A new survey from Ashley Madison is clearing up a major mystery regarding infidelity: How exactly do cheaters carry out their affairs?
As Bustle reports, the site for extramarital affairs quizzed 1,500 philandering folks on the preferred mode of communication with a lover. Does it involve a pager, a burner phone, and a script straight out of The Wire? Is it all about sliding into those DMs? Exactly how many social media accounts does a suspicious partner need to hack into to get some receipts?
The answer is surprisingly simple. A majority of respondents — 56%, to be exact — contacted their lover on their cell phone. Email came in second place with 44%, followed by dating sites (20%), social media and those sneaky DMs (18%), and, lastly, secret phones (11%).
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If these results are inspiring you to use your sleeping partner's thumb to unlock their iPhone — and no, that's not a recommendation — be aware that you may not find the smoking gun you're looking for. As it happens, a lack of a smoking gun may actually be the smoking gun.
"One clue is that their cell phone will be glued to their hands and their text and call history will always be clean," relationship coach Chris Armstrong told Bustle of a cheater's M.O. "Same with erasing the cookies (web browsing history) from their computer...When someone is cheating on their partner, erasing all of the breadcrumbs becomes priority one, largely because cheaters have a guilty conscious and a nervous mind."
Or maybe they just like a clean cache, don't want anyone discovering they're a regular Dancing with the Stars voter, or have been scared off ever keeping some sort of electronic trace thanks to the Mueller investigation.
If you are the philandering one, be warned: Now that this information is out there, the jig may soon be up.