Nobody wants to find out they’re being cheated on, but sometimes the signs are there long before the truth comes out.
When Reddit user Top-Departure2859 asked people to share the subtle signs that tipped them off that their partner was being unfaithful, many of people weighed in with their experiences. So here are 25 warning signs people experienced before discovering they were being cheated on:
“She was spending a lot of time with a guy friend, to the point that it made me uncomfortable. But I didn’t want to be a controlling boyfriend, so I let it slide. She’d also get funny and ask me 21 questions whenever I had any sort of innocent interaction with a girl, to the point that it made me feel guilty to even have polite conversation with anyone of the opposite sex.”
— u/Acrobatic-Muscle4926
“She literally told me to get out of a friend group we had in common, because she didn’t want to share them. Mind you, I was in the friend group before I even got together with her and she wasn’t in it before I introduced her into it.”
— u/Havesh
“This happened to me with my ex-boyfriend. We went to a Fourth of July work party where his friends at work invited me, without me asking or prompting to join, and he got SO mad. He immediately started accusing me of asking to join and stealing his friends. He just wanted to fuck one of the girls there. Surprise! He got to.”
“I take solace in that I do not have to deal with whatever it is he has to deal with internally every day to have to do something so disgusting and terrible.”
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— u/JudeFlower97
“Caught my ex on Tinder. We were in the elevator; people came in and he thought I was still directly behind him. I was at the side and caught a full glimpse as he opened his phone. Tinder was on the front. He claimed that he was just trying to talk to people to practice his English. I was like ‘since when has Tinder been used as a language app? You can’t download Duolingo like everyone else.’ He just sat there staring at me.”
“I was like ‘Do whatever the f*ck you want; I’m not fighting you over this.’ I stayed with him for a bit more because I had just had surgery and needed help getting around. Long story short, he broke up with me through text and said I made him feel lesser as a man. He talked about his supposed problems, and proceeded to block me. I was like, ‘LOL, okay.’ Coward.”
— u/deleted
“I was blind to a lot of it, but she was getting lots of help from her ‘friends’ to keep me in the dark. Even boasted on Facebook about how ‘in the dark’ I was the day she left me. The thing that really tipped me off was when I restarted my phone one night. We both had the same model of Motorola, and when the ringtone came on after the restart, she woke up instantly and began searching for her phone. I knew right then: There was something she was hiding. The next day, she had new passwords all over her computer, which did not normally have any. Because we trusted each other, right? About a week later, one of her ‘friends’ called me to tell me my then-wife was cheating all over the place and the guilt was eating this woman up for knowing and not telling me. As the years have gone by, I have found that almost every single person I met through my ex was also sleeping with her.”
— u/ZongoNuada
“She said she was going on a trip to Kansas City with her friends. I found out she was going with some other dude and when I confronted her, she denied it many times before she finally admitted it. The kicker? She still went to Kansas City with that fucker, and that was that.”
— u/Lord_Dreadlow
“They started getting really annoyed with me over little things. Just always acting like I was bothering them. Like, I made too much noise in the morning, or I’m being lazy while watching TV. Stuff they never had a problem with before. They started to suggest we go out and do things on our own, like having ‘me time’ when we didn’t in the past. No explanation, just ‘because why not’ kind of attitude. Then they started going out a LOT and saying ‘No, you can’t come. This is my me time!’ They started to pick apart everything I did: ‘Why do you always say that word?’ ‘Why do you have to eat like that?’ Eventually I found myself not wanting to interact with them as much and walking on eggshells when I did.”
“I don’t know why they do these things. Maybe because they are comparing you to the new person they are head over heels with and seeing all the things that make you different from them? Maybe to push you away so you break up with them and they can pretend to be the good guy? Maybe to make themselves feel less bad because they ‘look at how horrible you are,’ and they think they deserve better?”
— u/HauntedGhostAtoms
“She had to go to the doctor and asked her friend to take her, not me. It was to get the morning-after pill.”
— u/CalabreseAlsatian
“Her friends took my side during the breakup. That’s how you know it was bad. Then they only told me when she was fully out of the picture.”
— u/Gheauxst
“I still don’t know for sure, but I left anyway, as it was clear our relationship was bad. We had no sex for over a year, after two years of marriage. He would avoid it and didn’t want to talk about it. He had a very prudish relationship to sex, so I initially put that down to this, but it got ridiculous. He would be out all night every night. Coming home at 2 a.m. was not at all unusual. Sometimes he’d come home, shower, and go back to ‘the office.’ Social events and work events would exclude me. ‘No wives invited, sorry’ — only for me to find out spouses WERE invited, just not me (and he was the CEO)! He’d go on trips away for long weekends; again, without me. I wasn’t allowed to see any financial info. The financial abuse (I was deliberately kept uninformed on what he earned) was a big reason why I left, as well as the total neglect and never being home.”
“He made wild accusations that I was cheating. He rang my boss, even. (I wasn’t nor have I ever cheated in ANY of my relationships.)
I discovered a box of condoms in our home. He told me his male business partner gave them to him. I found a receipt of a meal for two when he was ‘working late.’ I discovered he’d joined an online club for affair partners (this was before smartphones and dating apps).
I went a bit crazy trying to gather proof. All I had were rumors and stuff like this. I did confront him, and of course, he denied it. I left because I saw I had no relationship, whether he was cheating or not. He was absent and I was broken and lonely. Saddest time of my life.”
— u/cactusghecko
“Her history of sleeping around before I married her was a sign, which I so foolishly chose to ignore. Two years into our marriage, she’d started having late nights at her boss’s house for ‘meetings.’ She’d also get $200 a week raises, every four weeks on the nose, until she was making $3,000 more a month than when she started. She became emotional unavailable and completely unwilling to engage in sex with me at all. The remnants of their ‘escapades’ were always on her clothing. I could go on. I left her on year five, after I realized she would never be able to be faithful. She called me before the divorce was finalized to tell me about a threesome she had with two guys she picked up at a bar, thinking it would ‘excite’ me or something.”
— u/waywardcowboy
“I suspected from the very beginning, but didn’t get proof for a year and a half. Some of the things that made me suspect were a change in personality and suddenly caring more about his hygiene and appearance. He started caring what people thought of him, and he started treating me differently. There were small instances that could be explained away, but they didn’t sit right with me, like wanting to fly home for the holidays a day after me. He suddenly had to work late and started having to have his phone on him at all times.”
“The thing that caught him was when I was driving us to lunch and he sat in the back with the baby, I could see his phone screen in the baby mirror. When I asked who he was texting he said ‘the guys,’ but I know he messaged them through Slack and it was a different app on his screen. I turned around and went home and said neither of us was leaving until he came clean. Even then he only told me a small portion.
I tried to make it work but found out nine months later he was still cheating when I found a secret email address and logged into it on his computer and found their chats. At that point we even had each other’s locations, but he was leaving for work early and dropping his phone off at the office and then going to her house. He also had a second phone taped to the back of a drawer in the bathroom.
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Why he went to all that trouble instead of just ending out relationship, I will never know. It was incredibly cruel and traumatic to go through, especially being pregnant and having a baby at the time.
My mistake was confronting him every time I suspected. It just made him better at covering his tracks. I would have just gathered evidence until I was sure.”
— u/ketocavegirl
“Time discrepancy was a sign. She said she was doing X and it took way longer then X should take. The thing about time is that no one wants to waste theirs. If you’re getting a massage and it takes three hours, there better be an extremely logical reason, because no one hangs out for two hours after a massage.”
— u/deleted
“My ex would tell me he was going to run errands, like going to the store. He would show back up three hours later, and couldn’t understand why I suspected him of cheating. Even his mother started to suspect it, and told him that if he was in fact cheating, he needed to come clean so that I could make an informed choice about whether or not I wanted to be with him. I’m sorry, but a trip to the grocery store doesn’t take three hours.”
“I think the worst part about getting cheated on is the insult to our intelligence. It’s like they’re saying ‘I don’t think you’re smart enough to figure out what I’m doing to you. If you do figure it out, I’m going to gaslight you into believing that you’re just being paranoid.’ I hate cheaters. The first time someone cheats on me emotionally or physically, I’m gone. There is no working through it. We’re just done. I’ll never trust them again.”
— u/Unusual_Focus1905
“For me, my husband started deleting text messages, stating that he was trying to make room on his phone. He also started putting his phone with the screen down instead of how he normally would leave it. Those were two red flags. (When I met my current husband, I let him know that the phone face down was a trigger for me, and he never did it again.) He also just started acting differently. He claimed it was depression, but it was the guilt eating away at him, because he was having an affair with our friend. My gut just knew, and I called him out on it. He eventually came clean.”
“There were subtle signs before that I didn’t notice or pick up on at the time because you believe the best and don’t want to see it, but the signs were there.”
— u/mertsey627
“They will constantly accuse you of cheating or always want to know your location. Huge red flag. Also they’ll gaslight you constantly, try to make you feel like you’re to blame, and they’ll always want to check your phone. No trust? Get out!”
— u/K3GR
“Absolutely trust your gut feeling. I noticed a weird red flag that he kept his phone on Airplane Mode at night. When I asked him about it, he said it was so that it would charge faster and not disrupt him with notifications. It turned out that he had a whole double-life with a girl in a different city, and just assumed our paths would never cross. After a few more suspicious moments, I went through Facebook and found a girl that had him in her profile picture (he didn’t have Facebook himself). If I hadn’t trusted my gut, I wouldn’t have gone looking, and who knows how long I would have wasted my time with that asshole.”
— u/marmaladecat7
“The first weird thing I noticed was a change to her sleeping habits. I always stayed up later than my ex; then, one day, she started staying up later than me every night. It was such a drastic switch — she usually went to bed a couple hours earlier than me; then, it was me being unable to stay awake as long as her. The second thing was the phone. All of a sudden, the phone was always angled away from me. There were a lot of other little things, but those were the ones that really stood out as stupid and obvious that something was going on.”
— u/Deleted
“She stopped cuddling, started coming home late from work the last few weeks of our relationship, and started bringing this ‘friend’ to our mobile home. She’d put her phone face-down with hidden notifications. I know the signs of a relationship being over, so when she revealed she was cheating on me, I was just like ‘Whatever.’ What passed me off is that she wanted us to still be friends/roommates. I didn’t say anything, and went to sleep in the guest room. As soon as she left for work in the morning, I packed up and bought a plane ticket back home. Later that night, she started blowing up my phone and leaving voicemails. I blocked her number and went on with my life.”
— u/The-Silver-Scream
“She got a screen protector for her phone that was specifically designed to only be viewable from the front, and told me she got it by ‘accident’ and didn’t know it was that type.”
— u/GlimpseWithin
“When she heard a certain friend was on the way over, she would jump up, skip to the bathroom, and proceed to put a full face of makeup on. They got together and have two kids now.”
— u/Deleted
“She was a shy, nerdy homebody just like me. Then, one day, she just started changing her wardrobe and getting a serious number of tattoos and piercings. This was a drastic change, but I just said ‘Hey, it’s your body and you’re my wife; you do you.’ Suddenly, she wanted liposuction and a breast reduction too. I said, ‘Those are expensive and dangerous. I think you’re hot; you don’t need to change your body so drastically.’ I knew she didn’t really have any friends, but suddenly she started ‘hanging with the work girls’ or ‘having dinner with mom’ several times a week. Also, our frequent sex life started to dwindle. I finally put it all together when she came home very late one night and SPRINTED to the bathroom, taking an odd path to avoid the living room. She told me, through the locked bathroom door, that she hit a skunk and was worried about stinking. I went out to check the car. No smell at all.”
“I went back in and she was trying to hide the packaging of a morning-after pill at the bottom of the trash. She’d been meeting a much younger man, and even had a secret apartment.”
— u/Deleted
“He joined dating sites to make friends, then tried to gaslight me when I confronted him about it. He went out with another guy and I had no idea; I just so happened to walk past him kissing someone else.”
— u/LTSO1911
“It always starts with emotional cheating — shady behavior with the phone, like taking it to the toilet with them, going into other rooms with it, using it when they leave the room, or putting the phone away when you look at them. They’d start hoping to ‘bump’ into said person when you’re both out. They’d become generally disconnected and distant when you’re with them. It’s pure narcissism. Funnily enough, they’re usually the ones that are insecure when you get texts from other people. Everyone knows in their gut when their partner’s behavior is deceptive, but they gaslight themselves into being ‘just insecure.'”
— u/Hakametal
“He used to whine if I didn’t want to hang out with his friends. One day he was going to a couple’s house who I thought were mutual friends. I said ‘I’ll go with you,’ and he got upset. A girl he worked with showed up about 20 minutes later and everyone was acting nervous. She left after ten minutes and he swore that I was being paranoid. Then he didn’t come home from work a few days later, and texted me that he felt like we weren’t working anymore. He came and got some of his stuff to stay with a friend. That night my sister (who didn’t know anything about it) called me and told me she sent me some screenshots from the ‘mutual friend’s’ Facebook page. There were several pictures of him and the girl with her sitting on his lap. They’d blocked me from seeing them. I asked the supposed friends how they could do that, and the wife had looked me in the eyes and swore he’d never cheat on me, and that I was paranoid.”
“She said ‘I’m friends with both of you and didn’t want to get involved.’ I said letting them use your house to hook up got you involved.”
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— u/missymaypen
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