Love Life with Matthew Hussey - A Dark Way To Predict If Someone Will Cheat Matt Monday

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

This week’s episode looks at why even highly intuitive people can miss the signs of a partner living a double life. I share the story of a woman who spent 17 years in a marriage without suspecting a thing—not because she wasn’t perceptive, but because love can dull the very instincts meant to protect us.I also break down the psychological trapdoors that make us overlook what’s right in front of us. The goal isn’t to make you suspicious; it’s to help you trust those moments of quiet discomfort instead of dismissing them. If something has ever felt “off,” this video will help you understand why.---►► Answers Tailored to You, In Real Time, When You Need Them Most. Ask Matthew AI Your Biggest Dating Question Now at AskMH.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you know if someone's 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. Well, today I want to talk about this. We're going to dig into this video and I'm going to talk about cheating and betrayal in general. And how it is that a perfectly healthy, usually intuitive person can miss it when it's happening right in front of. of them, leading not only to what's called betrayal trauma on a deep level, but the madness of feeling completely blindsided when we realize what's been going on. So I can honestly say that the 20 years that I was with my husband and the 17 years I was

married to him and I found out that he was cheating on me starting from year one of marriage. I never once suspected that he was cheating on me. 17 years of betrayal that she didn't say. that she wasn't aware of. That is a frightening amount of time to be unaware of a double life that someone is leading. And it does, of course, lead to questions

like how on earth does someone not know during that time? There must have been signs. There must have been something. And in a way, when we're saying that, we're saying it because it brings us comfort to imagine that there must have been something along the way

that alerted her that I would see in my own perceptive ways that she didn't. I mean, if somebody had told me that that happened to them, that their husband was cheating on them the entire time they were married, I'd be like, um, you're very unaware because there have to have been clues. Literally, I would have staked my life on him being faithful to me.

This is not actually uncommon. A lot of us had no idea. But is that really true? Like, I didn't have the feeling that he was cheating on me, but. So this is always the interesting part, right? It's the, it's the but. It's like when I really look at it, what was there?

Even if I didn't feel they were cheating on me, what was there that didn't feel quite right? Let's see what it was for her. I can see things that did point to stuff being out of alignment. So for me, the biggest thing in my marriage was he had, um, rage attacks. It would be like, why are you just losing it? Like nothing, no big deal happened. Just one little thing that didn't go your way. And you're losing it. So I want to pause there for a moment because this now steps into one of the key psychological trap doors that we can fall into that prevent us from seeing someone's true behavior and who they are. We see a red flag. We see a

strange behavior. But we don't see and we can't easily predict, what that strange behavior, what that red flag is actually pointing to. So in this video, this woman talks about rage episodes that didn't make sense in the moment. They were completely outsized reactions to what was going on. Let's see how she justified these rage attacks. Okay, so he is a first responder, but I knew he had issues from work. And I excused it as being like PTSD and stress from work. Okay, we have a.

behavior, that's not good, rage attacks. And we have this justification of them. Oh, that's because this person's work has created PTSD and this is a response to that. So we find a way to make sense of it. And sometimes that person helps us make sense of it. They give us the story about why they're having, in this case, those rage attacks. The really tricky part about the psychological trap of the misdirect is that it's not always logical at all. what that behavior might be pointing to. In his case, it wasn't PTSD. It was far more likely guilt.

The signs were there, not of cheating, but a man who was split in two. There are other examples of this. I know someone whose husband insisted on tracking her location and being able to see it on his phone and justified it as, I'm worried about you and I wanna know where you are. It turned out,

was cheating and it was very helpful for him to know where she was at any one time but she wrote it off as at best this is someone who's overly worried and maybe a little controlling at worst this is someone who's so insecure about where I am and what I could be up to that they're tracking me what she didn't see is that it actually pointed to his own cheating with the misdirect the things that are concerning about someone's behavior, don't always bear any relation to the issue that ends up revealing itself. Whether you're watching this video relating to everything I'm saying because you're in one of the worst emotional times of your life, or whether you're somebody who's ready to date right now and looking for a better way to do it because you're not ready to give up on

love, I have the perfect thing for you today. We have chosen to do a Black Friday offer for Matthew AI this year. It is helping so many people. I want it to help. you to. You can call or text Matthew AI any time for advice on what to say, what to do, to make sense of someone's behavior, to heal from heartbreak, you name it. It has 20 years of my coaching inside of it so that when you ask it a question, you're getting my answer. And right now, because of Black Friday, we are offering it for two weeks completely free. That means for 14 days, you can use Matthew AI unlimited as much as you want. and you can cancel at any time if you'd like to before the trial ends.

Check it out. The link is below and I can't wait to hear how you use Matthew AI. The second psychological trapdoor is the false sense of security. We excuse bad behavior because it's aimed at others, not at us. So we feel safe because we mistakenly assume, or it's not even in our consciousness, that they would ever do that thing to us. And then one day we realize they're exactly capable of doing it to us. We just hadn't been in the firing line yet. Maybe you've watched them take revenge on someone, even after the situation is over and there's

nothing to be gained from it apart from the satisfaction of inflicting pain. Maybe it's the way they discarded their previous partner before us or even the person they discarded for us. Remember, character is consistent. So how they treat other people will end up finding its way to you when you are no longer useful or valuable in the ways you are right now or when they take issue with something you do. The third psychological trapdoor that makes us miss the signs that someone is cheating is the iceberg effect. We take the bad behavior that we see on the surface and we think if there's more I don't know, it's more of the same. not worse. Because when we see the bad behavior on the surface, we don't think this behavior points to something

even darker. We think, this behavior is horrible. I hate that they're capable of this. And I really hope that there's not more of this behavior that I haven't seen. And this is why when it comes to betrayal, there's always the potential for a new level of shock that's right around the corner. And when people we know say, how are you still surprised by anything this person does? They don't really. that it's because we measure what they're capable of by what they've already done, as opposed to seeing what they've already done as only the part of the iceberg that we can see. Now look, the danger of the iceberg effect in our own relationship is it can have us turning every breeze into a hurricane if we're not careful. This is why context and consistency of character

matters so much. Remember the story I told you about the woman whose husband insisted on being able to track her location on his phone because he was worried about her. What I didn't tell you in that story is that in the years prior to that, she had already caught him in lie after lie. So he had shown a pathological capacity to lie. When you start to collect all of that data, it's a lot harder to believe that this is just a man who's super overly conscious and worried about his wife's safety and that's why he wants to track her. It starts to paint a different picture. If you're just a seeing bad behavior or real darkness in a person, be very wary of assuming that what you're seeing is the worst they're capable of or the worst they're already doing. Number four, the biased

judge. Each of these trapdoors that we are talking about in this video opens under the weight of something we want. Love, safety, approval. And the moment that we attach our desire to somebody else's behavior, we can become unreliable narrators in our own story. When we're focused on holding onto love or approval, in our desire to maintain it, we ourselves become avoidant. When we see something we don't like, or when someone's behavior, habits, or bedroom desires change overnight, which can be signs of unfaithfulness, we don't talk about it openly. We don't have the conversation. When it comes to the biased judge-trapdoor, it shouldn't be about judge. judging the person who should have known.

It's about understanding the person who couldn't afford to know. Our cognitive dissonance acts as a safety mechanism, protecting us by filtering out what would destroy our world. And that protection, the blindness is what keeps so many people stuck for years in relationships that are built on lies. We've all been biased judges at different times in our life. Whether it's on a first date with someone attractive when we're longing for love, or a 17-year marriage that we can't afford, sometimes literally, to lose. And of course, we also

want to operate in life with a sense of optimism, not defaulting to always assuming the worst in people all of the time. For me, the worst effect of this video would be that you all now go out and live in constant anxiety of someone betraying you, always on guard for the signs. That's not living. It's more about realizing that our intuition often isn't loud. When it comes to dating, is louder. And in long-term relationships, intuition gets muted by love, shared history, and sunk cost. We can't account for someone who continuously distorts our reality through lies, gaslighting and secrecy. But we can get better at not distorting our own reality, because real safety doesn't come from avoiding the truth. It comes from being prepared to

confront it. Now, that doesn't mean that we spend our time in relationships accusing people of things we can't yet see. It's about creating an ongoing environment of openness and honest, uncomplicated communication. And then we see what kind of people can tolerate that environment and which ones can't. And when we find ourselves faced with someone who reacts poorly to that kind of environment, it's about learning to trust our discomfort, even when it doesn't make sense yet. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you found it informative and you want to continue this healing with me, up on the Black Friday offer on Matthew AI. I will leave a link below. Make sure you get it

before it disappears. I'll see you next time.