Relationships often begin with a date, but for 22-year-old Daniella Stockley, hers ended with one. Several actually.
She’s been left devastated and heartbroken after she discovered her boyfriend of more than three years, Joe, had been scheduling ‘golf’ as a secret cover to go and see another girl.
To add insult to injury, her relationship broke down just before Valentine’s Day.
The couple had first met at a party, and it was Daniella’s friend who brought the two of them together.
‘”Dani, how about him? He’s stunning!” She shouted,’ Daniella said.
‘I said “no way! He’s horrible”.’
But her friend went and introduced them and the then 19-year-old ended up spending the whole summer with Joe and his friends.
‘It felt like an enemies to lovers rom com,’ Dani added. She ended up falling for him but admitted: ‘As our relationship went from casual to serious I should’ve seen it then that he was a rubbish boyfriend.’
After six months of casually seeing each other, Joe asked her on a date and they became an official couple, and Dani ‘adored’ him, with the couple going on holidays and festivals together.
But there were some red flags.
‘People would say to me “Joe is a horrible person, you really shouldn’t be with him” and tell me stories about the kind of person he was,’ Dani explained.
‘But I didn’t care and I didn’t listen because I’d finally got to a point where I loved him so much.’
Joe would admit to her that he didn’t show her he loved her, but him saying it was enough for Dani for a while.
But the longer they were together, the more the cracks started to show. She felt like he didn’t want to book a holiday with her or spend time with her.
‘It just got a little too weird and it felt like I would never see him. I had a bad feeling then but just ignored it,’ Dani said.
It was then that the calendar app came along. She’s initially used it to plan days out with her friends and it worked so well that she suggested to Joe that they make a couples calendar.
‘He said “No Dani, I really don’t want to do it”,’ she explained. ‘That was alarm bells for me, it was weird that he didn’t want to be more involved in each other’s lives.’
After a month of Daniella ‘begging’ to get a shared calendar, Joe caved in and began adding to it.
This is where it all went wrong. ‘One day I decided to be nosy and see what he was up to, and all I could see on the whole calendar was “golf plans”,’she said.
‘Those alarm bells started ringing in my head because I’ve not once heard him mention liking golf.’
She said she began asking him questions about golf to test him and he’d have no idea what she was talking about.
After growing suspicious of Joe, Dani asked her friends what she should do and they suggested she went through his phone.
‘I don’t care if you think that’s a bad thing, she said on TikTok. ‘I went through it.’
It was then that Dani saw the messages between Joe and another girl.
‘I had a great time, I can’t wait to see you again xx’
‘Me too, see you very soon xx’
That’s how it read back and forth for months between them and they’d met at a rave. It was message upon message of plans to meet up and he’d even changed her name in his phone.
These plans to meet all lined up with the times he’d scheduled in their shared calendar to play golf.
Dani said: ‘I felt so delusional! I just started shaking thinking, “What the hell?”.’
‘I wanted to scream but I couldn’t wake him up. My fight or flight mode kicked in and I just ran.
‘I was running around the house packing my bag and sobbing before he had the chance to stop me, I couldn’t stand the sight of him.
‘I should have thrown a bucket of water over him.’
Dani drove home to her mum during the night and cried to her mum over Joe’s betrayal.
She took a week off work for her mental health and felt ‘broken’.
Why we feel the need to snoop through a partner’s phone:
Sex and relationships expert Rhian Kivits says there are some common motivations for feeling tempted to snoop:
- You’re driven by insecurity and a lack of trust, fear that you’ll find something that suggests disloyalty, and feel a need to prove yourself right
- You sense a distance from your partner and want to delve into their private space to create a sense of intimacy
- You’ve been betrayed previously and fear it happening again, so snoop to find reassurance
- You genuinely have reason to believe your partner is being disloyal and snoop in order to confirm your suspicions
How to talk to your partner about snooping
Boost your communication within your relationship. Often, feeling like you need to nose around comes from a lack of connection, or bad communication. The way to fix that is pretty simple – talk about it!
‘It can be helpful to talk to your partner and share your feelings because it may be that improving communication and trust within the relationship will help you feel more secure,’ says Rhian. ‘Relationship experts and therapists can help you work through the issues if you can’t do it alone.
‘It can help to come clean with your partner about the fact you’re tempted to snoop.
‘In fact, just by being honest about your feelings, you may find the craving doesn’t feel so strong. When we share our feelings we build trust.
‘You may also reveal the fact that you would benefit on working together to establish deeper trust as a couple.’
After a while, Dani took to TikTok to share her discovery and it reached more than one million views and more than 100,000 likes.
A while after she received a sorry note from Joe on a gift card, which was attached to a bunch of flowers that were sent to his work.
‘I started to feel a bit of sympathy for him but then I found out that girl is now his girlfriend,’ she said. ‘The pain just came flooding out all over again.
She text Joe, telling him how he’d made her feel, and despite him wanting to ‘talk’, she had no further contact with him.
‘Nothing helped, I just had to give it time,’ she said. ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater is the way I look at him now.
‘I don’t need a man, especially one who thinks he can get away with treating me like I’m second best. What a lucky escape!’
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