Should you carry out a background check on your new partner?

A successful relationship is built on trust, but with online dating now accounting for around one in every five new relationships, are we all becoming a little less trusting?

 

Previously we could rely on the endorsement of a mutual friend or colleague to reassure us that a prospective partner is legit and unlikely to be hiding too many dark secrets. But sites like Tinder have stripped away those reassurances, so what is a modern dater to do? And is probing into the background of a new partner the ultimate passion killer?

 

“Are they who they say they are?” asks Aretheysafe.co.uk, a service which background-checks partners and dates. "Well, is anyone in the online world?" you might ask. Online dating profiles are like CVs, in which we are encouraged to elevate, amplify, and enrich our own personal brand. But it is easy (and tempting) to stray from little white lies to bigger deceptions, and online daters are having to get more savvy about checking up on those they meet on the web.

 

“Both males and females come to us,” explains Laura Lyons, founder of Aretheysafe, "wanting to know whether a person is married, living with someone or in fact of no fixed abode, any of which could be red-flag issues. We check whether they have alias names, been convicted of a criminal offence, or carry a financial risk. We ascertain an individual's debt, bankruptcy and insolvency status to help ensure someone isn't specifically looking to take advantage of a person's financial situation, something many individuals look to exploit.”

 

But if you think this smacks of paranoia, and that the vast majority of checks come back clean, Lyons has some alarming news. "From the checks we perform, around 60 per cent of people come back with red flags," she says. "Some may be married and still living with a partner, some have criminal histories, some have financial problems and some are lying about their backgrounds.”

 

Those who aren't afraid to take matters in to their own hands have plenty of options. Data monitoring apps are increasingly being employed in homes and offices to monitor for safety and efficiency, including software such as mSpy, which tracks web history, images, videos, email, SMS, Skype and more. The London-based company claims to have over a million users, and was designed, according to its website to "keep children safe and employees efficient".

 

However, another service offered by the mSpy group is an app called mCouple, a “cell phone couple tracker for mutual monitoring". Designed to be used with the express consent of both parties, the makers explain, “With our couples tracker, you’ll have peace of mind since you’ll always know where your boyfriend or girlfriend is and what they are doing. You will know that your sweetheart is safe at all times. No secrets will stand between you two.”

 

Nothing says "romance" quite like a GPS tracker, right? Don't worry if you have to spend a night apart, you can still peruse each other's texts, call-logs, phone book entries and messages exchanged with other Facebook users. Love's young dream.

 

Even though I have nothing to hide, the thought of such “mutual monitoring” makes me cringe. I embrace social media more than most, but I once hit the roof when someone I was dating questioned me after checking (out of “curiosity”) the time and date stamps attached to instagram posts I had made. “I just wanted to know what you were up to,” he explained. Even this very small snoop on some freely available information utterly creeped me out.

 

So how would I feel if a partner did a background check on me through Aretheysafe? And what about the low-level stuff, perhaps if I happened upon a partner rifling through my emails? Relationships have been terminated for much less than that.

 

If you're feeling tempted to flick through an iPhone or conduct some larger scale surveillance, you need to ask yourself some big questions first. Whether you are just being nosey or searching for solid evidence to support your suspicions, if someone gives you a reason to feel uneasy perhaps it's time to ask yourself if you really want to be in a relationship with that person in the first place.