This week’s video 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.
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Matthew Hussey
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 know 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 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.
Speaker 1
“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 suspect it that he was cheating on me.”
Matthew Hussey
17 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. 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.
Speaker 1
“I mean, if somebody had told me that, that that happened to them, that their husband was cheating on them the entire time they were married, I’d be like, 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…”
Matthew Hussey
This is always the interesting part, right? 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.
Speaker 1
“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, 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.”
Matthew Hussey
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.
Speaker 1
“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.”
Matthew Hussey
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 want to know where you are.
It turned out he 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.
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The second psychological trap door 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 trap door 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. It’s 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 realize 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, the 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 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 trap doors 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 and 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 trap door. It shouldn’t be about 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 bias 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, chemistry 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, take this 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.
You hit on so many valid points. I assumed my partner had a medical issue ie lesions in the brain. He did have a medical issue with that in the lungs and i thought the condition had spread. He would go into rages unfortunately directed at me (not physical though …yet) for such little things. I still dont know what was going on with him but I am so thankful I moved out as I understand it could have gotten much worse. It has taken its toll on me but I am slowly rebuilding my life. Matthew ai has been great and helped me so much.