Photo by http://flickr.com/photos/patries71/; creative commons license
Continued from Part I of this series….
First, the ordinary signs:
- Unusual smells. This is an unusual sign that most cheaters miss. A man will come home after an afternoon tryst, freshly showered, but his unwashed hair will smell of sex. Or a woman who doesn’t smoke will have a not-so-subtle scent of cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair when she comes home from her non-smoking office. One of my former colleagues kept two or three relationships going outside his marriage for years, thanks to his local YMCA. The Y’s showers had a distinct-smelling liquid soap. He worked out at lunch, unbeknownst to his wife, and then told her he’d be working late (he often did, legitimately) with a stop at the gym on his way home. He’d spend hours with a different woman several times a week, then head to the gym to shower. If he went home allegedly from the Y and smelled of lavender, vanilla, or even hotel soap, the scent would have been a dead-giveaway. And he dared not go home after a liaison without washing off a woman’s sultrier scents.
- Unusual phone and texting activity. If your mate is suddenly taking calls out of earshot or not answering a call but returning it when you’re in another room, it’s a good sign that something’s amiss. This is actually one of the easiest ways to discover that a mate is cheating. Suddenly, he’s getting more “calls from work” than normal, but not taking them on the spot. Or there’s a new number on his cell phone or an uncanny number of voice mail messages, both new and old ones he likes to re-listen to. Or you get a text message from him that was meant for someone else (one of my personal favs!). Betsy’s phone activity was her undoing. Rather than keep a separate throw-away phone as her lover suggested, she frequently left her cell phone where her husband would find it on the kitchen table, read her naughty texts, and discover her 30-calls-a-day with her lover. However, her rather gentle husband didn’t invade her privacy. What he did notice, though, was the cell phone bill that was $200 higher than usual on their strained budget. He logged onto their online account (since she “couldn’t find” the paper copy of the cell phone bill with its 56 pages of phone calls) and was shocked to find that all those “emergency calls” to her “suicidal” sister late at night were really to her lover.
- Unusual gifts and trinkets. Small items start turning up here and there, and some are treated as precious and closely guarded. A new worry-stone for his pocket, a new keychain, some small knick-knack in his car. Just one isn’t a big deal, but lots of little reminders of someone else? Definitely a hint. Has your mate routinely bought items of this sort over the years for himself? They’re coming from somewhere, and it’s not you.
Watch for the next three telltale signs in Part III of this series, coming later this week.
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