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Here is a summary of the transcript from YouTube, slightly edited with AI.

How Do You Know If They’ll Cheat?

When Betrayal Comes as a Shock

How do you know if someone is cheating on you? How do you know if they’re going to cheat in the future?

I saw a video recently of a woman who learned that her husband of 17 years had been cheating on her the entire time. People will say to that, “How didn’t you know? Surely you knew. You saw something.”

Today, I want to talk about this. We’re going to dig into this story and talk about cheating and betrayal in general—and how a perfectly healthy, usually intuitive person can miss it when it’s happening right in front of them.

This can lead not only to what’s called betrayal trauma on a deep level, but also the madness of feeling completely blindsided when we realize what’s been going on.

As the woman explained:

“I can honestly say that the 20 years I was with my husband, and the 17 years I was married to him, I never once suspected he was cheating on me. I later found out he had been cheating starting from year one of the marriage.”

Seventeen years of betrayal that she didn’t see—that she wasn’t aware of. That is a frightening amount of time to be unaware of a double life that someone is leading.

It leads to the obvious question: How does someone not know during that time? There must have been signs. There must have been something.

In a way, when we say that, we’re seeking comfort. We want to imagine that there must have been something along the way that would have alerted us—something we would have noticed in our own perceptive way.

Many of us assume we would catch it.

Yet this woman said:

“Literally, I would have staked my life on him being faithful to me.”

This is not actually uncommon. A lot of people had no idea.

But when we look back, there are often moments that didn’t quite make sense at the time.

Even if someone didn’t feel their partner was cheating, there may have been small things that felt out of alignment.

Trap Door #1: The Misdirect

In this woman’s story, one of the biggest issues in the marriage was her husband’s rage attacks.

She described how he would suddenly lose control over very small things—outbursts that felt wildly disproportionate to what had happened.

This brings us to one of the key psychological trap doors we can fall into: the misdirect.

We see a red flag. We see strange behavior. But we can’t easily predict what that behavior is actually pointing to.

In her case, the rage episodes didn’t make sense in the moment. They were outsized reactions to everyday situations.

So how did she justify them?

How We Justify Bad Behavior

Her husband worked as a first responder. She believed the rage came from the trauma and stress of the job.

So the behavior—anger and explosive reactions—was explained away as PTSD.

This is what often happens. We see behavior that isn’t healthy, but we create a story that makes sense of it.

Sometimes the other person even helps us create that story.

They give us a narrative about why they behave the way they do.

The tricky part about the psychological trap of the misdirect is that the behavior we see doesn’t always logically point to the real issue.

In this case, it likely wasn’t PTSD at all.

It was guilt.

The signs weren’t of cheating directly, but of a man living a split life.

I know another example. A woman told me her husband insisted on tracking her location on his phone. He said he was worried about her and wanted to know where she was.

It later turned out he was cheating. Knowing her location made it easier for him to manage his own secret life.

But she wrote it off as concern—or at worst, insecurity.

What she didn’t see was that it pointed to his own behavior.

With the misdirect, the behaviors that worry us don’t always resemble the problem that eventually reveals itself.

Trap Door #2: The False Sense of Security

The second psychological trap door is the false sense of security.

We excuse bad behavior because it’s aimed at other people, not at us.

We feel safe because we assume—often unconsciously—that they would never do that to us.

Then one day we realize they are perfectly capable of doing exactly that. We just hadn’t been in the firing line yet.

Maybe you watched them take revenge on someone long after a situation was over.

Maybe you saw how they discarded a previous partner before they met you—or even the person they left for you.

Character is consistent.

How someone treats other people will eventually find its way to you when circumstances change or when you’re no longer useful in the ways you once were.

Trap Door #3: The Iceberg Effect

The third trap door is the iceberg effect.

We see bad behavior on the surface and assume that if there’s more we don’t know, it’s probably just more of the same.

We rarely assume it might be worse.

When we see troubling behavior, we think: “I hope there isn’t more of this happening.”

But we don’t imagine that what we’re seeing might only be the visible tip of something far darker beneath the surface.

This is why betrayal can bring repeated shocks.

People sometimes say, “How are you still surprised by anything this person does?”

But the reason is simple: we measure what someone is capable of based on what they’ve already done.

We forget that what we’ve seen might only be the visible part of the iceberg.

That said, we also have to be careful not to turn every breeze into a hurricane.

Context and consistency of character matter.

For example, the woman whose husband tracked her location had already caught him in multiple lies over the years. Once you add that context, the behavior paints a very different picture.

If you see darkness in someone’s behavior, be wary of assuming that what you’re seeing is the worst they’re capable of.

Trap Door #4: The Biased Judge

The final trap door is the biased judge.

Each of these traps opens under the weight of something we want: love, safety, approval.

The moment we attach our desire to someone else’s behavior, we can become unreliable narrators in our own story.

When we’re trying to maintain love or approval, we often become avoidant ourselves.

If someone’s behavior suddenly changes—habits shift, intimacy patterns change, or secrecy increases—we may avoid the conversation entirely.

It’s not always about judging someone who “should have known.”

Sometimes it’s about understanding someone who couldn’t afford to know.

Cognitive dissonance can act as a safety mechanism, filtering out the truth because accepting it would destroy our world.

This blindness is what keeps many people stuck for years in relationships built on lies.

Listening to Your Intuition

All of us have been biased judges at different times in our lives.

Maybe it was a first date with someone attractive when we were longing for love. Or maybe it was a long marriage we couldn’t afford—emotionally or practically—to lose.

Of course, we also want to live with optimism. We don’t want to assume the worst about people all the time.

The worst outcome of this conversation would be everyone living in constant anxiety about betrayal.

That isn’t living.

The point is simply this: intuition is often quiet.

In dating, chemistry is louder.

In long-term relationships, intuition can be muted by love, shared history, and the sunk cost of years together.

We can’t always control someone who lies, gaslights, or hides things from us.

But we can get better at not distorting our own reality.

Real safety doesn’t come from avoiding the truth.

It comes from being prepared to confront it.

That doesn’t mean accusing people of things we can’t see yet. It means creating relationships built on open, honest, uncomplicated communication—and seeing who can tolerate that environment and who cannot.

And when someone reacts poorly to that kind of honesty, it’s about learning to trust our discomfort, even when we can’t fully explain it yet.

Thank you for watching.

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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