4 Quirks of Fate That Outed Cheaters
Back in the 1950s, they used to say the traditional way a man got caught for cheating was lipstick on his collar. This made no sense when you think about it and was almost certainly a stealth campaign by Big Laundry.
No, when your infidelity finally comes out, it’s probably going to be because of circumstances no one could have predicted, such as...
Getting Stuck in a Mine
You might remember the summer of 2010, when a mine collapsed in Chile, giving the world something to rally around. The rescue effort united companies from around the world and even NASA, and in the end, all the miners were pulled out, after 69 days underground.
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“Nice,” said Yonni Barrios, miner number 21 to get rescued. But the woman who embraced him when he emerged wasn’t his wife Martha. It was his mistress, Susana.
The miners’ loved ones had been holding vigils for the trapped men, and Susana had shown up at one of these. She’d introduced herself and explained her relationship to Barrios, which isn’t quite normal extramarital etiquette, but these were unusual circumstances.
Martha, on finding out about the affair, continued communicating with Barrios through letters dropped down into the mine, just long enough to determine that he was alive and would be getting out eventually. She made it a point to stay home and not show up on the day that he was rescued. Extramarital etiquette has something to say about this situation as well: The husband is supposed to get back into his wife’s good graces by giving her some extravagant piece of jewelry. It’s fortunate then that Barrios worked in a gold mine.
A Talkative Parrot
Chris Taylor’s parrot kept saying one word: “Gary.” Taylor was living with his girlfriend Suzy Collins in 2006, along with the parrot named Ziggy and absolutely no one named Gary. The inspiration behind the parrot’s utterances was a mystery, though the clues were there: Ziggy most often would say “Gary” when Suzy’s phone rang.
When the parrot finally escalated to a full sentence, the truth became more obvious. “I love you, Gary,” said Ziggy, and Chris demanded answers. It turned out Suzy had been having an affair with a coworker named Gary. It’s generally advisable to seek out affairs with people that have the same name as your significant other, to guard against this specific contingency.
They broke up, of course. Worse, Chris gave Ziggy away, because the bird went on saying “Gary” even afterward, and this was unbearable. The two had spent eight happy years together — we mean Chris and Ziggy, not Chris and Suzy, as the latter had only been together for two years. Asked for comment, Suzy said she “couldn't stand” the bird, even before the Gary incident, so her relationship with Chris was always doomed.
A Plane Ride
Before you get too morally superior about all this sleeping around, keep in mind that you yourself have probably slept with plenty of strangers. Maybe you haven’t had sex with strangers, but you still slept with them — on airplanes. On a plane, everyone lets their guard down and sleeps communally. Sleeping with strangers on either side inches away in a dormitory sounds like something you’d only do as an adult out of desperation, but on a plane, it suddenly seems perfectly normal.
In 2017, an Iranian husband in a plane went to sleep, with what we have to assume was uncharacteristic carelessness. We can think of no other reason that his wife chose now, of all times, to use his thumb to unlock his phone. What we do know is that poking around on this phone now revealed to her that he’d been having a affair. She took this opportunity to attack him physically.
The crew were unable to break up the altercation, so the plane (which was on its way to Bali) made an emergency landing in India. The couple were unloaded, and since they had no legal authorization to be in India, they were both sent into detention, hopefully in separate cells.
60-Year-Old Letters
There should perhaps be a statute of limitations on infidelity. The couples we’ve looked at today all fell out over ongoing affairs, but affairs from many years in the past deserve more mercy. In 2011, a man filed for divorce against his wife due to an affair she’d had 60 years in the past.
The couple, Antonio and Rosa, lived in Italy, with him coming from Sardinia and her coming from Naples. That alone was enough to justify splitting apart, said commentators, but the final straw came when Antonio opened an old chest in search of Christmas supplies and discovered aged love letters addressed to Rosa. The affair had been in 1940s, and by the time he found the letters, the couple had been married for 77 years.
At 99 years old, Antonio is believed to be the oldest person ever to file for divorce. The identity of the third party in this triangle hasn’t been revealed. We can’t rule out the possibility that he was still alive in 2011, but we are certain he was dead by 2012.
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