By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT
Review of The More You Know: Getting the Evidence and Support You Need to Investigate a Troubled Relationship
If you suspect your spouse is cheating on you, what can you do to prove or disprove your suspicions.
Affairs, whether lasting one night or several months, damage families even if one or both parties pretends it's not really serious, or that no one is hurt if it's kept secret.
At the very least, if a man is cheating on his wife, whether she doesn't know (or chooses not to see the signs of an affair going on right under her nose), she misses out on having an open and deeply committed relationship with the man she's chosen for a partner. He misses out on experiencing a marriage of faithfulness and honesty. Their children miss the opportunity to learn what a committed and loving relationship looks like.
In short, adultery ain't good for your marriage and you're probably reading this page because you have a nagging suspicion your spouse has strayed. But how can you know if your husband or wife is cheating on you (or your partner if you are in a supposedly committed relationship without a marriage license)? Furthermore, what can, and should, you do about your suspicions.?
Hiring a private detective to spy on your spouse is not an action most suspicious wives or husbands take. If they do hire an investigator, they don't do it lightly.
However, after reading The More You Know, you'll be much better prepared to recognize whether your spouse or partner is most likely cheating on you, what to do to protect yourself and your finances, and whether to hire a detective. The author, a private investigator and son of an FBI agent, offers a practical guide to approaching the possibility of an affair. He shares the many ways in which he has helped uncover and prove affairs in hundreds of couples he has seen over the years.
To set the stage for exploring infidelity, in the first chapter Bill Mitchell looks at what kinds of relationships are most at risk. Next, he gives eight signs of adultery. They are:
1. Defensive behavior
2. Changes in affection and sexual activity
3. Financial woes
4. Communication problems
5. Unexplained absences
6. Need to be alone
7. Pattern and lifestyle changes
8. Wardrobe renovation
Any of these, by itself, doesn't mean adultery is occurring or even right around the corner. But satisfying relationships are most often free of these characteristics (except, perhaps, the last, in which case a person may feel their natural sloppiness has prevented moving up the corporate ladder and decide to do something about it).
In any case, as you read examples of each of these, you can access the likelihood that cheating is taking place. You might also decide to take steps to change a rocky relationship so that an affair doesn't occur — for example, by reading and taking to heart suggestions in the articles here in Support4Change for strengthening your marriage to prevent future heartache.
Bill Mitchell's chapter on "Where it All Begins" offers a warning on how to avoid getting into a situation where the potential for an affair can grow into full-fledged adultery. Preventing adultery takes effort. For example, I have a neighbor who has a policy that he doesn't go to lunch alone with a women other than his wife. If there is business to discuss, he will do that in his office or he'll take someone else along to a lunch meeting. As a lawyer, he's seen too many cases of affairs that began very innocently, but concluded with ruined lives.
Of course, there are many places where lovers can rendezvous besides lunch. There are weekends and evenings (a time when investigators are most often hired to do surveillance), days when a spouse and co-worker are both not scheduled to work, before and after work, business trips, etc.
So let's assume you are fairly sure your spouse has been cheating on you, but you want to get proof. It would be nice if you could simply say, "Honey, Betty saw you with a blonde at that roadside cafe last Tuesday when you said you were working late at the office. Explain yourself." And then, in the better of all possible worlds (the best being a world in which no one cheated on anyone), your spouse would say, "I was just meeting with her to plan a very special event for your birthday." And you would believe him because he was telling the truth.
In another scenario he might say, "I've been having an affair for several months and intended to tell you but it slipped my mind. If it bothers you I won't do it again." Then you both kiss and that's the end of that. Yeah, sure. If he had an affair, he has a lot of damage to undo and you have a lot of exploring to see where you want to go from there.
However, given the fact that affairs occur in a climate of secrecy, if he is having an affair, the chances are that not only will he deny it, he'll be more cautious when he next meets with your competition. Further, once warned you're on to him, it's possible he may try to hide financial transactions, so that in a divorce settlement you won't get the money you deserve. A person who cheats by having sex with someone other than his wife is not beyond cheating with his finances.
Consider a case I heard in a lecture on divorce and negotiation in graduate school. The instructor was a woman lawyer who had been a therapist. Her story goes something like this. When her husband, we'll call him Joe, began divorce proceedings, he claimed the large amount of money in their bank account was a loan from his brother, Steve, his partner in business. Since he had to pay it back, he claimed it wasn't an asset.
To prove it was a loan, next to each deposit in the account book he had stamped the notation, "Loan to Joe from Steve." The same stamp appeared on each check Steve had written.
Unfortunately for Joe, his wife went through the drawers of his desk and found a receipt for the stamp used in both instances dated after he filed for divorce. Without that evidence, he could have gotten away with claiming he had much less than he did, and she would have gotten much less in the settlement. Deciding women needed help from jerks like that, she went to law school.
Anyway, back to my review of The More You Know. If you have doubts about your spouse's fidelity and want answers quickly, the book will give you good, practical advice on what you should do, which includes various ways to go beyond suspicions to getting proof.
Before I read this book, I hadn't recommended clients hire a private detective if cheating was suspected. We used therapy techniques that often eventually exposed adultery. However, I now see the advantage of hiring someone like Bill Mitchell.
If you do hire a professional investigator, you may not find evidence of your spouse's cheating in a week, which is the amount of time Bill is often able to gather the necessary proof.
Nevertheless, even if you don't choose to hire a professional, a person trained in surveillance can at least guide you in what you can do on your own. To help you find an investigator, the book includes a list of state agencies that license private investigators, for you wouldn't want to use one who wasn't licensed.
Setting out on the path of checking on a wayward spouse is painful. But it's not any less painful than not knowing the truth, for lies we tell and lies we believe too often destroy relationships beyond the point of repair. The truth may seem harsh if it is not what we want to know, but it's also liberating.
© Copyright 2006, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT
