There are four massive reasons why people get caught when they have marital affairs and, for the most part, each of the four reasons is down to plain stupidity. If you’re going to cheat on your partner, you need to be smart. You need to come up with a story that works, and you need to come up with lies to cover your ass that doesn’t arouse too much suspicion.

On top of all of these things, you need to be one step ahead of yourself at all times. For example, do you leave yourself logged in on the extra marital affair website you have joined up to, just closing the browser when you’re done to finally meet your partner in bed an hour later than them? This is where my friend Kate got caught. She closed the browser and didn’t clear her history. She didn’t log herself out either. In fact, she asked the browser to remember her details by mistake, but didn’t really think about it.

The next morning, her husband Pete came downstairs and hopped online. Just as he went to type in “HSBC.co.uk” to check his bank balance, the website “localhookups.uk” came up, he clicked on it, and because she hadn’t logged herself out, he was able to bypass the password details because she had accidentally told her browser to remember them, and read EVERY message she had sent and received on the website.

Honestly, how could Kate have been so stupid? It’s simple things like this that will get you into trouble. You don’t expect your partner to come down in the morning and type in a “h”, bringing up the website you had happened to be on the night before. You didn’t realise that asking the browser to remember your details would be quite so catastrophic.

Now do you see what I mean by needing to be one step ahead. Do yourself a favour and delete your browser history, always log out of the website you are on, and never, ever ask it to remember your details. There is even a setting on most internet options where you can request the history be deleted whenever you close the browser itself… There really is no excuse. There’s even a “private” browsing option on the iPhone that doesn’t save your search history, cookies, or websites you may have clicked on.

Now think about your phone… How often do you leave it lying around? What about this morning when your phone was on the bedside cabinet and you hopped in the shower, leaving your partner still in bed. It would have taken no time at all for he or she to pick up your phone and start reading your messages. Do you have a lock on your phone? Does your partner know it? It might be time to change it and not let them know. If you have a tendency to share phones, or they use yours a lot, get yourself a secret phone that is ALWAYS on silent and is NEVER out of your sight.

There are a few other tips that you will need to learn before you embark on your adulterous journey. Never use a shared or joint bank account to pay for anything that you are doing that is related to your affair. For example, lunches in towns you are meant to be in, or hotels or nights that you were meant to have been working really late. Always pay in cash with your lover, if you can.

So there you have it – the common mistakes made by people cheating on their partners, and how to get around them without landing yourself in the poop. These are lessons learned from experiences, and once you’ve had a few near misses, you’ll soon see how fast you can learn!