1. Get Tested For STIs

Anyone who’s sexually active should regularly get tested for sexually transmitted infections. With that said, if you think your partner is cheating, getting tested should be a priority. Believe it or not, many STIs don’t have any visible symptoms. Because of that, it can be all too easy to not know you’re infected. That’s why getting tested is so important.

While getting tested can be scary, it’s a necessity and normal. Thankfully, there are ways you can get tested without leaving your home. For example, at-home STI testing is an option. Companies can deliver STI testing kits directly to your front door in discreet packaging. These kits usually include everything you need to take your sample and send it to be tested.

Your results will then be provided virtually. And depending on your results, you’ll be connected with a medical professional who can advise you on treatment options. Getting tested for STIs can be nerve-wracking, but it’s better to know than to be clueless. It also might provide you with the evidence you need to confront your partner, and potentially walk away.

2. Write Down Your Thoughts

It might seem unnecessary, but writing down your thoughts can help you better understand what you’re thinking and why. While there’s a chance your partner is cheating, there’s also a chance you’re jumping to conclusions.

Maybe your partner’s work schedule has picked up, and they’re spending more time away from home. It makes sense you’d think the worst, but that’s why it can be beneficial to write down your thoughts. Research shows getting your thoughts down on paper can keep you from overthinking. You’ll be able to see your thoughts for what they are — sometimes just thoughts.

The sooner you put everything down on paper, the easier it’ll be for you to gain prescriptive and decide on the next steps. Let’s say you plan on confronting your partner. Writing down your thoughts can also help you prepare for that conversation. Instead of leading with emotion and saying anything that pops up in your head, you’ll have an outline of what you want to say.

3. Seek Out Advice

It’s important to remember you don’t have to deal with this alone. If you think your partner is cheating, don’t hesitate to confide in close friends and family. Not only can they offer you support, but there’s power in saying thoughts aloud. In fact, many experts suggest people talk things out, whether big or small, as it has several benefits.

For one, talking can help put your thoughts into perspective. Think about it. How many times has a small issue turned into something catastrophic because you spent the day obsessing over it in your mind? Exactly. Often, things seem bigger and scarier when they only exist in your head. By talking, you’re able to hear what you’re saying and adjust those thoughts.

Saying ideas out loud to your friends and family can also be beneficial, as they may see the situation differently. They may agree with you that your partner is cheating or think you’re being dramatic. Either way, there’s a good chance you’ll leave the conversation with more clarity.

4. Talk To Your Partner

The truth is, you can speculate all day on whether or not your partner is cheating. But it’s better to go directly to the source. While confronting your partner can be uncomfortable, it’s something that needs to happen. With that said, there are ways to go about it that are more effective than others.

For instance, you don’t want to come right out and accuse your partner of cheating. This is especially true if you don’t have any evidence to back up what you’re saying. The last thing you want is to be wrong and ruin the trust between you and your partner. Instead, ease into the conversation by focusing on your own feelings.

You could say, “I feel like your focus may be elsewhere.” This gives your partner an opportunity to either defend themselves or come clean with what’s actually going on. The goal is to avoid sounding accusatory. However, this doesn’t mean you should play nice or pretend like everything is perfect. Be honest and open with how you’re feeling. Even if your partner isn’t cheating, your feelings are valid, and you shouldn’t feel unwanted or unnoticed in your relationship.

5. Decide On What’s Next

After talking to your partner, it’s important you take time to reflect on the conversation before making any decisions. Regardless of what they said, you don’t want to regret anything that you say. Yes, even if your partner admits to cheating. While cheating can be a deal-breaker for some, other couples do their best to get through it.

If your partner admitted to being unfaithful, you might still want to stay in the relationship. There’s nothing wrong with making that decision, but give yourself time to do so. That might mean spending time away from your partner so you can reflect. You should also consider talking it over with friends, family, a therapist, or even with your partner. Just make sure you confide in someone who’s honest and wants the best for you — not someone who lives for drama.

It’s important to remember that your relationship consists of two people: you and your partner. Because of that, it’s crucial you bring your concerns to them, rather than talk behind their back. No one wants to think their partner could be cheating on them. Unfortunately, it happens. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the signs and not be afraid to confront your partner. The tips above can help you prepare to have this difficult conversation.

Photo Credit

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Guest Author Bio
Aurora Leah

What may start out innocently enough as chatting, becomes flirting, becomes emotional cheating, becomes infidelity. Facebook makes it so easy to develop a relationship online. This can and often does lead to the desire to move the relationship to a face to face one.

A wife begins chatting with an old flame she discovered on Facebook. At first she just wants to catch up and be friends. Then the man begins flirting and telling her he still has feelings for her. She is flattered and pleased by the attention. It makes her feel good. She is stimulated and excited. She finds the feeling addictive and they take the chatting offline. Eventually they agree to meet. What began as an online reconnect has now blossomed into a full-fledged affair.

The reasons for this include boredom, excitement, titillation, attempting to recapture lost love. Whatever the reason Facebook facilitates more and more infidelity and divorces.

“Eighty-one percent of divorce lawyers say that the use of social media evidence in divorce cases has increased significantly in the last five years. Facebook lead the pack, followed by MySpace and Twitter.”

From “Infidelity From Facebook Cheating” by Dr. Frank Gunzburg, Marriage Counselling and Marriage Help.

Women are cheating as much or more than men says Michelle Langley, author of “Women’s Infidelity”. She goes on to state, “women’s relationships today follow a predictable pattern.

• They push men for commitment
• They get what they want
• They lost interest in sex
• They become attracted to someone else
• They start cheating
• They become angry and resentful
• They begin telling partners that they need time apart
• They blame their partners for their behavior….and eventually, after making themselves and everyone around them miserable for an indefinite, but usually long period of time, they end their relationships or marriages.”

Infidelity has always been around, but with modern technology has become easier. Facebook is now the preferred method of cheating.

The old saying, “the grass is greener on the other side” drives men and women to be constantly searching for something better. It’s harder to stay in a marriage and do the work to make it better, than it is to logon to Facebook and find something new, which may or may not be better. The easy way is a cop-out in this writer’s opinion.

I was raised to take the marriage vow, “I do promise to take you for better or for worse, in sickness or in health, til death do us part” seriously. Many spouses today stay in the marriage only “til Facebook do us part.”

Photo Credit

Microsoft Office Clipart Collection

Previously Published on Writings & Ramblings  (the author’s blog)

Guest Author Bio

Steve B. Davis
Steve Davis is a freelance writer and researcher. He calls Calgary, Alberta home. Davis writes nonfiction and fiction. He is working on a nonfiction book related to the 1920’s. His work has been published in mainstream and philatelic magazines.

He is employed full-time in the energy industry at the present time, but retirement is looming. He then plans to pursue his writing full-time. His other interests include postal history and genealogy. Steve is a do-it-again dad with five children, four daughters and a son.

Blog / Website: http://stamperdad.wordpress.com

This Wednesday I had flowers on my mind. I don’t usually. The kind of work that I do is the kind that rarely allows flowers as a business expense.

You might say I’m an investigator. There are days when that description is accurate. I look for lost things. Most of the time I look for intangibles that are lost — love, time, sometimes money, and almost always, dreams. It often takes the shape of divorce work, or embezzlement or, for the most part, missing children. In the latter case the intangibles get lost along with the very real possibility, too often the case in the meth-addled days in which we live, that the final losses — of life, health, possibility — are the acknowledged outcome of the investigation.

I tell my clients, that closure, that knowing, is better than not knowing. But the truth is, as far as I can see, that with knowing comes the death of hope, the end of dreams, the loss finally, of happy endings.

Victor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, talked about how having bad dreams was not worth the cost of waking the man up when his life was to be found in Auschwitz. Frankl said, with astonishing clarity, that without the dreams, horrible though they were, the man had nothing left to live for. More kind to leave him to struggle in that world, than to deny him the dreams in this world. I have a hard time arguing with that.

This Wednesday had nothing to do with a client though. I was looking for guilt flowers. I had just jacked up a good friend, a woman about whom I care deeply, someone who brought out things in me I thought had died long ago.

I met her almost a year ago through a mutual friend. I sometimes take personal pictures for friends; weddings if they are truly informal, soccer games, marathons, you know, the stuff you want to have done well but can’t really see paying for. The personal pictures often act as refuge from the strain of the other work, the divorce stuff, the blood.

I took some pictures of Jake’s soccer game. Jake is Zach’s son whom I have known all his life. Zach for much longer than that. One of her kids was on Jake’s team. In taking pictures of all the future Pelés, Ronaldhinos, and Mia Hamms, I always try to take crowd shots to round out the day. You never know when something beyond Saturday morning soccer will show up.

I came across a picture of her in a pink fuzzy toque with a designer name on it. She was in profile, starting to speak to someone out of the frame. I couldn’t take my eyes off the expression of intent in her face; the teeth bared not in anger, closer to passion, her eyes sparkling, alive.

The rules don’t allow for hitting on the moms, so the picture would just have to do. I sent it on to Zach and thought no more about it.

Not exactly true. I thought about her from time to time, mostly at sunset, purple fires streaking over the mountains, Dexter Gordon playing in background. It had been a very long time since me and Dexter dreamed those dreams together.

Life got in the way, my work got ugly and the skies turned springtime misty before she surfaced again. Turns out that she had some pictures she wanted taken as record of her body art. I hadn’t figured on that. I suggested we get together to talk about it. We agreed to meet the next week at a local java joint.

In conversation she has an almost hidden face, the kind you might not take note of on first glance. It didn’t take very long to notice that her eyes are attentive, her smile welcoming, inviting more, her presence an attitude of repose but paying attention.

She told me that she got my number from Zach after he showed her the pictures from the game at a soccer related event. We agreed to meet again the next week the same place.

I asked Zach what he knew about her. He told me he thought she taught somewhere, that she was married with more than one kid and that sometimes he caught a look at her and could not help thinking that something was wildly out of keeping with the tended lawns and German cars in the neighborhood. What, how, why that was he didn’t know. He thought it might be the long, braided, dark hair that hung to her waist. Maybe he just needed something to take his mind off the tedium of getting from here to there with a retirement plan intact.

I took the pictures on a cloudless day in late March. The background walls were yellow, the sky cerulean blue and bright. The body art, sleeves of tattoos, colorful and active, imagery straight from La Dia de los Muertos, made for quite a contrast, but somehow it all worked.

This gal was not a model but there was something in her that the camera loved. Maybe it was all the hidden stuff, as if her life was in her back pocket. In my experience, the people who know that best are the ones who know how pain comes from right close in, how love is never an equal exchange, who know that only the young die young.

We met for lunch a few days later. We had agreed that I would hand over the pictures; she would pay for them with a chic lunch at a local joint with the same name as her daughter. Somewhere between the green salad and the crème caramel, she let me know that she was ”not monogamous”.

I almost choked. When I found my voice again, I asked her if her husband knew that he wasn’t monogamous. It was a trick question I guess but it spoke to my work and the horrors that I had seen come from such situations.

Lunch was clearly over. Whatever hesitations I might have had, wanted to have, disappeared minutes later. We played a little clutch and grab on the street under the budding poplars and agreed to meet the following Tuesday. It didn’t work like that. By the time Friday had come and gone, so had she and not very much would be the same for the next several months.

She does indeed teach and equally does aid work in South America. The teaching, the work on an article, the upcoming three-month fieldwork expedition began to take all of her time. From every day at lunch our meetings started to be separated by days at a time. I was going into some emotional places I hadn’t been since I put away the crack pipe and the Jack Daniels several years ago.

Things were growing deeply complicated. An act of kindness, of intimacy became the doorway to the addict in me who always wants more. She had been here before she said. Not me. Not sober. Even so, we were doing fine until the first argument about getting together. Her life was taking over and it flat out pissed me off.

One day — well, Wednesday, to be precise — I called her to ask her what time she was coming over. We had kind of decided that we could grab one day a week of four to five hours, given her schedule and play the rest by ear. That lasted a week. I felt everything slipping away, her words of reassurance and her request to just let her get the work done so she could be present, fell on my “I need more, you don’t get it” ears. I said as much in a phone call at mid morning.

I heard the anger, the violation in her quiet response. I ignored it. In the end we agreed she would get there at 12 for three hours. There wasn’t much about it that felt good.

I went out almost immediately to get a sticky bun of some sugary walnut caramel thing that I knew she liked and thought to add some flowers. Looked for roses, got irises but it took three stores, some judicious, “what do you mean you don’t have fresh cut irises” negotiating. Irises in hand, sticky bun in the box I got back to house.

She came over; we fought; it got mean. I had put the irises in a hand blown glass coffee maker that doubles a vase in my bachelor house. I had pointed them out to her early on. She didn’t exactly ignore them but they certainly did not get in front of the runaway train that was our anger and frustration.

I had forgotten how my anger gets rolling, how it takes no prisoners, how it uses therapy terms as clubs. I become the bully I track down for others. Where it comes from is another story not for now, but it was there. She didn’t back down an inch. Quiet, controlled, in the end, mean as only the truly wounded can be, she gave as good as she got.

Eventually we got to a sweet place and after awhile she left. The irises were still in the vase on the kitchen table. When I mentioned it to her later that night, or maybe the next day, I said they were for her, her office or whatever. She said she left them because they looked good there.

We met up at a lecture on Friday that week. I was tired from an 18-hour day to that point and not thinking very clearly. She was uncomfortable with my being tired, likely with my being at the lecture in that condition. We went for coffee.

The fight that followed was cowardly on my part, an act of desperation. I felt criticized, cut down, abandoned. In fact she was married. And committed to it in her way. There was no changing that. What the hell had I been thinking? I told her I was going home to get fucked up, the junkies’ only good answer. The fight was over.

We parted, neither of us able to make this right.

As I came through my door, I saw those fuckin’ irises. I took them out to the deck and threw them as far as I could. I went back inside and lay down.

I awoke in the freezing darkness. Far off the sound of crying, the smell of salt. Slowly it came to me, I was lost, the tears were mine.

The next morning I found the irises in the garden below. I cut the stems on a diagonal, wrapped them in wet paper and tin foil and put them in the trash.

Photo Credit

“Iris” (matt) @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“I hope I’ll get an ice cream cone today. I hope grandma doesn’t make me eat turnips. I hope I get a pony ride. I hope daddy will come back someday.”

Hope is a six year old in an woman’s body.

“I hope that if I’m very good, if I smile pretty and wear nice clothes, but I’m naughty in bed, he’ll leave her and be with me.”

The flip side of hope is despair.

Despair is Sylvia Plath readings at a coffee house. Despair is three quarters of a bottle of wine sitting in the bath when he leaves. Again.

Daddy never came back. Men never stay.

Faith is twelve years old.

“If I pray very hard every night to Jesus, he will bring me a new bike.”

Faith is a twelve year old in a woman’s body.

Faith is dating; another evening seated across from a man who has nothing to say, imagining a dress, a ring, another walk down the aisle. Faith is the rituals of coupling and couplehood well before harvest time, invoking an intimacy that could never take root in such shallow soil.

“Maybe if I pretend I like Enya and vacationing in a 36-foot-long gas guzzling motorhome, I can make this work. After all, he would never leave, he’s devoted to me.”

The flip side of faith is suspicion.

Suspicion is poison emails and text messages and a hot rage that burns bridges and destroys relationships. Distrust is finding a stray message and kicking him out at 11 pm, throwing his shoes out the window while your chest caves in.

“Fuck you then. You will never have another chance to hurt me, ever.”

Charity is eighteen years old.

“I’m staying in the school gym for 24 hours without eating anything … to raise money for the food bank.”

Charity is an eighteen year old in a woman’s body.

“Oh no, look what I’ve done. I can’t just leave him with blue balls can I? He’d be so upset if I said no right now.”

Charity changes nothing. Charity is stealing someone’s dignity with a handout. Charity is an endless feedback loop that teaches nothing and prolongs the misery.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t really love you; I didn’t mean for it to get this far.”

What is the flip side of charity, hope, faith: selfishness? No, charity IS self-serving. In reality, the flip side of charity is compassion. Wisdom. Letting go with love. It’s a timeless acceptance and serenity in this 45-year-old woman’s psyche.

I’m still working on it.

In one otherwise forgettable movie, one of the female characters has the habit, upon encountering a man she’s attracted to, of bluntly asking a series of questions: “Are you married? Are you gay? Do you have a job?”

If they answer yes to the first two (or no to the third), she walks away without a second glance. Eventually, she finds someone who is straight, available and financially secure and they live happily ever after.

I have taken a more subtle approach, and I’ve got a wide variety of rationalizations for answers, all of which equal more or less the same thing:

• “It’s complicated” = married (or as good as married)
• “We’re still living in the same house but we’re not together” = married
• After we had arranged for me to pick him up from his vacation; leaving me at the airport to go home with estranged wife who showed up unannounced = married
• Still socializes with the in-laws on a weekly basis = still married
• “We have an understanding” = married
• “We’re seeing if there’s anything still there between us” = married
• Still wearing ring = married
• Still wearing his ring but on right hand = married
• Still has dent on left ring finger = married
• Saying divorce is imminent but he can’t see me or call me for two weeks while she’s in town visiting = married
• “I’m living with someone but I can’t resist you” = married
• “But she hasn’t had sex with me in four years!” = married
• Asking me to think of her as “an old friend” but referring to her as “my wife” to the rest of the world = still married
• “The spark is gone” = married
• Has to leave the house on pretext of going to the store to call me = married
• Asks me not to call his cell so my number won’t show up on bill = married
• Still has wedding picture displayed in dining room = still married
• Only calls from work = married
• “I just have to get her to a place where the divorce is her idea” = married
• “I can’t afford to get a divorce, she’d take everything” = married

I realize everyone has baggage. (Ahem, those without baggage tend to be extremely boring. Sorry. It’s true.) I try to be a compassionate person who can wait it out for the right guy. Not for the truly married ones mind you, but for the truly separated ones who are going through a hard time before the inevitable divorce. I wish I could be that patient, because maybe I’ve missed out on someone wonderful already. In practice, I am intolerant of ambiguity. Why is this? Take your pick:

• Lingering ex-wife baggage raises alarm bells for the little princess inside me who wants to be the absolute centre of attention.
• Fear that he’ll dump me and go back to the ex – better just not to get too involved in the first place.
• Or, you might say I’ve been burned one too many times on this one (see above).

I could just start taking the blunt approach, but then I don’t believe in Hollywood fairy tales and would never take my cue from a forgettable romantic comedy. Life is messy, and one of these times something wonderful will emerge out of the dating chaos. Relationships are hard enough as it is for pity’s sake – at least let’s start out being not married, OK?