Is My Boyfriend Lying Or Is This Just Dating Spam?

A man uses his cellphone at the table. Can his partner trust him?
Granger Wootz / Getty Images

I received a concerned email from a reader. In it, she asks:

"Can a person get messages from one of these mobile dating things if someone doesn't sign up/or leave that particular cell number? I had one from speak-live.com which transfers into a sex website (porn pics, etc.) and I never have been on one of these in my life! My boyfriend, on the other hand, has in the past. I am afraid my boyfriend is lying to me."

My first reaction was to ask the reader for more information to clarify her situation. From what I can understand, the two of them share a cell phone, and she's getting text messages from an adult dating site, asking her to join, sign up, or visit. I'm answering the question with this assumption in mind, although, I'll cover the other possibility at the end of this post.

Therefore, to answer: what you've received is most likely spam. A quick search for speak-live.com found that they've used several Florida-based Google Voice phone numbers to spam random cell numbers with the message, "Hi I put a pic on my page on speak-live.com just sign in and check it out ;-)".

Could this dating spam have come from your boyfriend's former adult dating site use? It's possible, yet more likely that your cell number got thrown into some database somewhere (similar to emailed internet dating scams). All a spammer has to do is buy those emails or cell phone numbers, and then blanket message them all the same thing. Sadly, this isn't terribly difficult to do. 

I strongly suggest focusing on a solution to this issue, instead of thinking about what your boyfriend did in the past. In this case, that might include getting the speak-live.com number blocked, having a quick discussion with your partner to let him know what's happened (and showing him this blog post), and finding the positives in the situation - such as you finding the text before the kids did. 

All in all, this is pretty innocuous. I get spam of all kinds on my phone, even when I'm not signing up for random dating sites to review them. I just block them, try to use fake numbers if I have to when signing up for things that "require" a number, and leave it at that. If it becomes an ongoing issue, I'd likely call my local authorities to see what I could do on a more formal level. 

The other possibility in your situation might be that your boyfriend left his own phone somewhere, and you grabbed it, saw the dating spam, and were confused as to where it came from. This is a much more serious situation - but not why you might think.

Your email (which was much more lengthy than I could share here) detailed a history of trust and commitment issues between you and your partner. So now, you're (possibly) checking his phone "innocently", and have all these doubts and fears coming up that you don't know what to do with. 

Someone with a different history - say, a girlfriend of yours - would get different treatment from you, yes? 

If they had dating spam on their phone, would you assume they were using sex sites to meet someone?

Would you even check their phone without their permission?

This isn't meant to embarrass you, or put any sort of blame on your shoulders. Rather, I want you to take responsibility for your own actions. Something horrible happened, and now you don't trust your partner. 

When do you trust him again? What has to happen? What if, it was only within yourself that it could possibly change?

These are all big, huge questions, and ones that we'd be better off exploring in a love coaching-type arrangement. In the meantime, I suggest learning to love yourself, and then, figuring out if he's The One. Once you've worked through both of these processes, you'll have a better idea a to what you have to let go of within yourself, so that you can honestly trust your partner (and in turn, yourself), to never have to question his fidelity or honesty again.