If you are looking to catch your husband (or wife, boyfriend, etc.) cheating on you, you actually have two problems at hand, not one. The first, of course, is that your husband might be cheating on you. The other, however, is that you have a relationship with your husband which is adversarial – meaning you feel like enemies, not friends.
In a healthy relationship, you and your significant other feel like a team. If there is a problem, you are able to talk about it instead of using it as a weapon against each other. And yes, cheating can happen even in healthy relationships. There is still a lot of repair to be done in such a situation, but at least there’s a framework to do it. There has been a sense of partnership that often both parties want to get back to after the explosion of an affair.
In a relationship where one person feels like they have to “catch” the other one, you and your partner probably don’t feel like a team at all. You feel like you are in conflict, struggling against each other, where one wins and one loses. Cheating is just the result of that situation, and whether it’s happening or not, the underlying problem is still there. And it’s those underlying relationship issues that are going to have to be dealt with, because even if there is no affair going on, or if it’s caught, apologized for, and stopped, your relationship is not on solid ground.
So, if you’ve been looking to catch your cheating husband in the act, perhaps it’s time to rethink what you really want. If you’d like to have a satisfying relationship that can survive the tough times, acting like an enemy probably won’t get you there. Instead, talk to us to see how you can turn things around. If really you’re just looking to punish your spouse and get out of the marriage, go ahead and hire a private investigator. But as a marriage counselor I can tell you this – it won’t fix your relationship; it will just make it worse.