Man Discovers His Girlfriend Has an Extensive Spreadsheet About Their Relationship

Updated April 27 2020, 2:16 p.m. ET

What do you do when you're snooping on your girlfriend's computer and she has a document that's just titled "DAVE," which is your name? Do you look? How do you not? And how do you react when you see something you never expected to see in a million years? Do you confront her about it?

Those are the questions at the heart of this post, which was deleted from the Relationships subreddit but still lives on on Twitter. Dave has been dating Amy for about eight months and according to him, it's "the most intensely passionate and compatible relationship" he's ever been in. Turns out, there might be a concrete reason for that.

Dave explains that both he and Amy are "young professionals" with good jobs in finance. "Her position is more analytical so she's very familiar with spreadsheets and uses them for her daily life as well (budgets, meals, etc.)," he writes. 

And recently, he was at her apartment and trying to order pizza on his phone while Amy was in the shower. But the app wasn't working, so he opened Amy's computer to order the pizza.

"As I start typing in Chrome," he writes, "I see a Google Sheet link in the history just called 'Dave,' my name. I don't know why I did it. I honestly wasn't even thinking. But I saw my name and clicked the link... which brought me to a massive sheet with a ton of tabs that were basically analyzing our entire relationship. 

"There was a Pro/Cons tab, a tab analyzing who texts / calls first, some sort of emotion / period tracker. Tons of random lists about my likes/dislikes, gift ideas, TV show suggestions, etc. There were graphs, there were filters and drop-down menus, conditional formatting. It was impressive to be honest. I looked at it for five minutes before closing everything and regretting it completely."

This is... a lot. Dave went on to fake a headache to leave, and now he has no idea how to feel about it. And honestly, I understand. I get why Dave couldn't help clicking the link, and I understand why he's weirded out.

He seems truly ambivalent about it. "On one hand," he writes, "I feel incredibly freaked out, I feel like my trust has been broken, I feel hurt. I also feel like she didn't do anything wrong. I invaded her privacy and that terrifies me. She's an analytical person and this seems like a way of analyzing her thoughts / feelings?"

He mentioned that he's always been impressed that she remembers small details about things that he likes, but now he knows it's because she's been tracking it all. He also writes that she's not at all "clingy" or "dependent." 

He doesn't want to break up with her over this, and he's worried that if he talks to her about, she'll break up with him for snooping. He just wants to know if this extensive relationship spreadsheet that his girlfriend keeps is a red flag. 

I happen to think he's inviting way more trouble if he talks to her about it. Sure, this may be a bit overboard for some, but it just seems to me like this the way she likes to organize her thoughts. If anything, it's indicative of how much she cares about him!

I write in a journal and have a list on my Notes app of gift ideas for my husband in order to reflect on my relationship. This woman has a weirdly complicated spreadsheet. Different, sure, but also kind of the same.

And most commenters agreed. "To me, that just sounds like a data geek version of her diary, which you snooped into. If your relationship is good, let it go," one person wrote, and I think that's very good advice.

I imagine that if he brings it up, she will be embarrassed and hurt. He seems to really love her, and there's nothing that indicates that she's obsessive or weird in their actual relationship, so why jeopardize a good thing?

In subsequent comments, Dave wrote that he was not bothered by the gift lists. He does the same thing. It was the pros and cons list and the call / text tab that weirded him out the most. However, he does note that she seems to have stopped tracking that after a month-and-a-half of them dating, so I don't know why he's so upset. 

It's normal in those early days to obsess over who's initiating the conversations. And as for pros and cons, that's definitely diary-level stuff that I'm sure she never meant for him to see. 

My advice would be for Dave to try his hardest to forget he ever saw what amounts to his girlfriend's diary, to appreciate how kind and attentive she is, and to move on. It's the right thing to do.

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