Everyone has heard a story about an affair that was revealed in an embarrassing and obvious way. She was caught in bed with her lover. He came home with his mistress’s lipstick still all over him. She has suddenly acquired a diamond bracelet that you didn’t buy her. His mistress left her shoes under the bed, and her feet are three sizes smaller than yours. Affairs like these make for great stories, but not all cheaters are going to be oblivious to the fact that they are leaving evidence of their indiscretions in plain sight. Unfortunately for their spouses, some adulterers are clever and cunning enough to cover their tracks.
With the notable and terrifying exception of clinical psychopaths, no human being is a perfect liar. Everyone has little “tells” that show they are lying. For example, a person who is lying might not make eye contact, or they might stare at you intently to impress upon you that, of course, they’re being truthful! A person who is lying might fidget or sweat. A liar might also put an enormous amount of detail in their lies in order to convince you they were at the burger joint as they claimed. The amount of detail can be a huge give away. After all, who remembers the exact pattern of the wallpaper in the restaurant bathroom?
An affair is a huge secret to keep and requires dozens of falsehoods to cover up the larger lie. Even if you find yourself in a relationship with a serial cheater, your spouse won’t be able to cover up their affair without leaving some sort of clue behind. That said, adulterers have come up with some clever ways to keep their dirty little secrets under wraps. Here are six ways your spouse could be hiding their affair.
Accusing you of cheating.
Reverse psychology is sometimes treated as a joke, but there is a reason the concept is so entrenched. When done correctly, reverse psychology works, and cheaters are often very good at taking advantage of that fact. So, to hide their infidelity, a cheating spouse may start accusing you of cheating. You are left feeling defensive and are distracted from your suspicions about your spouse because you are busy trying to clear your name. Accusations of cheating might also make you feel as if your spouse would never cheat. After all, if they are concerned about you straying, they wouldn’t stray themselves. After all, a cheater wouldn’t care if their spouse was cheating, right? Sadly, you’re mistaken.
Cheaters also have a guilty conscience and can project that guilt onto their spouse. So if he is suddenly jealous of your male friends when there was never an issue before or if she suddenly starts quizzing you about whether or not your female friends are really just friends, your spouse might have a dirty little secret.
Portraying the perfect marriage.
A perfect marriage is an oxymoron. A marriage involves two people sharing their lives, feelings, fears, dreams and space. By definition, it will not be perfect. No matter how much spouses love each other or how well they get along, the marriage will not be picture-perfect. Even if the spouses don’t have serious fights, they will argue. She’ll get frustrated with how he leaves the TV on at dinner, and he’ll get annoyed that she is always running late. In a healthy marriage, couples compromise, and compromises, by definition, mean that no one gets everything they want.
A marriage that seems “perfect” is a lie. If he never does anything to irritate you or she never annoys you at all, there is a problem. The problem might be a preexisting issue in your marriage, or it could be a sign that your spouse isn’t invested in your relationship anymore. He’s not arguing with you because he doesn’t care. She doesn’t care because she is investing her emotional energy elsewhere.
Having ‘legitimate’ excuses.
This is the mark of a clever cheater. When most adulterers meet their lover, they have an excuse ready for their spouse. “I was at the gym.” “I had to work late.” “The traffic was awful." "I got home as soon as I could.” These excuses, however, fall apart when a suspicious spouse asks how the cheater worked out when they didn’t take their gym shoes with them. A smart cheater, however, will use a “legitimate” excuse. He might actually have worked late and then stopped to get dinner before making the hour-long commute. What he isn’t telling you is that he was eating dinner with his mistress.
Legitimate excuses are difficult to unravel. She might honestly just be going through a really busy period at work, or she could be meeting up with her lover several times a week. Your best bet is to watch for a pattern of excuses and then try to break that pattern. If he always has to go into the office on Saturday and eat dinner on the way home, offer to meet him in town for dinner. If he gets angry or panicked about it, you might have a clever cheater on your hands.
Using technology.
A technological arms race has developed among adulterers and betrayed spouses. Unfaithful women are finding increasingly clever ways to hide their lover’s sexy texts, but angry wives are using ever more advanced spyware to catch cheating men red-handed. More than one adulterous man has been blindsided by his wife’s recording of him whispering sweet nothings to his mistress.
Software and smartphone apps aren’t just developed to help catch cheaters. Plenty of websites exist that help cheaters hook up with their lovers or let them store love notes away from a spouse’s prying eyes. Adulterers might also be taking a leaf out of rebellious teens’ books and using “hidden” apps on their smartphones. These apps appear to be something innocuous, like a calculator, but when the correct code is entered, the app opens up to reveal sexy pictures or tender notes exchanged between illicit lovers.
Unfortunately, a cheater’s technological assistance can be hard to bypass. If you think she is acting suspiciously, simply monitor your spouse’s behavior. If he spends a lot of time “just calculating this real quick,” the odds are good that he’s doing more than a subtraction problem on his phone.
Help from their friends.
You would think that a true friend would have the sense not to cover for your cheating spouse. Unfortunately, her girlfriends might be all too willing to act as an alibi while she meets up with her man. An affair is a big secret to keep, and it helps a cheater have someone else in their corner. It’s a big risk on the adulterer’s part to come out and say, “I’m having an affair,” but the payoff might be worth it for the unfaithful spouse. Her girlfriends might think you don’t deserve her, or his friends might think he’s a stud for having a mistress on the side. Regardless of the friends’ motivations, it’s hard to prove your spouse is cheating when they always have an alibi.
If you are seriously concerned that friends are covering for an unfaithful spouse, you have to roll the dice. If you talk to the friends you think are helping hide the affair, they might warn your adulterous husband about your suspicions. They might also feel guilty and confess that your wife has been unfaithful. If you keep your concerns to yourself, her girlfriends might decide you don’t care about her and that she is better off away from you. His friends might also slip up and reveal the affair because they don’t know you are worried. Either way, infidelity gets even more complicated when other people are involved. No matter what action you take, it’s a gamble. You could have proof of the affair handed to you on a silver platter, or you could be back at square one. There’s just no way to know how the cards will fall.
Using the ‘we’re just friends’ excuse.
This is perhaps the oldest trick in the cheater’s handbook, but it is one of the most effective. No sane person expects their husband to stop talking to his best friend since grade school or their wife to stop getting lunch with her brother-in-law. This does, however, make it difficult to tell when a person in your spouse’s life is a friend or a lover. Identifying who is truly just a good friend and who is a threat to your marriage can quickly descend into paranoia. When differentiating between “old friend” and “mistress,” you are going to need to be patient and keep an open mind. Just because her “friend” always greets her with a hug or tells her she is beautiful, it doesn’t mean he is her lover. He might well just be a tactile or friendly person.
Similarly, if his old college friend lets him crash on her couch whenever he has a flight and then lands late in the evening, that doesn’t mean she’s sleeping with your husband. Logic and patience will be your best guides to telling a friend from a “friend.” There is a time and place to listen to your instincts, but when it comes to your spouse’s close friends, your “gut feeling” could easily just be jealousy.
There are as many ways to hide an affair as there are cheaters. Some methods of deception are more clever than others, but all of an adulterer’s tools are meant to hide a massive lie. It may be cold comfort, but no cheater can keep up the illusion forever. Eventually, they will slip up, and the affair will be revealed. Then, the unfaithful spouse has to deal with the repercussions of their betrayal, and no one will care how cleverly the cheater hid their affair once that lie has been brought into the open.
