What changes in your partner’s behavior and emotions should you pay attention to?
Infidelity, whether real or suspected, remains one of the most insidious challenges a couple can face. Sometimes suspicions of infidelity become true paranoia, leading to looking for it where it never happened, blaming an innocent partner, and ultimately destroying the relationship.
But if your partner is really cheating on you, then to give your suspicions a solid basis, you don’t need to interrogate them with bias, just some simple insight. Because in order to try to hide what’s happening and divert suspicion from themselves, people usually use the same behavioral strategies, which are easy to spot if you know what to look for:
A partner who has something to do with it, in order to disguise the betrayal, begins to behave especially affectionately and tenderly, just like at the very beginning of the relationship.
2. “How dare you!”
If you ask your partner directly if he is cheating on you to gauge his reaction, he will either put on a stony expression or will fake outrage that he is suspected of something.
3. Encryption
To prevent you from tracking his movements and whereabouts, the unfaithful partner avoids mentioning the names or addresses of places where he is supposedly heading. In addition, he tries not to leave electronic traces of his infidelity by deleting correspondence in chats and messengers, and does not share his adventures with friends and acquaintances, especially with your mutual acquaintances.
4. Nerves are on edge
Cheating is a nerve-wracking affair that carries a lot of stress. If you feel that you are playing on your partner’s nerves more often than before, that he has become more irritable and you have to watch your language more closely in order to avoid quarrels, it is quite possible that the reason is not in you at all, but in his guilty conscience.
5. Suspiciously pleased
When a previously demanding and eternally dissatisfied partner suddenly becomes surprisingly content and undemanding, most likely, his needs are being met somewhere else.
6. Sudden interest in your schedule
An unfaithful partner may suddenly start asking about things he or she never showed interest in before, such as when and where you are going, when you will arrive, etc. However, he or she does not seem to suspect you of being unfaithful because he or she never asks who you are with.
Most likely, this interest is not connected with the desire to have dinner together, but with the purpose of insuring himself and knowing exactly where you are at the time when he meets with someone else.
7. Something on my mind
You notice that your partner has changed the way he or she behaves, holds himself or herself, looks, or facial expressions, as if he or she has something different in mind. Such changes are difficult to express in words, but impossible not to notice.
8. Changed schedule
Suddenly your partner starts leaving work early or staying late. At the same time, he or she cannot provide any clear, logical explanation for this change, or these explanations seem false to you.
Of course, all of these changes on their own, or even in combination with each other, are not clear evidence that you are being cheated on.
However, since healthy relationships require trust and commitment, being aware of potential red flags will help you avoid wasting your time with the wrong partner. Life is finite, so it pays to maximize the likelihood that you’re spending it with the right person.