I often hear from people who can’t help but notice that their husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend has been increasingly sending and receiving text messages. However, when they go to check up on those texts, they’ve often been deleted or erased.

I often hear comments like: “my husband will go and try to find privacy when he’s texting. I’ll see he has a mischievous and excited look on his face and I get a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. But, when I get a hold of the phone later to see who he’s been texting and what he’s been saying, I find that he’s deleted his entire history. He also does not like to part with the phone and mostly keeps it on him at all times. What is going on? Should I be concerned that he’s cheating on me and using his cell phone to do it?”

These concerns are most definitely valid. Statistics show that it’s increasingly common for people to get caught cheating from their cell phones. And, it’s very tempting for cheaters to sending playful and flirtatious texts to someone who you are cheating with. Plus, the cheater often thinks that all they have to do is hit the delete button to erase all evidence of wrongdoing. (This assumption can be just plain wrong.)

If you confront your loved one about the deleted texts, they’ll often tell you that they were trying to save memory on their phone or that it’s just their habit not to let their messages clutter up their phone. And, I suppose there are cases where this is a valid excuse. But, it will often help to look at how soon after the message’s use that they are actually deleting it. It’s less problematic if they let the message sit there for days or weeks before they get around to erasing it. But, if they’re erasing immediately after it’s sent or received, then this becomes a good bit more suspicious.

If your loved one is even reasonably tech savvy (and they likely are if they’re constantly messaging,) then they likely know that they can easily set their phone to automatically delete old messages after a specified period of time so that having to go in and manually do this is really over kill.

What To Do When Your Loved One Is Constantly Deleting Their Texts: As I see it, you have a few choices here. You can ask or confront them about this, but I have to tell you that an extremely large majority of cheaters will firmly deny any wrong doing. You can ask yourself if there are any places where you’re seeing odd behaviors (like at the computer) and then try to follow up and check those places. You can also check the call log, photos, and sent emails. There is software that allows you to go back in and read the texts and only you can decide if you want to take this that far.

I think it often comes down to the other behaviors that surround the messaging and whether or not you believe that this is all innocent or not. And, if you’ve found this article, I suspect that you might feel like there is more to this than saving phone memory. Sometimes this isn’t the case, but many times, it is.