Do you currently feel something off about your relationship? Is your partner behaving a bit strange with you?
Do you consider infidelity on your partner’s part? If you are distantly worrying about being the victim of infidelity, you are at the right place.
Loyalty is nothing but an undocumented urge to stay sticking to the promises you made to your partner. But for varied reasons, a person often gets tempted to cheat. Interestingly, when the affair comes out in the public, we realise, that the signs of cheating were glaring at us all along. We just couldn’t put a finger on it.
How can one be sure if they are a victim of infidelity ?
Is lying or cheating in a relationship only about sleeping around with some else?
Sometimes it’s not really easy to figure out if your partner is cheating on you or not. “Since cheating is cloaked in secrecy, the person is doing their best not to arouse suspicion in their partner,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Lesli Doares, “The cheater’s goal is to not get caught and then have to deal with the consequences. They strive to make everything appear normal.”
It is never okay to be cheated by the one you have invested so much time and love on. And it’s more about the emotional trauma that you may go through after finding out that your partner is cheating on you.
Given below are 5 of the subtle signs to help you figure out if your partner might be cheating on you and not make an emotional fool out of yourself:
1. Less connectivity.
Communication is the most crucial thread that holds a relationship together but what happens when your partner is least interested in conversing to you?
It becomes suffocating for the one who wants to stay in the relationship and wants to make things work, but the other one shows no efforts in return, that’s when you have to understand that something is not quite right and things may culminate to difficult heights.
Your partner who use to wake you up with ‘good morning’ texts, would often miss you, desperately wanted to spend hours talking to you without getting bored, has now nothing to talk to you about.
Some cheaters are great at simultaneously handling multiple relationships, one with you and the another with the ‘other person’. With these people, identifying the signs become a bit difficult. Look for subtle change in their body language.
If you are having face-to face conversation with them you might look for the following signs in their body language:
- They fidget with their phone – typing, scrolling or staring fixedly at the phone screen, while you speak.
- Complete absence of or reduced response to your words showing disinterest in continuing the conversation with you. (typically using one word responses like ‘hmm’, ‘okay’, ‘yes’, ‘fine’ etc.)
- Constantly shifting attention from you to other things around, even when you are speaking of something significant.
- Actions like scratching head, shaking legs, sitting cross legged, or cross-armed – all of which are expressions of boredom, disinterest, frustration and restlessness.
- Complete absence of or broken eye-contact.
- Reduced physical proximity.
- Exit body language – feet pointed away from you, the body turned away from you.
All of these behaviors are characteristic of reduced emotional intimacy and connectivity. Detachment that springs all of a sudden is a sign that shows your partner is no more into you.
2. Changes in sexual chemistry.
Physical intimacy is a medium to express love but when your partner is cheating on you, they will have sex only to satisfy their physical needs.
The sex life still exists because your partner knows that sex is the best option available to them at the moment. Your partner will express less emotional connection while being intimate with you, and will be excessively lusty. There can be two probabilities – reduced physical intimacy because your partner is emotionally focused on someone else or increased sexual activities because they are trying to compensate their emotional absence and in both the cases sexual activity is kept intact.
Sex will more often than not be initiate by your partner, making sure you get convinced to engage in action between the sheets. They might even end up forcing you for sex, even when you are not willing to. Without a second guess, those sexual encounters with your partner will seem mechanical, lack emotional or spiritual connection that you previously experienced. Gradually, sex will become a task to be accomplished.
Over the time this will get increasingly draining for you – both physically and mentally, leaving you all perplexed and with no grounds to complain about. After all they are loving you. Isn’t it?
3. Excuses galore.
Another possible sign that shows your partner is or might be cheating on you is when he will have enough excuses to give you for not meeting your expectations and needs.
A meeting at the office ,last moment work load, helping the boss with client’s requirements, being too sick or tired, a family member not keeping well – all of these excuses are only to avoid catching up with you because he has another date in the evening.
Not just that, your partner doesn’t want to be seen with you in public places and that’s why he chooses to go nowhere with you or do nothing with you anywhere.This sign of him giving innumerable excuses and behaving like he can’t give you anymore time, proves he is into more than one relationship.
4. Ex-Factor.
In all of our lives, “ex” is actually a big factor.
Even though your partner has moved on with you, it is not obvious that he has stopped feeling for his ex partner. When your partner is caught or seen being in touch with his ex, you know it is a warning sign.
They might come up with innovative justifications for contacting their exes. And chances are, you are going to be fooled by their reasoning. No matter what, it is simply not okay to be in contact with a former romantic partner.
This sign shows that your partner is more likely to be interested in the communication because they still might have feelings for each other or maybe they both are back together even.
When the current relationship with you fails, your partner has a back up plan too. It possibly can’t be true when the next time your partner tells you that he/she is going for a business trip but actually is going for a vacation with her/his ex.
Trust your intuitions. If your guts are shouting that your significant other is cheating on you, trust it!
5. Hide and seek.
When your partner is cheating on you, they are more likely to play hide and seek game with you. The more they hide from you, the more you seek from them- for an explanation, for the truth, for facts.
When you see your partner using their phones and laptops too much than before and you’re sure it’s no office work, there is something not right. Chats, mails will be mysteriously deleted from their devices.
And of course, their phone and laptop has a passwords now, which do not open in front of you. They will be extremely cautious while using their phones around you -either for calling or for texting.What could be so confidential?
Your partner has been working too hard in deleting texts and call records, in clearing their browser history, and started taking the phone to the bathroom or locking it up in their wardrobe; answering calls behind your back , changing contact names with initials or code alphabets.
Isn’t something fishy here?
6. Play the victim role.
No matter how absurd it might seem but often when a person is cheating on you, he or she will adopt a weird habit of accusing you of being unfaithful to them. Right now you might be wondering, but why?
What human psyche is built to do is unconsciously project one’s undesirable thoughts and emotions on the other person, to get rid of it’s accountability. It is a defense mechanism when unconsciously used. On the conscious front, one might simply start pointing out at how you were being overly sexual with you colleague at the house party or how you are currently being secretive. While they are the one playing nasty with you.
This type of accusation not only shifts focus off them, but also helps create a situation to their advantage. Under such circumstances you are less likely to talk about what bothers you as you are already worried about how ‘disturbed’ they are about your cheating. This also allows them to excuse themselves of “needing time away to think things through”, aka meet their lover.
7. They suddenly become a critic.
Every small things about you bothers suddenly starts bothering them, without any rational basis. All the reasons for which they initially fell in love with you have now become the grounds for them to detest you. They become hypercritical of your actions, trying to find grounds to justify their cheating.
Coleman believes one does that when faced with the unsettling anxiety and tension provoked by cognitive dissonance. When a person’s attitude about something (cheating is wrong) is contrary to what they are doing (cheating anyway), they have to constantly work to defend themselves to sustain the inner conflict.
If your partner is being unreasonably critical of you, you must be alerted.
8. Over-indulging you.
In contrast to point 7, this sign is often the most powerful weapon used by a cheater and also is very difficult to identify. Showering attention, giving gifts, buying flowers to your lover is seemingly a very innocent act of love. But when it happens too frequently and too unexpectedly, especially after you noticed something fishy about your relationship (accompanied by other mentioned signs of cheating), it is a matter to take into consideration.
It is simply a way to reassure that they are devoted to you, “so that any subtle sign of cheating the partner uncovers can be readily dismissed as something ‘they would never do’,” Coleman says.
This article is not to bring about unnecessary hassles in a relationship. It is not to instigate you to accuse your partner of cheating on you, based simply on these signs. These signs might also mean something harmless. All you need to do is face your partner and have a clear conversation regarding what is disturbing you. In the beginning, your partner might avoid all of your requests to talk things out if he/she has genuinely seeing someone else. But eventually he/she will give in. Keep patience and continue following up with their behavior. Make decisions only after thorough considerations.
