Expert: Don - 1/9/2008

Question
A while back I started to have an intuition that was cheating, but I do not have anything concrete, and I doubt I ever will. I have come to realize that my wife is a very good liar and manipulator. Just last weekend, she told me that the secret to deceiving someone is to not look guilty.

Anyway, I do not expect I will be able to catch her red handed unless I get really lucky. Heck even if I hired a private detective she would probably find out. On the other hand, I have seen several things that made me very suspicious. A while back, she mentioned a type of lingerie that I had never heard of. I thought it would be fun to buy it for her. So I went to her computer's history to see if she had browsed for it. I found it and bought it for her. I made the mistake of telling her how I had found it. The next time I surfed the internet on her computer, the browser asked me if I wanted to clear the history when I closed it. This worried me. I decided to look in her cookies to see where she had been. I found that it had visited a web site that helps married people have affairs. This really worried me. Only she and I have access to that computer. So I installed computer monitoring software. It took her all of a couple of hours to figure out that I had installed the software. So she bought a program to kill it and a program called privacy guardian, which deletes all computer information.

I then confronted her. She said that she cleared her history because she did not like me spying on her and wanted to provoke me.  Also, the cookie might have been placed by an advertisement, but then again, she would have had to visit a site that shows such advertisements.

Here is another story:

My daughter said she wanted to go to an amusement park for her birthday. My wife, who is typically really big on birthdays, said she did not like amusement parks and wanted to stay home. When her birthday came, it was raining hard, so we decided to go to an indoor pool. My wife loves to swim, but again, she begged off because she had work to do. So I left and everything seemed fine. After we had swam for a few hours, I called my wife and she did not answer. It took six calls to get her to answer. When she answered, she acted really annoyed with me. Through the conversation, I realized that she was not at home. I said, "I thought you were at home working." She said she decided to go shopping instead. I told her we were going home now, which seemed to upset her. She got home shortly after we did. My daughter noticed that she had done her hair differently and said something. My wife looked at me like a deer in the headlights. She looked scared and did not respond for some time. My daughter decided she wanted to go bowling and we all went. During this time my wife appeared to be upset with me. She even snapped, "why do you always have to be doing something?" A while later, I asked her about her work and not swimming. She said that she had not felt well.

But she felt well enough to go bowling and shopping? Why was she annoyed with me? Why did she spend a lot of time doing her hair and then look scared when it was mentioned?

So what do you think? Am I being paranoid or is she cheating?

Answer
From the second story alone, it appears that you're wife is having an affair or at least has something to hide. It seems like she was adamant that you and your child not be around her that day because she had alternative plans, plans that more than likely involved her and the person she is having the affair with.

I don't think you're being paranoid at all, she is engaging in some heavily suspicious activities and if I were you I would do some further investigating into her actions. You talked about hiring a private investigator, if you can afford it, that might not be such a bad idea, most of those guys are pretty good and will be able to get the dirt on your wife without her finding out.

You should definitely do something though because it appears that she is up to something.