Despite the assurances of your spouse or
partner that the affair is over, quite often the
strange and secretive behavior persists or pops up
again, and those same feelings of unease and doubt resurface. Is it your irrational fears getting the better of you, or do you have good reason to
believe that your partner is picking up where they
left off?

You have forgiven them for the last indiscretion
and are trying to put it behind you, but something
tells you that something is not quite right.
Living with the knowledge that a spouse has
cheated on you is an everyday struggle, and the
thought of them cheating on you again seems almost
too much to bear.

What if you are wrong? What sort of damage is
this going to do to your marriage? Then again,
what if you’re right?

That’s the situation faced by a member who
emailed me recently, whose details I have edited
for their anonymity, but here’s what they had to say:

I am engaged to a man whom I dearly love. But I
believe he is seeing someone else. He had an
affair about 6 months ago with his ex-girlfriend.
He apologized, said all the right things and was
truly sorry for what he had done. Everything has
been going along fine until a few weeks ago. He’s
distant, secretive and that same intuition I felt
before is coming back again.

The first time I caught him by hiding a voice
activated tape recorder. Now he looks for those. I
can’t tap his phone because he looks there too
and he is in telecommunications for a living. He
is on the road all day in a company vehicle,
maintaining his area. There is no specific
location he is in every day. He is a very
intelligent man and one that is hard to get
anything past him.

We are engaged and I do not want to marry him
if this is happening. If it is, no excuses this time.
The first time, maybe a mistake. The second time -
no mistake. I will end the relationship if it is
happening again. The truth of the matter is, if it
is happening again, I want to cold bust his butt.
I have been nothing but good to him.

If he’s not, then great! Because no matter how
this may sound, I do love him. But I can take just
so much deception. Please help with any advise
you have. Any new ways to catch him. I cannot
afford a private investigator, or I would have
gotten one. I sometimes think that maybe it’s me
because I still do not trust him all the way yet.
But I truly believe that’s not it.

Here’s my reply:

Hi there, Thanks for your email. You are
going to find it very difficult to find proof of
his cheating if he is traveling away from you on
a regular basis and he is already aware that you
have monitored him before and caught him cheating.

While this was great in proving his infidelity
the first time, it is going to be difficult to
find proof in the future. If he is cheating on
you again, this time he is going to be much more
careful.

Have you tried installing our tracking
software on your home computer if you have one? I
understand that he is away traveling a lot, but
there may be times when he is communicating via
email from your home, and it might be worth
looking into this. As well as that, if your
husband is cruising internet dating sites, there
may be times when he is doing this from your home
computer.

It’s easy for people like this to be lulled
into a false sense of security and use the
computer while you are not around. If you are able
to track your home computer and get his email
passwords, you may be able to find emails received
as well as emails sent.

As frustrating as this is, I want you to trust your
intuition. If it doesn’t feel right, postponing your
wedding may be an option until you are in a position
where you feel you can trust him again. The trust issue
is where it is at, and if you don’t feel reassured
that he will not cheat on you again, you need to
deal with this issue before you get married. Trust
me when I tell you that marriage won’t magically
make it better!

Examine the ways he breeds mistrust in your
relationship and try and understand his
motivations for being secretive. If he truly wants
to put the hurt of his past affair behind you, he
needs to create an environment in which you feel
loved and reassured of his faithfulness. If you do
not feel like this you need to take a close look
at why.

There are a lot more tips and techniques in the
cheating partner course by Sara Paul,
and I encourage you to explore all of them.