Seven Signs That Your Wife May Be Cheating on You

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person, real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. All right, let's just get this out of the way. Most women in relationships do not cheat. I know for some of you, a lot of your persona in your current life situation seems to point to the fact that, oh wow, all these women are evil creatures. They're all conniving. They're all out to cheat on us. They all secretly have their own little life outside of our relationship. We just all need to wake up to this fact. But I'm sorry, the science seems to show that no, that is not the case. A minority of women and a minority of men cheat while they are in a committed, long-term, monogamous relationship. It's not as common as you think. With that being said, if you're watching this, if my material comes up on your algorithm, on your stream, or whatever you want to call it, you probably belong to a subset of guys that I call— and this is not an insult because I fall into this category myself, that's how I started all of this— you probably fall under the category of what we call an anxious dude. And as an anxious dude, you tend to be paired up with a certain type of person for romantic relationships. Those type of people tend to come from a life of chaos, a life of dysfunction, a not so good childhood. And since they come from chaos and dysfunction and a not so good childhood, they probably have very poor boundaries, as we say. They probably had a parent who cheated on their spouse, and so on and so forth. There's all kinds of nastiness in their past. Those people, yes, do tend to cheat more so than the general population. So I have talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of men one-on-one over the years doing the Dad Starting Over and now the Help for Men thing, and I hear a lot of infidelity stories. And I myself have been a quote-unquote victim of infidelity in a past relationship. It's not fun. But if there is one thing that I have learned over the years is that people are kind of predictable. It's kind of interesting, the programming in the human animal and just how predictable it is, how common it is cross-culturally, across socioeconomic divides. We're all the same, it seems. Not completely the same, not 100%, but we're more alike than we are different. And one of the ways in which we are very similar is our emotional and mental reaction to certain things in our life, how we react to certain traumas, how we project certain feelings when we're doing something not so nice. So that's what this video is about, is about those things to look out for that may very well indicate that your spouse, your woman, is up to no good. So let's get into it, shall we? Number 1, she spends more time away from you and the family. A lot of men that I've talked to who have discovered infidelity by their spouse will point to there was a period of time leading up to the discovery of the affair where the wife was gone for hours at a time when she didn't used to be. Often this comes with a new fitness hobby, for example, or a new friend group or something that it gives a pretty legitimate excuse for being gone from the house hours at a time. If this is sudden, if this is kind of unexplained, for example, wife says, "I'm going to the grocery store," and what normally takes around an hour takes 4.5 hours? Not so good. She goes to her CrossFit class, something that you see on the schedule, supposed to last hour, hour and a half, and she's gone for 3.5 hours. When a person is engaged in an affair, it is very unsettling for them and very stressful for them to maintain basically what is in essence two different lives. The family life, the comfort, security, safety, boring, if you wanna call it that, life of the normal day-to-day family life, and then the new exciting, sexy, titillating, energizing world of the affair. The more they dip their toes back into the boring family waters, the more they feel really, really uneasy about this over here. So they need to limit this as much as possible in order to maintain the new sexy relationship. So they will be gone more and more. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are seeing their affair partner during this time. It could just mean they need a timeout from the boring, safe family world. This world over here to them is somewhat suffocating. It doesn't allow them to be their quote unquote true self. I know it's kind of angering to hear that, but that's how they process it in their mind. So yes to meet with a fair partner. You obviously got to get away from the family for that, but it's also just a big fat timeout from Life X when they want to devote more and more time to Life Y. Number 2 sign that they may be cheating on you: they look and act younger. I've talked about this in previous videos. There is a very well-known phenomena, and there's nothing nefarious or evil about this. Both men And women do this. And that is when we are in the throes of a new relationship, or in more general terms, when we are back on the market and trying to land somebody for a new relationship, we project the most attractive version of ourselves possible. And both men and women naturally know, we don't have to be taught this, we just know this innately, that a good portion of being a more attractive mate on the market is to be as youthful as possible. Men, you know, get the tattoos, dress a little younger, act a little bit more energetic, get the sports car, get things that show status and youthful energy. Women, women will lose weight, dress a little sexier, get the nose ring, the tattoo, start acting a little bit wilder. They're saying, hey, Hey, I'm a good mate. Look how fun and sexy and sexual I am. That is going to attract more men to her than if she's typical boring, you know, quote, Karen, taking care of 4 kids at home. So if she has a new partner that she's trying to impress and trying to get to commit to her, not run away from her, she's going to want to project the most sexy thing possible. Now, a lot of guys are very, very hurt by that because they initially think, well, why doesn't she want to project that for me? Why doesn't she want to maintain me? Well, human nature being what it is, you are the for sure thing. You're comfortable. You ain't going anywhere, dude. You're a father to 3 or 4 kids. You got a job, you got a mortgage. If you leave, you'll be paying, you know, child support and half of your 401k goes to her, et cetera, et cetera. It's terrible to say, but the chances of you leaving and going elsewhere and upgrading or whatever are slim to none. At least in her mind. So the stress to keep up appearances, to play the mating game, not nearly as much as the new relationship world. Just the way it is, guys. Number 3 sign that she may be cheating on you: weird random thoughts leaking out of her brain. You cannot fathom the storm that is going on in her brain as a cheating wife. As I mentioned before, she's split between two worlds. She has a lot of thoughts spinning in her head about both the new sexy relationship and trying to maintain the, uh, comfortable, familiar world of the kids and the husband and everything. To have the two— to make the two work in concert with each other is damn near impossible. It's extremely difficult, it's extremely stressful. And so she has this powder keg of stuff brewing in her head. Picture it like a steam engine. It's just building steam, and it needs to release at some point. And every now and then it just releases, and you're sitting back going, what was that about? You know, you'll be at the dinner table eating your typical boring dinner, and all of a sudden she just goes, what do you think about open relationships? And you're like, hello? Or just randomly, Angie at work is cheating on John. You're like, okay. Or sometimes it'll be a form of outright projection of the guilt or thought patterns in her head, and she will start accusing you of wrongdoing. You'll be at the dinner table again, you'll pick up your phone, look at it real quick and put it down, and she'll be like, who is that? Who are you texting? Let me see your phone. You'll be like, um, okay, it's Bob from work. Here you go, here's my phone. You're like, what's going on with her? Suddenly she's just very suspicious of everything that you do. Suddenly she's blurting out little factoids that have nothing to do with anything that's going on. Again, the steam, it has to come out or it's going to blow. This is extremely common. This is where a lot of guys go, oh, something's going on here. Why would she bring that up all of a sudden? Why is she suddenly so interested in the drama at work, this infidelity stories? Why is she asking about polyamory? Why is she suddenly accusing me of doing bad things just because I'm looking at my phone, just because I've dressed a certain way or whatever. What's going on with her? The next sign, number 4. This is for a lot of men the most hurtful. A lot of guys that I talk to are in what they call a dead bedroom situation, and they're talking to me because I wrote a book years ago called The Dead Bedroom Fix. And by the way, the 3rd edition of that book came out in July of 2024. Check it out, Amazon, Apple Books, wherever books are sold, deadbedroomfix.com. But anyway, they will, uh, tell me about sometimes years and years and years of zero or little to no sexual activity between the he and the wife. She certainly is not sexual. She's certainly not sexy. She's certainly not, uh, aggressive in that way, in any way, shape, or form. She's very passive, very sexually dormant, as I often call it. And sometimes this— the men will think, I think she is asexual. And sometimes the women themselves will say, I think I'm asexual. I feel nothing. And then suddenly, wife wears something really, really sexy to bed one night. Wife takes out some toy out of nowhere. Wife suggests something over-the-top sexual. All of these things result in more activity in the bedroom. She's doing things that this guy has been either outwardly requesting or secretly desiring for years, and suddenly it's happening, and the guy's over the moon. Like, yahoo! Why this is so bad is that oftentimes the guy thinks that this is a result of all this work that he's been doing. Maybe he read my book and he put in all this work, and he's like, it finally worked, my wife is finally sexual, yahoo! That happens. Sometimes that happens, absolutely. But sometimes what you're seeing is a very obvious outward manifestation of a woman who is newly turned on. The new sexy relationship energy has really revved up her engine, and yes, she is in essence using husband as a sexual device to release some of that energy. Or even more nefarious, she's trying things out with husband to see if it's something that works in the bedroom that she can then in turn use with new boyfriend. I've had some guys say, in hindsight, after discovering an affair, and they look back on this short period of hypersexual activity, and they're just crushed because they're like, oh, she was asking me, like, how do I look from this angle? She was asking me if she shaved all the hair from this particular area of her body, and she had me check. And she was asking if this is sexy or not sexy. And what do I think about this noise she's making? At the time, I thought she was just really worried about what I her husband thought in that moment. But in hindsight, I realized I was basically like a rehearsal for the real thing, the new boyfriend over here. Oof, that is very heartbreaking for a lot of guys to endure. Number 5: I need space. Suddenly your wife is just way overwhelmed. The kids, work, you, house, everything else, it's too much. I need to get away from all this. I need space. Sometimes it's in a really overt language such as, I want a trial separation. I'm gonna go live with mom and dad. I'm gonna go live with my friend. Or sometimes in-house, I'm gonna go down to the basement. You stay here. Stay the hell away from me. I need space. I need distance. A lot of the times, not a good thing. Basically means being with you repulses me. Being with you makes me feel very, very uneasy. I have completed the emotional connection to this man over here, and being with you, as strange as it may sound, feels like I am being disingenuous to new guy. I can't be in this new head-over-heels, in-love, in-lust relationship with new guy and still maintain some semblance of marriage, romantic relationship with you. So, we need, you know, go over there, dude. We need, I need space from you so I can concentrate on this new thing over here. The number 6 sign that she may be cheating on you. This is an interesting one. She rewrites history. And with my first wife, before I discovered what she had done, one day out of nowhere, we're having a telephone conversation over the cell phone, and she says something to the effect of, You made me take this job. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be doing this. And I was like, where did this come from? If I remember right, this was a response to me saying she was taking on too much work-wise, too much hours-wise, and it was away from me and away from the kids. The distance, staying away, right? And instead of saying something to the effect of, yeah, I know, but I got a lot of hours to work, they're wanting me to do this, I'm sorry, blah blah blah, instead it was instant anger reaction. And the reaction was, you made me take this job. You're the reason I'm doing all these hours. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I remember when we first talked about her taking this job of hers, I said I had reservations about it because this is going to take you more and more away from myself and the kiddos and leave me with basically doing a lot of things. That's not necessarily fair. I'm not sure about this. Can you manage and juggle all these things at once? It was a major step up in her her job role at the time. So I had my reservations. I wasn't sure. I certainly didn't, quote unquote, make her take the job. She was reinventing history. She was changing the narrative. She was a victim in all of this. I am in part the reason why she is where she's at right now. These two different lives, juggling all this, doing all the stress, yada yada, and here comes husband saying, I don't think you should do this. And kaboom, the bomb blew up. And it just made no sense whatsoever. From what I've gathered over the years of talking to so many men, very, very common. And number 7 sign that your wife may be cheating on you: she lies about everything. Again, we go back to this— it's very difficult to juggle both sides, to maintain these two separate lives, these two personas— lover, cheater. Stable mom, wife. It's difficult to balance what did I say and do. I got to keep these stories straight. It's like two— juggling two balls, got to keep them in the air. And it's very difficult to do so. Sometimes you just want to drop one of the balls and just have the one to worry about. And often, a lot of the times, these people in these kind of scenarios just say, you know what, it's easier if I just lie about everything. Easier to keep things straight in my mind. And the people around them are like, why would she lie about that? I mean, it gets ridiculous sometimes. You know, if you say, hey, did you pick up milk from the grocery store? And she's like, yes, I did. You're like, cool. And you go home and you're like, where's the milk? Now stack up dozens of little situations like that and you start to paint a picture for somebody who is just kind of crazy, for lack of a better word, kind of off the rocker. They can't keep reality straight, so they just create their own. Yes, I got the milk. Yes, I paid that bill. And a lot of men in these situations, like, the electric bill hasn't been paid, the, the kids' daycare hasn't been paid. What's going on? You know, typically, wife, you're the one who pays these bills. Now I have to step in and do this. And I asked you about this and you just flat out said you did when you didn't. None of this makes any sense. A lot of what I've outlined here is also very, very common for people that are in the throes of addiction, substance abuse. You'll see a lot of this kind of behavior— missing time, stepping away from the family, I need to get away from everybody, lying about everything, changing their behavior suddenly. Like, who is this person? That's what we're seeing here, folks, with this affair. It's a full-blown addiction. It's Mother Nature saying, go mate with new person. That is an extremely strong urge, and one, by my estimation— and some experts may disagree with me— why this is so strong and it leads them down such a road that there's no coming back. Once they go down that road and go, oh, this was a big oopsie, and they try to come back, it's not the same person. I've talked about it before in other videos, how the case could be made that when the woman cheats, it's a far more nefarious action than when the man cheats. And that's not man good, woman bad. It's just the science seems to point in that direction, because the majority of men engaged in affairs say they are still very, very happy with their marriage, which just blows a lot of people away. But it's some 56% of men that are cheating say, I'm very, very happy with my marriage. I don't want to see it go away. While 70-some-odd percent of women engaged in affairs say, "I am very unhappy and ready to leave this relationship." So the cheating seems to be a pretty strong indicator that she's done. So if she tries to come back, you don't start over right where we left off. You start all over again because she is detached from you. Now she has to reattach. And that is very, very rare.