“He's been working late every night”
The short answer
Working late is only meaningful when the schedule stops being checkable. A genuine busy period comes with specifics, a deadline, named colleagues, a project you have heard of before, and it ends. A cover tends to be vague in a particular way: plenty of detail about the fact of being busy, very little that could be confirmed, and no visible endpoint.
Specific versus vague
Listen for verifiability rather than plausibility. 'The Henderson thing has to ship Thursday and Priya and I are stuck on the data' is checkable and will resolve on Thursday. 'Work is mad at the moment' has been true for six weeks and refers to nothing in particular. Both can be honest, but only one of them can be wrong in a way you would ever find out about.
The corroboration question
Real work produces traces that are not testimony: tiredness that matches the hours, complaints about specific people, a calendar, money if it is paid. If the late nights leave no trace anywhere else in his life, no exhaustion, no grumbling, no financial change, no mention from anyone else, that absence is worth noticing. Not as proof, but as a gap.
What usually turns out to be happening
In most cases, exactly what he said. Sometimes something else that is not an affair, a job search, a problem at work he is ashamed of, debt, a health appointment, avoiding home for reasons unrelated to anyone else. The last of those is worth taking seriously, because 'he is avoiding the house' and 'he is seeing someone' produce identical schedules and require completely different responses.
When it is not what you think
Some jobs genuinely do this, seasonally and brutally, and someone under real pressure will be both absent and bad at explaining why. Avoidance of home is also common and is not infidelity; it can mean depression, dread of a conversation, or a relationship that has become tiring for reasons neither of you has named. Those need addressing, but they are a different problem with a different solution.
What to do about it
- 1Ask something specific and forward-looking: "When does this project actually finish?" A real deadline produces a date. Note whether the date arrives and what happens when it does.
- 2Track it for two weeks rather than reasoning about it. Nights, stated reason, and how he was when he got in. Patterns are visible in a fortnight of notes and invisible in memory.
- 3Consider the other explanations before the worst one. 'Are you avoiding being here?' is a harder question to ask and more often the right one.
Find out where you actually stand
Is He Cheating? Test
Schedule irregularity is one of four vectors scored separately, so you can see whether this is isolated or part of a cluster.
Take the assessmentFree · No account needed · 3 minutes
Common questions
Should I turn up at his office?
No. If he is there you have damaged something for no gain, and if he is not you have a confrontation in a car park with no preparation. The timeline gives you the same information without the ambush.
He gets angry when I ask. What does that mean?
Sometimes guilt, often exhaustion, and quite often the accumulated weight of having been asked before. What is worth watching is whether the anger replaces the answer or merely accompanies it.
Related
This page is general information, not a diagnosis or clinical advice. If you are frightened of someone, or being controlled, a domestic abuse service can help, in the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and 24 hours.