gone. We would not even have a conv about it. Good bye.

      Now, I am not married, but anyone that I was married to would know that I feel this way. Plus, I agree with the other posters, if that essential trust is gone, why bother being in the relationship? If we are at the point where I am going through his stuff (or vice versa) than we have much larger problems to discuss.

      Similarly, I would not go through my children’s FB accounts, email, dresser drawers, etc, UNLESS (and this is a big unless) I thought they were involved in drugs, or shooting up black tar heroin in their bedroom or something. (But I am pretty sophisticated and I think I would figure this out pretty fast.) Then the hammer would come down pretty hard on them. (Again, ZERO tolerance, their lives would go into total lockdown.)

      Basically, I think my BF is lucky as hell to have me in his life and if there is someone else he would rather be with — so be it. I am not hanging around…

      Plus, that other woman sounds pretty angry, I wonder why.

      1. I don’t mean to sound resentful. And maybe I’m coming off
        as that. But I don’t believe everything is as black and
        white as you guys state that it is. I don’t believe that
        snooping or having access should be the end of a relationship.
        I don’t believe that trust should be blind – and that you
        you walk around believing that everything is OKAY if it
        doesn’t feel okay, even if you partner tells you it is.
        Because sometimes, the world revolves around more than you
        and just your partner and extraordinary circumstances arise
        and you find yourself in a situation you dind’t believe possible.

        Regarding the SNARKY comment about assuming that all guys are
        not wired to cheat, I know that. Thanks for the FYI.
        I’ve been with the same man for almost eight years and I don’t believe he’s cheated on me once. I also believe I would be able to tell
        if he’s lying to me, because he has lied in the past
        and I noticed and we overcame it.

        I also do agree that if a guy is interested in cheating,
        he’ll create as many email addresses as he needs and has
        as many phones to do so. I just think its a fine line
        to draw – and to do so with so much finality is wrong.

        At the end of the day, we are all human and have
        vulnerabilities and insecurities. If that includes the
        ocassional snooping, I do not believe that is a cause for
        firing/dumping/walking out. How much is your relationship
        worth if you are willing to walk away for something so small?

  19. I think that just having access says a lot. If you are not barred from looking you might even choose not to look but just being allowed in is all you need. My hubby and I have all eachothers passwords to EVERYTHING. I personally can’t imagine being married and not knowing having access. He is less likely to look than me but he’s admitted to an ocassional browse through ‘just to check’. Also, how amazing is it when you look and don’t find? It’s the greatest feeling of reafirming that what you think is a loving faithful relationship actually is.

    I think its bizarre that a person would just expect blind faith on these things, especially in the beginning. You should be allowed all the information on the person you are choosing to fuse your life with. We get one shot at this life and we should be allowed to make the most well informed choices.

    Phil allowed you to do just that which allowed you to move past. You guys handled it perfectly.

  20. Yikes! I agree with Sarah, that this must have hit a nerve with you. I’m sorry if requiring that someone trust me sounds “pretentious.”
    And “sharing” an email and “snooping” are two completely different things, aren’t they? If my husband told me “here’s my passwords, look away” and I do look, that’s not snooping. He gave me permission.
    If I suspected my husband of anything, I would point blank ask him and I would know by the look in his eyes if he was lying. I guess that’s just a benefit of being in a relationship for 15 years.

  21. Every month of the year for the past 6 we gave given money to a child through the Chrisitian Childrens Fund. Our foster son is in Indonesia and we love the letters and pictures he sends to us. If you have $35 a month to spare (NOTHING!) you can greatly impact the lives of a family far away who are currently struggling.

    Let go of the freaking ‘STAR’ news, focus on what you Can DO for a family…

    And yes, thinking Tiger Woods and his franchise could shut up already and just donate to some worthy causes.. You are worth billions, share the wealth, try to redeem your status as a ‘sports celebrity;.

    Personally I am sickened by your behaviour and wish your dad was still around to guide you as you so obviously needed.

    Now when I think TIGER WOODs I think horny sleaze bag, out there for all he can get. Hoping you are very proud of yourself Tiger. So many of us NOT.

  22. Oh, the irony! It’s ‘grammar’… For the record, I totally agree with you, Sarah, but if I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen someone bust another on their grammar or spelling, while spelling ‘grammar’ incorrectly, I’d have, well, probably about 30 or 40 cents…

  23. Team Stephanie. We ALL have baggage and NONE of us are perfect and AS A COUPLE, we grow and overcome. We support one another in ANY WAY that it needs to happen so that growth can happen. Period.

    Phil, honey, you must learn to take a compliment!
    God Bless you Stephanie, if you can’t win with insults and you can’t win with compliments, at least you still have sex!

  24. Author

    I had never noticed it before, but your pointing it out makes perfect sense to me. One thing we often discuss in therapy is how Phil has a very hard time believing, or respecting, even the possibility that there’s another point of view to any situation that may, indeed, be valid. He basically believes, each and every time, that his word is TRUTH, and everything else is just excuses, or “LYING TO YOURSELF.” Whenever he states something, he states it as if it’s fact, not opinion. So it makes sense that his body language, eye contact, defends that position of, “I don’t need to look at you because I don’t believe you. MINE is the only statement that matters here because it’s the only one that makes any sense. Period.” He’ll look at me in an argument when he’s talking down to me, slowly, comparing me to a toddler. Good fcuking times. I’m not going to lie: it makes me very angry. In fact, there’s a lot of anger in our relationship. It’s why we’re in therapy. If it goes on like this for too long, things begin to really crack. And cracks become breaks after a long time untreated. So we’re trying to repair the cracks before they branch out.

  25. Ha, and the worst thing is, I KNEW that was wrong, but then second guessed myself and put it in there anyway. Sorry Carolina, looks like I’m the dummy.

  26. To Amy: Wish his dad was around “to guide him”? Where do you think he learned this behavior? Dollars to doughnuts, dad did the same thing.

    I have tried to ignore this from the beginning, because i have a friend going through the same thing and it hits too close to home. Bringing tramps in to the house is unforgivable. But as the 8th woman comes out, it is impossible to ignore. these things have a life of their own. I still don’t know why we care, I had no interest in him before, other than appreciating the racial barrier he broke in a game where wind is a primary challenge.

    I do feel for Elin, as she will be hounded by the paps for years to come and her soon-to-be wasband (thanks for the appropriate word Stephanie) laid this mess at her feet. If she did buy a home on a private island in Sweden, that will be her salvation.

  27. I don’t know (esp from just watching a video), but then it seems that you also feel as if your opinion is the “right” one… but maybe that is in response to Phil’s response (as I said, we can’t tell/don’t know).

    Must be hard to try to have a relationship, conversation like that.

    I wonder why so many men feel entitled like that? Their mother’s? Society? The world?

    I also grew up with a silent father and a hysterical mother. Good times.

  28. I don’t know (esp from just watching a video), but then it seems that you also feel as if your opinion is the “right” one… but maybe that is in response to Phil’s response (as I said, we can’t tell/don’t know).

    Must be hard to try to have a relationship, conversation like that.

    I wonder why so many men feel entitled like that? Their mother’s? Society? The world?

    I also grew up with a silent father and a hysterical mother. Good times.

    PS — look at your vid with the sound off, and watch Phil’s expression. He looks bored out of his mind…

  29. I loved the article in yesterday’s WaPo talking about the way technology has changed the ability to keep an affair under the radar.

    In August I looked in a beau’s phone. Huh, those aren’t my tits, I thought as I scrolled through. And I said something. Since I also found a boarding pass for Florida when he said he was in Alaska. He claimed the right to privacy. It’s a valid argument. But when it feels like the one consistent thing you keep from me is the fact that you’re fucking other women, well, privacy becomes secrecy and those, my dear, are two different things.

  30. I had a fool who lived with someone propositioning me by email as a “joke” so he claimed. But I knew what he was up to. I did some research to figure out the situation. My first reaction to his “joke” was “I need my sight too much. I’d rather not go blind.” But then I figured out what was going on. He was putting me in a very awkward situation with a woman who I thought was very cool and didn’t know if she were involved with him or not. I gave him an opportunity to come clean. He played coy. Then eventually on some wine and PMS and via email, I let him have it. “What do you take me for? A piece of SIDE ASS? The nerve! I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming.” I was annoyed and felt compelled to make a point. The next day I had regrets. What is they aren’t living together? What is I’m wrong? So, I contacted the suspected girlfriend via Facebook (she was a friend) asking if they were a couple. Not long after that, I got an email from him saying how afraid he was of me and that he was so sorry but it was only a joke. Yeah, whatever. I was terrified some woman would be on my butt because of his egregious behavior and my response to him when I assumed he was single. So, think about what you say over email and text because you never know who might have access to it. Still, I think it’s a private matter. Ladies and gentlemen, stop using your past pain as an excuse to snoop on your current relationship. Not all women and men are the same. If you have trust issues, get them resolved before you jump into another relationship. Most of all, let it go. Not everyone is the same. Realize that. Not every experience is the same. Violating privacy is just so lame.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.