The sad reality is that betrayal is everywhere anymore. Everyone has in some way been touched by the specter of unfaithfulness. You likely either encountered cheating in your own relationships, or you saw the destruction it left in its wake in a friend or family member’s relationship. When your loved one is the one who is betrayed, it is very easy to turn hatred on the so-called homewrecker. It is simple to loathe a stranger whom you see as responsible for the pain of someone you love. Unfortunately, the betrayal of cheating and adultery sometimes hurts a second innocent party. Most people do not think about the mistress as being an innocent when it comes to infidelity, but there are a surprisingly large number of women who had no idea that their boyfriend or lover was already in a relationship with someone else. Few cheaters are good enough liars to fool both their spouse and their mistress for long periods of time, but most are silver-tongued enough to keep up the charade for a while. Before the lies start unraveling, it is very possible for both women to believe that their man is wholly devoted to them and them alone. It may seem hard to believe, but it can be tricky to tell when you are the mistress. Here are seven warning signs that you are the other woman. 

Meeting his family is a sign that he is interested in you and believes he has a future with you. By introducing you to his loved ones, he is opening himself up for discussions about you at a later date, and when you are not there, he leaves himself open to questions about why you are not there. For some men, this means that introducing you to his family is a sign of interest in a more serious commitment. For others, it is something that happens after the first date. How he views his family will inform when he introduces you to them, but if you two have been together for months and you have yet to meet anyone from his family, be wary. This may be a sign that he is stringing you along or is hiding the fact that he is married. His family, after all, will know immediately that you are not his wife and be able to recognize that he is being unfaithful. 

Some people live with their phones all but surgically attached to them. Others will cheerfully ignore their phone ringing six inches away. One is not necessarily right or wrong. Both have their advantages, and both have the potential to be utterly infuriating for a partner. People can learn to shift their habits at least somewhat on this front, but few people swing from one extreme to the other. As such, if your man is a great texter all week but vanishes over the weekend or is perfectly happy to call you on his lunch hour but never picks up the phone after 5:00 p.m., you may actually be the mistress. He is not answering his phone afterhours because that is when he is with his wife. Similarly, the long breaks in texts or sudden hang-ups may be because his wife or children entered the room.

If your man categorically refuses to take you to his place, this is a major red flag. He may have all the excuses in the book, and it may seem perfectly reasonable to usually head over to your place. If you two have been together for some time and he still refuses to take you to his home, however, he is not a good idea for a long term partner. If he is always that messy and refuses to learn how to clean, you do not want him around forever. If he has a roommate and you do not, surely the roommate has nights when they are out? If he lives farther away than you, you can always plan things out so you can spend some time over there. If you two always end up going out closer to your house, a drive to his can be romantic or you can explore the options closer to him. There is no reason to avoid his place like the plague unless there is something or someone there he does not want you to see.  

Cheaters tend to be one extreme or the other when it comes to giving gifts to their mistress. He might give you extravagant or expensive gifts in order to try and keep you from wondering whether or not he actually cares about you. Gifts can also be a way of buying your affection or silence. Expense can also be a way for him to disguise the fact that he may not remember your preferences or that he is afraid of getting confused over whether it is you or his wife that likes something. On the other hand, a complete lack of gifts may occur when he is concerned about his wife noticing the charges on his credit card. After all, she will know very well that he did not buy her that diamond bracelet or that she did not go with him to the theater in the last six weeks. 

Some people are schedulers. They like to know exactly what they will be doing, when and with whom. They do not react well to changes in their schedules and are practically allergic to spontaneity. There is nothing wrong with someone who is like this. Schedulers also tend to be very organized and rarely forget about plans they made. That said, most people are not rigidly scheduled in one area of their life and wildly spontaneous in others. If your man is spontaneous in most things but always has to make the plans and refuses to deviate from them, this is a red flag. He might be rigidly scheduling dates because he has to make sure he is not seen with you by someone his wife knows or that you two are going out at times when she will not notice he is missing. 

Men have a reputation as always being up for physical intimacy, but that is not always the case. Some men like to wait, and there is nothing wrong with that. It might be a red flag, however, if your man balks at any sort of physical intimacy. Wanting to wait to have sex is perfectly understandable. Freaking out when you tried to hold his hand or give him a kiss goodnight is a bit harder to reconcile. This is especially true if he refuses to give a good reason for why he shies away from anything resembling physical intimacy whether it is a kiss on the cheek, holding hands or snuggling on the couch during the movie. If you two are emotionally intimate but he keeps shying away from anything physical, it might be because he has to be able to justify your affair in his mind. He can rationalize away dinner with a “close friend” who just happens to be a woman, but kisses cross into infidelity.

There are a number of events in which an adult can reasonably expect to take a partner as a plus one. If you two have been together for any length of time, it is not unreasonable to expect that you will be his plus one at the company Christmas party or his cousin’s wedding. After all, those are precisely the sort of events to which you take a date, especially if you have been together for a while and are planning to stay together. If he never invites you to those sort of serious parties but is happy to take you out to the bars, this is not a good sign. He either does not have enough interest in you to see you are someone he would keep around in the long term, so there is no point in introducing you to colleagues, or he is cheating on his wife. She is the one he takes to serious parties because she knows his schedule, and his coworkers or family members will wonder where she is if he shows up with someone new. 

The idea of being the other woman is a horrible one. It is entirely possible, however, to be the mistress and have no idea about it until the enraged wife is kicking down the door demanding to know why you dared to go near her husband. No one wants to be in that position, and frankly, it is dangerous to be the other woman. It may seem like it would never happen to you because you have less than no desire to break up an existing relationship, but cheaters tend to be very good liars at least in the short term. Know the signs so that if you ever find an adulterer trying to woo you, you can kick him straight to the curb where he belongs.