How do I confront my spouse about internet cheating?

Another reader asks about internet affairs/internet cheating. As previously mentioned, internet cheating could be two things, an emotional affair, or another form of pornography when webcams are involved. Either case, they are both wrong, with emotional affairs being more dangerous than the actual "camming".

You confront a spouse having an emotional affair the same way you would a spouse that's having a regular "real" physical affair. You tell your spouse that he or she is cheating on you, and they have to stop their emotional affair. Are you sure they are in an emotional affair or are they just talking a lot? See the linked article on the difference between friendship and emotional affairs.

About the webcam cheating, most spouses justify this as just another type of porn, but really it can turn into relationship breakers when people start wanting to meet each other once they are comfortable online. The key to stopping this is finding a compromise. Ask your spouse what you can do to make them stop their internet affair/inappropriate activities online, and follow through. If both of you find a compromise, problem solved. If your spouse continues to cheat on you online, you may need to have more talks about your relationship and it's future.

Internet cheating or internet affairs usually start from three things. An online chatroom, a cheating spouse forum (yes, there are forums dedicated for just that, cheating on your spouse), and anonymous cam sites (usually ends up in skype exchanges). A lot of people actually make their living helping unsatisfied husbands/houswives by giving them ways to start an affair, specifically sites like ashleymadison.com. Think of plentyoffish.com, but dedicated to men and women who are willing to cheat and are actively seeking cheating partners. If you see this website in your internet browsing history, immediately confront your spouse.

Don't be afraid to put your foot down and tell them that you will end your relationship if they don't stop their emotional/internet affairs. And you really should not put up with being emotionally abused by a cheating spouse. If they don't want to compromise, set an appointment for marriage counseling and get a professional to help you. If your spouse still won't take marriage counseling seriously, they aren't taking you and your relationship seriously. Getting a divorce isn't always something negative, and you may want to consider it if you are living your life in a miserable relationship.

How To Spot An Internet Affair

Here are some signs of a cheating spouse on the internet :

• When your spouse is using the computer or laptop, and you come in the room, they either stop using it, hide their screen, or minimize whatever they were doing.
• After using the computer, your spouse clears the internet browsing history. This should making you wonder why they are hiding what they were doing. I'll post something about how you can check your internet browsing history in another article in case you don't know how. *Update* it's linked below.
• Most people in a long term relationship, or who have been married for a long time, know each other's password. If you've known your spouse's password ever since, but it stopped working when you tried to access their email, or social sites, they may be hiding something.
• You discovered a new email that they never told you about, or a new social site such as a facebook page, even if they already have one.A worse thing, that should probably be met with confrontation, is discovering your spouse joined a dating site.
• Unknown credit card charges start appearing in your bills. Dating sites, or adult sites commonly mask their site names when charging a credit card. They do this to protect the privacy of their members. Ask your spouse about it, then google the exact name you found on the bill to confirm whether or not your spouse is lying.
• Very experienced, and tech savvy cheaters will create a new user account on your computer. They will mostly make their accounts the administrator of the computer, so guest accounts can't check up on their sites or install software keyloggers or any type of spyware to monitor their internet activities. There's usually no solution to this unless you too have access to the administrator account.

Is your husband or wife hiding their internet browsing history? Read this article to learn how to Track your Spouse's Internet Browsing History

If you are miserable in your relationship, I suggest thinking about getting a divorce.

Track Spouse's Internet Browsing History

This is a free alternative to catching your spouse using keyloggers, this method is not effective against tech savvy spouses who know how to cover their tracks online.

Steps to tracking your spouse's internet browsing history :

Since there are so many browsers, we will only work with the most popular browser, firefox. This can work for either Windows or Macintosh, and can be freely downloaded.

Step 1 : Check Your Browser

Browser history disabled.

Check whether or not your internet browser allows storing browser history. You can do this by pressing CTRL + H on firefox. This is why it is not very effective against tech savvy cheating spouses because anyone can just go into the settings and disable the internet browsing function. An even sneakier way to avoid detection is by just selecting the sites your spouse doesn't want you to see and manually right clicking and deleting them from the history.

A blank screen (shown in the picture) means that your internet browser currently clears the history, or your spouse deleted it. Note: I forgot to add "and urls" in the picture text, it should be "it means your browser does not store pictures or URLS"

Step 2 : Enabling Internet History Logging

To enable history logging, select the "Tools ---> Options ---> Privacy". See the screenshot for more details.

The first blue box is what you want to check, and the bottom second blue box is what you want to uncheck. Doing this will allow you to check your spouse's internet activities. Cheating spouses usually go to facebook, or access their secret email accounts to talk to the people they are cheating with. You might want to watch out for secret facebook pages as well.

Step 3 : Confirm that your browser is logging the sites you visit

The screenshot below is with my firefox browser recording my internet browsing history. I have blacked out my personal email (you can contact me through catch a cheater admin at gmail if you need to).

As a sample, I typed in "random porn site" just to demonstrate that the browser records EVERYTHING. From searches done on google, to the email addresses used by your spouse that you may not know of. You can confirm that your browser is tracking your internet history by pressing CTRL+H again, or looking at the links you've visited. If you've followed the steps properly, all links you've visited will be a different color (like on our site, unvisited links are blue, visited links turn black).

Red boxes are my email, and a random search I did on google

Blue boxes are the settings that you want to have enabled on your own firefox browser to have it record your spouse on the internet. Great alternative to hardware or software keyloggers if you were thinking of getting one.

I'd like to caution you against downloading any of the "free keyloggers" because of the high risk it poses to your computer, and your bank account. Identity and password theft is common amongst people who download malicious software disguised as free keyloggers.

How To Use This To Catch A Cheating Spouse?

1. You can use this trick to know if your husband or wife has any hidden yahoo, gmail, or hotmail email accounts they are keeping from you. If you know your husband or wife's passwords, then it could probably work on their secret hidden email accounts as well.

2. Find sites in your internet browser history that support cheaters, or promotes cheating on your spouse. These sites are REAL, I am not kidding one bit. If you would like to see a site that makes a living off of spouse's cheating on their spouses, manually type "ashleymadison.com" on your browser. It is very disgusting and disturbing that people actually join that site.

3. Find out if your husband or wife is secretly visiting adult video sites. Not that it's wrong for them to be viewing any adult videos, but if they are hiding it from you this may be a problem. Watching adult videos can and does turn into seeking out "live" versions, and in this day and age there are adult cam sites that they can visit.

4. Look for Omegle, Chatroulette, or Stickam type of sites.These aren't necessarily signs of a cheating spouse, but if they are hiding this from you, you should worry. If you don't know why, these typical random anonymous webcam sites (omegle and chatroulette) are often used for cyber sex, while stickam is not really as bad as the former, it also has a lot of cyber sex in the private rooms.
5. Look for facebook profiles that aren't of your spouse. They could be creating alternate profiles that they use on facebook, myspace, or other social sites to find people to cheat with.

What if my spouse has a secret email or facebook account?

If you luck out and catch your spouse's secret email or social networking site, I suggest you NOT confront them about it. Play dumb, act like everything is fine, and you are clueless. This is the perfect time for you to Bait Your Cheating Spouse

See more ways to track a cheating spouse, read our catch a cheating spouse guide linked on the sidebar.

Cheating spouse on the internet

Here's an email I received from someone who found this site and thinks she has a cheating husband. Cheating often starts from the interenet, and it is not uncommon that a cheating spouse on the internet is using online chatrooms to meet other people.(And I am terribly sorry for almost a month in delay for replying to this, I have been busy in real life.)

Hello,

My husband clears the history after being on the computer and I confronted him in the past about searching adult porn sites. My question is, would that be considered a form of cheating? I feel as though it is because it is in his heart maybe not outward cheating but his eyes are on other woman. I'm just confused and torn over it.

Any advise would help from you.

Thanks,

A

For men, and even some women, watching porn is just a normal thing and I would not consider it cheating at all, so I don't think you have any problems A. You could even support him and watch it together. Let your spouse tell you his or her fantasies, and then do it with them or at least try and show your spouse you care about it. It's one of the topics that are discussed in marriage counseling. Not only will you prevent a cheating spouse, you will also strengthen your emotional, and sexual bonds together.

Now what I DO consider cheating is when your spouse goes on the internet to find other women/men to talk to behind your back. This online form of cheating is usually done in Yahoo chat rooms/MSN/ or any other chatrooms online, especially ones that allow webcams or "cam2cam". If you find out that your spouse is doing this, then you better be worried and start confronting him/her. A keylogger or spy program would allow you to view/read the chat transcripts of cheating spouses, or just find out if your spouse is indeed cheating on you on the internet. It is much more difficult to find out if they are having an online affair in chatrooms simply because there is no history or log files, or they could easily just delete those logs or are protected by YMessenger/MSN, which is why a keylogger is necessary to catch cheating spouses.

Some husbands/wives who are still young, early to late twenties, are into this thing called "MMORPGs". It stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. There are alot of older men using this platform to find younger women too. An example of an MMORPG would be the popular game by Blizzard called "World of Warcraft", if your husband or wife plays this, you should know what it is. It is like a 3D chatroom where people can play together and meet other people. A few commenters on this blog have also pointed out that their husbands use this game to meet younger girls, and then get their MSN/YM IDs and chat with them there, bringing the relationship outside the game.

Playing games and chatting online with the opposite sex is fine and all, but watch out for any signs of an emotional affair. It is very easy to get emotionally attached to someone when you play games or chat with them for several hours each day, and you don't want an emotional affair to develop any further and have your spouse cheat on you (physically).

Remember A, men just like watching adult videos, it doesn't always mean that they want to cheat. It will make them happy if you show them that you are interested and share their fantasies with them. Restricting him from watching it is what might even make him turn into a cheating husband, since you're taking away a form of entertainment from him.

Good luck, A.