Signs of an Extramarital Affair: What Actually Indicates Something, and What Does Not

We run a platform for married people who have decided to see somebody else, so you might expect us to be the last people writing this. We publish it for two reasons: the standard version of this article is mostly nonsense, and a very large number of the people who read it are hurting.

The problem with every list you have read

The usual list runs: works late, guards the phone, new clothes, less interested in sex, picks fights, suddenly attentive. Read it again. It also describes a promotion, a health scare, a parent's illness, a depressive episode, and a year of financial stress. Each item individually has a base rate so high that it tells you almost nothing.

The result is predictable. People read the list, recognise four items, and start surveilling a partner who is going through something else entirely. That does damage that does not undo.

What is actually meaningful

Therapists who work with couples point to the same three things, and none of them are individual behaviours.

1. A change in the pattern, not the behaviour

A partner who has always worked late working late is information about their job. A partner who has never worked late now working late twice a week, for four months, with a different explanation each time, is a change in pattern. The signal is the delta, not the level.

2. An account that does not hold together

Not secrecy — inconsistency. Details that change on retelling. A story that is unnecessarily elaborate. An explanation offered before anybody asked for one. People who are hiding something have to remember what they said; people who are not, do not.

3. Emotional withdrawal from the marriage specifically

The most reliable indicator anybody reports is not a phone. It is that your partner has stopped bringing things to you. The small news of a day goes somewhere else now. Depression looks like withdrawal from everything; this looks like withdrawal from you.

Things that genuinely mean less than you think

• A passcode on a phone. Nearly every adult has one. It is the default setting.
• Less sex. Frequency declines with age, children, stress, illness and medication. It is the single most common complaint in marriages where nobody is seeing anybody.
• New gym membership or clothes. People turn forty.
• Being on the phone more. Everybody is on the phone more.
• Guilt-driven generosity. This one gets cited constantly and there is essentially no evidence for it.

The one thing that does correlate strongly

Deleted messages. Not a locked phone — a phone where a specific thread is gone while the rest of the history is intact. That is a deliberate act with very few innocent explanations. It is also the point at which many people start doing things that are illegal.

Before you investigate, read this

In India, a number of things people do at this stage are criminal offences:

• Installing spyware or a tracker on someone's phone — Sections 43 and 66, Information Technology Act, 2000.
• Accessing their email or cloud account — the same provisions.
• Recording their calls without authorisation — Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, and a breach of the privacy right in Puttaswamy (2017).
• Publishing anything intimate you find — Sections 66E and 67A, IT Act.

Beyond the legal exposure: evidence gathered this way is frequently inadmissible, so you can commit an offence and still be unable to use what you found. Our guide to what Indian courts accept goes through this.

What to do instead

1. Write down what you have actually observed, separating fact from inference. The list is usually shorter than it felt.
2. Ask a direct question, once. Not a trap. "Something has changed and I need you to tell me what it is."
3. Notice the response, not the answer. Someone who is not hiding anything tends to engage with the question. Someone who is tends to attack the asking of it.
4. Talk to somebody outside it. A therapist if you can; a friend who will disagree with you if you cannot.
5. Decide what you want before you find out. People who have not decided in advance tend to make the decision in the worst possible hour.

And if it is true

An affair is not automatically the end of a marriage. Research on couples who stay together after infidelity is more optimistic than the cultural script suggests, and a meaningful proportion of them describe the marriage afterwards as more honest than it was before. It requires the affair to actually stop and it requires help. Our guide on whether a marriage survives an affair is the more useful read from here.