I don’t think I would know. I knew a couple where a guy cheated on his girlfriend with someone they both knew. They seemed like a perfectly happy couple in public. When she did find out she was taken completely by surprise.
My boyfriend and I both work different schedules that change every few months (we both teach) so if one of us really wanted to, we could probably get away with it (theoretically, anyway - I can’t lie convincingly to save my life). But Seoul is an extremely small city so sooner or later you’re going to run into someone you know.
I don’t know how you couldn’t know. You know what your man is like. You know what he’s like when he’s having sex. If you don’t have that connection (or lost it). You’re probably better off not being together. I was cheated on once, and knew about it.
My most recent ex I called the first time he had sex after our break up. It was a while, too. I said “Did you get a bj?”. He asked how did I know. I just laughed and hung up. (Note, I’m not on facebook and we don’t move in the same circles. So, I just knew.)
I think if you don’t know, you’ve either lost your bond with said or you’re in denial.
I’d probably never know. I love him very much and trust him completely and would hardly look deeply into his behavior. At the moment there isn’t even anything to look into - we spend all of our free time together. There isn’t really anyone who knows us well enough in this town to report back to me.
If he was pushing me out the door or had mysterious receipts show up…but as I said, first he’d have to start spending a lot more time away from me. Right now literally the only time he has is when he is at work.
If he were that kind of guy, it would be pretty easy for him to get away with it. As a grad student he works long hours and there are times he has to be away for a few days for conferences. Also, most of his colleagues are women. They travel together and sometimes, when the drive is long, he crashes overnight at their place.
I never really thought about it until he remarked it’s a good thing I’m not the jealous type, because he’s always off with some woman or another. I was like, ‘‘Oh, yeah, I guess you are.’’ It never even occurred to me to be jealous.
I trust him completely. i think if he were tempted to cheat, he would tell me immediately, as I would him. So overall I’d say I’d be pretty easy to deceive.
In all honesty I worry more about me cheating then him cheating. I am super vigilant by not spending time alone with men I am even remotely attracted to. I stay out of bars and clubs when I’m by myself. I’ve never had the desire to cheat or anything, but I never even want to be in that position where I’m even a little bit tempted. I actually think that’s probably the best safeguard against cheating there is.
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I would even say that the more you think that your husband couldn’t possibly cheat, the more likely he would be since you obviously don’t think much of him.
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Could you explain this a little bit? It sounds like you’re saying expecting fidelity in a relationship is somehow wrong, and moreover, that the expectation of fidelity somehow drives people to cheat.
I’m pretty sure what he was saying is that a guy whose girlfriend/wife assumes that he could never possibly cheat on her without her finding out (or because no other woman could possibly want him) is a guy who is actually likely to cheat because his girlfriend/wife obviously thinks he’s either careless or unappealing.
I remember watching the film I Love You, Man and Leslie Mann’s bitch character is asked if she’s worried about her husband (played by Jon Favreau) cheating on her. She said: “Oh, please! He’s overweight with a Jew-Fro and a small dick.” It never came up again in the movie, but I immediately thought: “Yeah, that guy is cheating on her. What guy wouldn’t cheat on a bitch who thought that way about him?”
Sometimes people facilitate cheating by constantly being on the SO and investigating them constantly.
Example: I have a brother, who’s girlfriend is off her rocker in several ways, but one of them is his schedule and him being out of her sight. He can’t: hang out with his grown step children from a previous marriage, visit family in NY, deviate from the pre-approved time to be home, even when it means he was visiting his son’s grave (I stood by grave-site listening to her SCREAM at him over the phone about taking an extra half hour); he can’t do any of these things without dealing with ‘consequences’ and threats of a breakup or kicking him out of the house. She checks his paystub to make sure he worked all of the hours he was away from the house.
He’s never been a cheater, but I can see that he feels like ‘if I’m going to be treated the same way as if I had, why shouldn’t I?’ But then she of course would get the added benefit of ‘being right’ from the beginning.
As for my own self, I can’t say, I’m not currently with someone. I kind of always felt (or learned very early) that IF a person is going to serial cheat (or drink, or drug or gamble, etc) he/she’s going to cheat, etc. and there is no amount of haranguing or digging that is going to change that.
Well, he is in a different city for work every other week, and when he is at home I am at work so he certainly has the time (if not the $$) for another complete wife or a string of girlfriends. If he has been getting something on the side any time in the past 20 years I haven’t twigged, so who can say? He seems happy with our life (except the frequent separations), and always comes home cheerfully horny so I am pretty sure he isn’t, or if he is I am not getting the short end of the stick.
I agree that in those cases, yes, cheating is more likely because what you are describing is contempt, and contempt almost always leads to some sort of mutually damaging behavior. However, I think that’s a pretty small subset of women who think they would know: in this thread, at least, most of the women who think they would know are ones that are physically with their significant others a great deal of the time, and so think the logistics make it impossible, or who feel they are strongly enough in tune with their significant others emotional state that they would notice any changes.
On the other hand, I don’t think my husband would be have a long-term affair without telling me simply because I think sex and love are pretty intertwined for him, and if he were having a long-term affair with someone, he’d want to be with her permanently. Furthermore, even if he were in love with someone else, I think he’d still be fond of me and it would bother him to be lying to me all the time. I don’t really think he’s capable of duplicity because he’s too good of a man. It’s not clear to me if you think that’s another form of thinking he’s incapable of an affair: I think a certain sort of person would see that as me saying he doesn’t have the balls to cheat on me, and that my faith in his gentleness/ethics is emasculating. But I don’t read it that way at all.
My ex-husband cheated on me for years. There were many times where I suspected something, but he always was able to explain it away. Looking back, I realize that I was in denial more than he was a good liar. The end came when his friends finally got fed up with his cheating and just felt really sorry for me. They invited me out while he was out of town for work and had an intervention. I remember feeling so stupid. After they had laid everything out, it was obvious.
Yep, I do know what he’s like when he’s having sex. He was still having sex with me. That part of our relationship never changed.
I sometimes think about how easy, in the logistics sense, it would be for either of us to have an affair. That is, I trust that when he takes off for several hours in the evening he is, in fact, going back to work because he’s busy, or to the hardware store, or whatever, and he trusts that when I take off to go to work or the post office or a baby shower that’s in fact where I’m going… and so on.
In practice I think it might become noticeable… I have a hard time believing either of us could be quite as silly with each other if one of us were having an affair… but who knows.
I was probably cheated on in my last relationship. At the time I had no idea. But looking back now it’s easy to see how it would have been very possible and likely. Not a nice thought. But whenever I get sad about the relationship ending, this line of thinking certainly helps.
You might suspect, but you’d never know unless you snoop and find hard evidence, catch them in the act, or get a confession.
Having become something of an expert from the point of view of the betrayed, I can tell you this: If you ever hear “I love you, but I’m not IN love with you”, they are almost always cheating. “He/she’s just a friend” is another near certainity that some form of infidelity is taking place.
I honestly don’t know. With the “flirting inappropriately”, he seemed protective of his phone for an entire day even though I had never snooped in his phone and never felt a need to. Call it a “bad feeling”, I went on our carrier’s website to see what he was up to. Meanwhile, he’s packing some stuff up to go “camping” on his grandparents’ land which he apparently had just decided that day without talking to me about it at all, inviting me along, whatever, which was unusual for several reasons, not the least being that he doesn’t camp EVER and hasn’t as long as I’ve known him. So I asked him who he was texting all day. Vague answers until about 5 minutes later when I asked “What’s her name?” I just knew. I don’t know how.
To actually bust him, I used his phone to access his gmail account. I felt like shit about it (still do) because I swear I’ve never snooped but in that moment, I really had to. It was like a week and a half after the texting, he was “off”, had been that whole week, and with his recent history of evasiveness, lying, and pattern changing (staying up all day while I was gone even though he worked the night shift and usually slept), I just had to. She had texted him during that time, which I knew about because he told me, but it was a three digit number with no further explanation which he claimed was work-related but which I knew wasn’t. Turned out to be the hotel room number where she first noticed him, awwww… (they both work at a casino). :rolleyes:
Short answer: I’m “relentless” and got confessions from both of them. Probably only partial confessions but it was enough for me.
I’m not confident, no. It’d be lovely to think we’re just such soul mates that I would have some sort of psychic moment and simply know, but we’re just people and everything I know about him is what he has told and shown me. I can’t know what he doesn’t say or show.