Holidays are an opportunity to relax with your family and forget or, at least, set aside your worries. Furthermore, family holidays allow you to regain that intimacy with your partner that was partially lost during the year, due to your respective daily commitments and to spend time with your children more often.
        Sometimes, however, problems surface precisely on vacation. Since the foundation of my first company, in 1988 Octopus detective agency in Bergamo, I have noticed that there is a significant increase in cases of marital infidelity immediately after the summer holidays or Christmas holidays or after any other medium-long period of vacation. This increase related to vacations has undergone a further increase with the widespread diffusion of mobile telephony and, subsequently, with the spread of smartphones and social media.
            It is not that there were fewer cases of adultery before cell phones and the internet; they were simply less visible, since the lovers were forced to interrupt or reduce communications throughout the holiday period. Although there were cases of reckless lovers unable to control their adulterous impulses. I remember the case of the cheating husband of a Client of my private detective agency Octopus in Milan who, lacking a cell phone (it hadn’t been invented yet), sent love telegrams to his lover every day. Moreover, he did it from the only post office on a small island, where he was vacationing with his family. And this was the end of his secret relationship, because he hadn’t realized that his wife had become very good friends with a local girl of her age who worked at the post office.
Other times, the cheaters, instead of getting a supply of tokens and calling from telephone booths away from prying eyes, used the switchboard of the hotel where they were vacationing with their family, only to then discover that the phone calls are charged on the bill, complete with the number called.Â
Since the opening of my private detective agency Octopus I have many foreign clients who ask me to investigate marital infidelity during their holidays in Italy with their family, especially Americans, British, Spanish, Dutch and Germans. Business trips to Italy are also a cause for concern for many spouses married to serial or random cheaters.Â
End of vacation and end of love. When vacations bring unpleasant surprises for couples.
        Coming back to the present day, the discovery of a partner’s infidelity on vacation depends on two main factors:
- Changes in schedules and habits, often forgotten or deliberately ignored by the lover, who calls or texts at inappropriate times.
In fact, it often happens that lovers, enraged by sudden holiday reconciliations with their wives or husbands (badly justified with the best interests of their children), do everything to ruin the holidays and the marriage of their respective clandestine companions.
- Greater sharing of one’s space and time with one’s partner and children. In this, vacation periods closely resemble the months of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which numerous extramarital affairs, that remained secret for years, emerged.
This increased closeness, in fact, exponentially increases the chance of forgetting to delete a text message, leaving a chat with a lover open, not storing newly received sexting photos in a secret subfolder, forgetting any electronic device open without the bulwark of a password, or letting one’s password be stolen precisely because of the closeness mentioned above.
At this regard, I have to say from experience that the cheater, especially if boomer, tends to underestimate his or her offspring belonging to generations X, Y and Z, since it is often the child who alerts the betrayed parent about the partner’s escapades.
I remember a Client, who had approached my agency Investigazioni Octopus in Milan, because during a beach vacation his preteen daughter had managed to discover the password to her mother’s smartphone by looking at the spots where the device’s keyboard remained smeared with sunscreen. And thereafter the little girl had downloaded all the chats between her mother and her lover, offering her father the evidence of infidelity in a kind of very sad Electra complex competition.
Almost regularly I still receive Clients at my Octopus Investigations agency in Cassano d’Adda who never suspected their partner’s infidelity until their children alerted them after monitoring their father’s or mother’s social activity.
Clients of my Octopus Investigations agency often refer methat they began to suspect their partner during the holiday times
The three types of vacation infidelity.
        First of all, a distinction must be made between whether it is an extramarital crush that occurred precisely during the current vacation season, or an old extramarital affair that emerges only during the holiday season.
A vacation infidelity denotes three possible scenarios:
- You have only now realized that you have married a habitual cheater, so do not act hastily and do not involve your children; you will have a chance to do it calmly and with more planning. Often, in the light of the bitter discovery, connections are made with past episodes, such that the duration of the clandestine relationship can even be understood.
My Octopus private detective agency has caught multiple adulterous people being followed by their respective lover on vacation, sometimes in the same hotel, so that they would not have to suspend even one day of their extramarital dating.
Discovering a partner’s infidelity on vacation and sketching it out, for strategic and offspring-protection issues, is a very stressful situation that can induce cardiomyopathy stress, the so-called tako-tsubo syndrome or broken heart syndrome. In order to cope adequately, do not be ashamed to ask your doctor or pharmacist for help in taking anxiolytics, sleeping pills or soporifics.
- It’s an isolated marital betrayal. Therefore, you should ask yourself whether it deserves to ruin your vacation and, more importantly, your marriage and life.
Vacations in couples already in crisis or partners of unfaithful disposition can trigger what I call the “temptation island effect,” namely:
- The mistaken feeling that what happens on vacation will remain on vacation without leading to any consequences.
- Having more time for oneself and taking better care of one’s appearance increases the likelihood of being courted.
- New acquaintances are made on vacation, and some of them may be particularly seductive.
- In cases of wives on vacation with their children and husbands in town for work (or vice versa), for a variety of reasons (much of them mysterious) both spouses may be more likely to fulfill their sexual fantasies. This is a condition that can also occur during business trips.
- The holiday’s escapade is merely the beginning of a long extramarital affair or it could be the end of your relationship in favour of the newcomer. Again, give time to the time.
However, you need to think about the worst right away by getting as much evidences as you can through the Octopus Investigations agency’s matrimonial investigations.
Between these three scenarios there are, of course, an endless array of shades of grey that must be examined on a case-by-case basis.
How to act when spousal infidelity is discovered on vacation.
In case of a suspected holiday escapade, take the following steps, not necessarily in this order:
- Avoid making contentions without sufficient evidence and postpone them until you return home, especially, to keep the minor children out of your personal tragedy. In fact, unless you spend the vacations in large spaces, any arguments, quarrels, bad moods are more perceived by the offspring because of the close cohabitation.
In the “last minute” discovery of a partner’s infidelity on vacation, it is difficult but of paramount importance not to involve children in their own tragedy.
- Hire a local licensed private detective to obtain full and legitimate proof of marital infidelity.
I already recounted in my book ‘The Detective Agency of the Third Millennium’ how I intervened on an emergency one past summer because one of my Clients, at the seaside with her teenage daughter and her new partner, suspected that her man was trying to seduce her teen daughter. And, indeed, I documented the despicable courtship just in time to interrupt it before the irreparable.
- In the impossibility of hiring a private investigator, argue with the partner about his blameworthy behaviour by recording the quarrel. Whether this arguing takes place in a private confrontation or after catching him in the act of adultery, after improvising yourself as a private detective.
As a reminder, recording the conversation in which you take part is not always permissible in any State. In the most part of the world you should warn people under recording; anyway, it’s better recording for your legal protection just in case false accuses or in case of partners’ criminal behaviours.
Furthermore, some problems of illegitimacy and illegality arise at the post-production and distribution stage, to use a film analogy, that is, in how you store, share and use the captured recordings. Simply put:
- It is forbidden to indiscriminately share the recording, which has the sole legitimate purpose of making a case in Court.
- It is advisable to keep the original of the recording on the device that made it or have it downloaded by a forensic computer scientist who will certify its authenticity.
- It is compulsory to keep the recording with the utmost care as prescribed by the Privacy Guarantor and only during the time strictly necessary to assert one’s case in court. In essence, it is illegal to keep it indefinitely “just in case.”.
- It is more effective to transcribe a verbatim report of any conversation before submitting it to the magistrates. No judge wastes time to listen to an hour-long intercept between attendees, but is more willing to read its contents in ten minutes, to decide whether to listen to it in full and acquire it for the trial record.
- Take advantage of moments when the suspected unfaithful person leaves his or her smartphone or tablet unattended and search for evidence within it, photographing or screenshotting the material found as unambiguously as possible. For example, if the lover has been memorized as “Jessico soccer” or “Ethana tennis lessons,” it is advisable to temporarily remove him or her from the phonebook to see the lover phone number while taking screenshots.
In Italy this operation, in order to be legal, should only be done if the partner has no password or shares it with other family members and if they leave their electronic devices unattended with no expectation of privacy. Otherwise, you are committing crimes such as abusive access to a computer system and risk penalties from the Privacy Guarantor. In many other Nations the Law is much restrictive.
The more you can handle the emergency in holiday, the more you will be able to uncover the truth, protecting yourself and your family from your partner’s infidelity.