The Secret Life of His Phone

Our phones are the silent witnesses to our entire lives. For a cheater, it's often the one witness they're most desperate to silence. If he has secrets, that’s where they’ll be.

Over the next few modules, we're going to walk through the biggest digital red flags. We'll talk about that weird, secretive phone behavior, shady social media patterns, and how to spot hidden apps or even a second phone. We'll also get into how porn use fits into all this, and how these secrets slowly eat away at the trust in a relationship.

Before we get into the signs, I want to share something personal. It’s a short poem written by a wife who discovered her husband was cheating, told from the point of view of his phone.

It went like this:

My husband came home with a new phone yesterday.

His old one? I think I hated it as much as I hated him.

It went on dates disguised as rounds of golf by day and poker games by night.

It went on romantic getaways masquerading as business trips.

It charged on the night tables of hotel rooms shared with another man’s wife.

It called and sent text messages to her every day, multiple times a day, for years, often while I was only a few feet away.

It held romantic quotes and fantasies about her. It made dinner reservations, requesting only the best tables to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and promotions with her.

Alarms were set on that cell phone to remind my husband to put his wedding ring back on since she asked him not to wear one in her presence.

My husband used it to call, text, and email me lies compounded by lies regarding his actual location and real plans for each day.

Following D-Day, it had the audacity to send a text message to her that was all for show. It was merely pretending to end their affair. Void of guilt, incapable of shame, it mocked me.

Yet, one of the most shocking revelations was not something ever to be found on that phone. On the contrary, there was a glaring absence. I, his wife, was nowhere to be found on that cell phone. There was not one single picture of me. My image ceased to exist. I had been strategically cropped out of every photo, if not deleted entirely. It was not as if I was no longer alive. It was as if I was never born.

The irony is that eventually, it was that very cell phone that finally grew a conscience. For its grand finale, it transformed from enemy to ally. It produced phone records based on cell phone towers, revealing evidence far exceeding my worst-case scenario.

In the end, that phone I hated was the only one that didn't lie to me.