Affairs can be devastating to relationships, especially ones that have developed between two consenting adults who may have married or were otherwise committed to each other at the start of their relationship. Depending on where you are in your life and experiences, reading about affairs may trigger painful memories of heartbreak, betrayal and hurt. Some individuals navigate affairs with carefully calculated secrecy behind closed doors. In revealing the strategies people use to hide their affairs, we hope to highlight some of the difficulties related to trust, communication and relationship boundaries that you may have a wily individual on your hands.
Secrecy and Discretion
Secrecy is the name of the game for an individual having an affair. Other calls, emails or messages are often sent from secret accounts, or through messaging apps with enhanced encryption – even another ornate online shadow-self is made to facilitate discreet contact with the beloved. The trail of communication between lovers is hidden, compartmentalised, broken up into tiny shards and scattered away from the main physical and digital life of a lover to avoid scrutiny by a partner.
Time and Schedule Management
Her finding that they devoted an average of eight and a half hours a week to scheduling (and time-management) their affairs, hitting the road, paying bills to their lovers and lying to the other spouse was eye-opening. Many found it necessary to engineer excuses for their frequent late stays at work, business trips, or legitimate reasons for checking out of town to deal with the time demands of their affair. Subtly manipulated calendars and detailed to-do lists helped manage the delicate schedule required to juggle a secret sexual life and not arouse the suspicions of one’s primary partner.
Increased Attention to Appearance
Individuals involved in infidelity are more likely to become self-conscious about their appearance by taking better care of their grooming, dressing better, or even switching to healthier lifestyles. This could be an attempt to look better to please or to attract their affair partners.
Guarding Digital Footprints
In the age of vast information exchange, entangled lovers at least take pains to protect their digital incrimination – deleting texts, clearing browsing history, using private browsing modes so that partners can’t inadvertently find damning material, leaving phones and computers alone, and even locking their devices using passwords.
Creating Alibis and Cover Stories
Creating alibis and cover stories is a common strategy that individuals having affairs use to hide their partner’s suspicions. It implies that a cheater will use plausible-sounding narratives to explain away their absence or unusual behaviour. And thus it becomes a little easier for them to avoid suspicion, if caught out Diving deeper, it reads:
Fabricating Outings with Friends
People construct alibis by inventing a social life with friends: I was with a friend, or we were in a group together, or I went to a friend’s house, or I had a hot date. Fabricated social lives are a type of alibi that accounts for a person’s time away while also performing innocence.
Claiming Social or Work-Related Events
The cover story might instead be linked to a social engagement or work-related event. The secret rendezvous could be attributed to a party, conference or work engagement that presents a good reason for someone’s absence. These sorts of events have the potential to reduce suspicion, as long as they don’t detract from the anticipated behaviour of one’s partner.
Fictitious Trips and Getaways
They will also concoct imaginary trips or getaways. I had one guy who had travelled in his car for six days, staying in hotels, and when I asked why he had disappeared for so long, he told me he’d been on a business trip. Another victim told me: ‘My husband used framing narratives all the time. He went on a weekend retreat with his Christian support group. He was at a conference in New Mexico. He had to go into the office on a Saturday for a meeting.’ Artificial trips conjured by adulterers allow them to remain undisturbed while they spend time with their affair partners and provide plausible reasons for their extended absences.
Meticulous Planning and Attention to Detail
It requires a detailed alibi – something both faithful partners would have ready to hand: many affairs are so well planned that they include intricate details about non-existent trips and outings that match what the person knows about the other: ‘How are you saying you spend your time, given what I know about your days?
Social Proof and Collaborators
Others engage friends or acquaintances to lend support to their lies. For example, they might ask friends to help them corroborate cover stories, vouch for them or even concoct false alibis for them. Collaborators get enlisted to make their stories more believable.
This means that having a good alibi and cover story is a delicate balancing act: making sure to weave a fabrication that is implausible enough to escape suspicion – but plausible enough that their partner won’t spot the inconsistencies with their knowledge about what the person is normally doing, where they normally are at this time, who they normally hang out with, etc. To have an effective alibi, you have to pay meticulous attention to detail, asking yourself what information the partner likely has, what information they’re unlikely to have, and what questions they might ask.
This strategy involves not only deceit but also the propagation of a rampant cycle of untruths, which hollows out the connection between the two partners, undermining trust and emotional intimacy. Maintaining cover stories is emotionally taxing, and the ongoing deception can take an emotional toll on both partners, even leading to added stress and guilt.
But most responses are cover stories or alibis, designed to conceal infidelity. For most couples, while trying to hide an affair, the process not only causes significant emotional hurt but it also leads to breaches of trust, which have lasting damaging effects on the relationship. Most people have to make choices and decisions. However, individuals must consider carefully what is the best, most intelligent way to deal with relationship problems. Open and honest communication is the better route, since it allows partners to bring these difficulties out into the open instead of trying to hide and disguise them.
Emotional and Physical Distance
People cheating can also be quieter, physically and emotionally withdrawing. They check out of their partner’s life, refuse to be physically close, or argue to create distance. The cheater will keep their partner at arm’s length to avoid arousing suspicion – they can then ascribe changes in their behaviour to stress or other problems.
Gaslighting and Manipulation
One partner might even become a ghostposts about extramarital affairs. The unfaithful one can use gaslighting to make a target doubt themselves: ‘Have you been watching too much TV dramas about affairs? You’re too paranoid.’ They might even bring symptoms of their partner’s condition into the picture: ‘Was it really that driver who cut you off? Or were you just having a bad day?’ Inventing new rules and trying to make the partner doubt their intuition is one of Bouchard’s four types of aggressive-dismissing discourse, or avoidant attachment style; it shows effort to control by denying the target’s perception. As Epstein explains, these ‘ghostposters’ have a conflicted relationship with empathy: they won’t admit to themselves or others that their family member is suffering and their relationship is falling apart. Often, gaslighting feels like emotional abuse.
Conclusion
These tactics are as varied and paranoid as our culture’s standards and workshop dependency to cover up all the lies and deceits of our infidelity. That is not to say, however, that anyone should be condoning affairs. Analysing this information and picking up on the signs is an important part of recognising the signs and symptoms of infidelity and improving communication within relationships to give the issues a chance to heal.
Trust can make or break relationships, and good communication is critical to build and maintain the foundation of trust so that you and your partner feel able to share your thoughts and feelings openly, express needs and concerns, and listen to each other. By relating to and being open and honest with someone, you are taking a risk, and if they reciprocate, they make that intimacy possible.
The ability to communicate well with your partner is another important function of maintaining a relationship. This includes active listening, empathy and being able to have a conversation even when the topic might be difficult. Opening up the lines of dialogue allows partners to work through challenges, verbalise emotions and hopefully reach deals that will help the relationship to become stronger. Honest communications that are judgement-free can also help identify underlying problems in the relationship and create a space that allows both people to feel heard and validated.
Mutual respect is the starting point for ensuring that the parties involved don’t come close to the kind of destructive secrets that lead to crisis. It means acknowledging the value and autonomy of the other person in the relationship. Mutual respect is expressed by respecting boundaries, keeping commitments, and valuing the feelings and perspectives of one’s partner.
It takes work to maintain a healthy relationship, and it requires you and your partner to periodically return to your own sense of self – what you need, what you want to gain, why you decided to be in a relationship in the first place. This ongoing introspection can lead to enhanced self-understanding and personal growth, which will help you in your relationship, reducing the desire for extracurricular emotional or physical affairs.
It seems to me that acknowledging and learning about the various ways in which people try to conceal their affairs is an important first step, but at the same time we can’t avoid also exhibiting a great deal of empathy towards the people who cheat. Infidelity can be both a symptom and a cause of deeper problems within a relationship – unmet needs, a lack of intimacy, underlying tensions. If partners can acknowledge these problems together with honest discussions, the relationship might be saved from imminent destruction.
In the end, truthfulness and transparency, prompted by consistent and shared values, are the ingredients of a healthy, resilient, communicative relationship. Given, couples can allow for a relationship that is oriented to the future and that is open to exploration and growth, rather than plagued by the devastating effects of a hidden affair.