Infidelity is a subject that often causes strong emotions in us. It’s been a big topic for as long as there have been relationships and it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t been affected by infidelity in one way or another.

The term infidelity can be used to describe any relationship outside of a couple, but most commonly it refers to sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not that person’s spouse.

There are signs of infidelity that can indicate that someone is unfaithful, but they are not always a sure sign and cannot be considered in isolation. Always such elements make up an overall picture that tells a story closer to the truth than the elements taken separately.

Early signs of infidelity include:

1. Suspicious or increased activity on phone, email or social media.

In today’s day and age, when so many people are glued to their phones almost all the time, it’s hard to say for sure what is suspicious activity. But there are a number of clues. For example:

• all electronic devices are password protected or some other security method that you don’t have access to.

• the phone is always placed face down when it’s out of your hand. There are phones that automatically go into silent mode when placed face down, but usually the phone is placed face down when you don’t want people to glance at the notifications on the screen.

• a sudden invasion of new ‘friends’ on your partner’s social media. It’s possible, of course, that your partner has suddenly become much more social and befriended 300 new people in a matter of days, but more often than not this sudden invasion is meant to hide the target of a new romantic interest. That is, the unfaithful partner hopes that his new conquest will get lost in the crowd of new friends.

• messages deleted from phone

• contacts named differently in the phonebook. For example, Lola from accounting becomes Mr. Smith in the phone book. Or vice versa.

2. Unexplained absences from work or home

Few people have a Swiss watch schedule, but even so, most people have certain routines and a certain predictability in their actions. Even those with chaotic schedules are predictable in their unpredictability.

If your partner is inexplicably missing from work during the day or from home, if they leave home frequently at night or come home extremely late on a frequent basis, these are all signs that they might be hiding something. Of course infidelity is not the only explanation for these absences, but it is one of them.

3. Unexplained financial problems

Unexplained financial problems usually have two plausible explanations: either infidelity or gambling problems.

Either way, if it seems that your partner is always running out of money, especially if he or she has a high enough income that it’s not justified to bother with finances, he or she is most likely hiding something.

Other mood swings such as anger, anxiety or depression may be a sign that something is wrong in the relationship. Of course such mood swings indicate that something is wrong with the person experiencing them in the first place, but often such mood swings also have an effect on the relationship when they are not caused by the relationship itself.

Somewhat stronger signs that an infidelity is taking place are the following:

4. Emotional distance

If your partner has become emotionally distant from you, it could be because they are thinking about someone else. Emotional distance can be seen by his refusal to talk to you, the fact that he doesn’t seem to have time for the relationship at all.

The first step is to identify the type of emotional distance you are experiencing. There are two main types of emotional distance:

Physical: When your partner spends less time with you or avoids physical contact with you. This includes sex, but is not

Mental: When your partner is more absent or uninterested in conversations or when they seem more distracted than usual.

5. The person is always tired or exhausted

Fatigue and exhaustion can have many explanations: burnout, high stress, depression, family problems, disagreements at work, chronic illnesses and so on.

But fatigue also comes from a duplicitous lifestyle, where you have to hide from each other and have to resort to all sorts of tricks to avoid being caught cheating.

This is only a sign of infidelity if the person in question is not experiencing any visible difficulties in their life, serious situations that could cause them immense stress. In any case, even if it’s not infidelity, continued exhaustion is a serious red flag that something is wrong with that person and it would be worth investigating the reason for maintaining this state.

6. The person does not make eye contact

A partner who avoids eye contact might feel guilty about something or might be afraid to find out they are cheating on you. Generally, when someone lies or hides something, eye contact is reduced or, on the contrary, intensified. Which means that when they lie, they don’t look you in the eye.

Rarely, when someone is lying, they will look you straight in the eye, but even then, if you’re paying attention you can tell something is wrong, because they will make more eye contact than usual.

7. The person is easily angered or emotionally reactive

If the person gets angry easily and often criticizes you, then this could be a sign that they might be looking for something or that they might be comparing you to someone they are interested in and are angry that you are not like that person.

Anger management issues are not just related to infidelity, but can signal that you are no longer enough for the other person.

8. Spending too much time on social media

Just because someone spends a lot of time on social media doesn’t in itself mean they are unfaithful. But certain effects of social networking can amplify the risk of infidelity. I’ll mention just a few of these effects:

• low self-esteem

• comparisons with other people, where you almost never come out a winner

• promotion of seemingly perfect bodies that don’t really exist

• fakeness as a way of gaining relevant currency, in the case of social networks the number of followers

• emphasis on appearance over reality

In addition to these, there are some strong signs of infidelity, and these are:

9. Finding a partner’s phone you didn’t know about, with a different phone number

Unless your partner is carrying out spy activity or is an interloper, this is a pretty clear sign that they have something to hide from you.

Think about why someone would have a secret phone, unless they wanted to hide the activity on it, without stressing about getting an unexpected message, deleting conversations or pictures from it.

10. Has “hook-up” apps installed, such as Tinder

I know a lot of people use the excuse that Tinder is a way to meet new people, that it’s still a social networking app. But essentially, Tinder was created for the purpose of finding people to have sex with. For that reason, I think that having such an app installed, even if it doesn’t clearly demonstrate infidelity, at least demonstrates an intention to do so.

Besides, truly sociable people don’t need such an app to make new acquaintances.

11. Increased attention to body care

A change of look is not usually a cause for concern. A woman who decides to change her hair colour or a man who decides to grow a beard is not necessarily unfaithful. Maybe they’re looking to reinvent themselves, maybe they’re bored with the way they look, maybe they’re trying to increase their self-esteem, there are many reasons to change your appearance, usually completely honourable and benign reasons. However, there is a much more subtle signal that is a strong indicator that infidelity might be taking place, which is true for women and men alike, and that is the attention paid to your own body.

Of course, in general, taking care of your body is a positive and helpful thing. But here we’re talking about a strong, visible and relatively rapid shift from someone who takes good care of themselves to someone who almost becomes obsessed with taking care of their body. Or it may be the introduction of complicated and completely new rituals into the process. For example, a man who has never shaved before suddenly starts shaving all over his body and not only that, he also goes to a beauty salon for it. Or a woman who suddenly starts wearing heavy or glaring make-up, where before make-up was either very discreet or missing altogether.

What I’d like you to understand is that none of these signs of infidelity are 100% certain. This is also why I hesitated to write this article, because I didn’t want to be the cause of two people arguing and ending up with accusations of infidelity, especially if they are unfounded.

But the truth is that someone malicious will always find ways to twist what you said, and use it to achieve their own ends, or to prove their point.

And that’s when I said, from that point of view, it doesn’t even matter what my reservations are, because I can’t change that anyway.

But there are not only malicious people in this world, there are also a lot of naive people. And as a rule, the naive fall prey to the malicious.

This article is written for the naive, to give them food for thought and somehow raise the question that infidelity can still be detected, it’s not that complicated and cheaters are usually not even great experts at hiding it.

There is one problem with that last point, and with this article. All signs of infidelity are based on a change in the person’s behavior from a previous time. However, there is a fortunately very small percentage of people who have infidelity as a way of life. They are very good at hiding infidelity and will most likely behave the same way from the beginning of the relationship. Therefore, when it comes to such people, infidelity is difficult to detect by deductive means. However, such people are extremely toxic to the partner and, even assuming they are not unfaithful, are still hard to live with in a relationship. So if you’re in a relationship with such a person, infidelity should be the least of your problems.