We’ve all been there—your guy comes home late, doesn’t answer his calls or texts for hours on end, and when you ask him where he’s been, he never seems to give you a straight answer. Your women’s intuition is on high alert, and yet you’re still not 100% sure: Is he cheating on you, or does he just get the newspaper a day before everyone else, like the protagonist of the late-90s TV show, Early Edition, and is out saving lives?
If he smells like another woman’s perfume or has a significant change in sex drive, he’s probably cheating on you. But don’t fret if he displays the simple quirks below, which are indicators that he’s more than likely NOT cheating on you and is just out preventing horrific tragedies:
He loves reading the paper, but won’t let you near it.
If your guy wakes up each morning and races towards the door to grab the newspaper, but then won’t let you anywhere near it, there’s a good chance he’s receiving tomorrow’s paper today and needs to scan it for preventable disasters. If you happen to glance at a headline or story that makes no sense in the context of today’s reality, and he then tears the paper away from you while shouting something like, “That’s not for your eyes to see!” then you can be super sure this is the case. He also might just be losing his mind. But he’s definitely not cheating on you, and that’s the important thing.
He comes home quietly devastated, mumbling about “not being able to save them.”
If your fella has been out late and won’t tell you where he’s been, he might be cheating on you. But if he’s also incoherently mumbling something about not being able to “save them” and strongly smells like a house fire, then you can be fairly certain he’s not fooling around with another woman—he probably just failed to save a lot of people from an electrical fire he knew was going to happen, but a series of other events prevented him from saving them in time. So while he might be racked with guilt and suffering from PTSD, you can totally be sure you’re still his one and only. Phew!
He often asks what time it is, and then looks either worried or relieved.
If your man is preventing daily tragedies that only he has the power to stop, then he’ll more than likely be super concerned with time. If you tell him it’s 2 PM and he screams, “Dear God…I only have 20 minutes or they’re dead!” and then takes off at a run, odds are good he just needs to pull a brother and sister out of a collapsing tree house and he’s not sticking it to that hussy Sharon from work. Remember what happened with the house fire?
He peppers you with a lot of dark hypotheticals.
If your man often peppers you with dark hypotheticals, like, “Hey — if you could save seven school children from a bus accident, or one Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher from a faulty elevator shaft today at 3:45, hypothetically, who would you choose? Hypothetically speaking of course.” then chances are good his erratic behavior is due to the immense stress and burden of knowing a future only he has the power to change, and not because he’s porking his ex, Chandra.
If your guy exhibits any or all of the above behaviors, then you can more than likely put your suspicions to rest and sleep easy knowing that he is burdened with tomorrow’s news today, much like the character Gary Hobson, portrayed by Kyle Chandler in his breakout role. While your man does seem to be leading a double life and keeping a ton of vital information from you, he’s also not dipping his dick into anyone else, and that’s the most important thing in the whole world.
