Today is Valentine’s Day, when lovers shower each other with gifts, but it’s also the busiest day of the year for private investigators, which are tasked with catching a cheating spouse.
“He’s got to buy her something for Valentine’s. He’s got to show a commitment to her, and then also his wife,” San Antonio private investigator Charlie Parker tells Newsradio 1200 WOAI.
He says the thrill of an illicit love, coupled with the pressures associated with the holiday, make secret lovers easy to catch. He remembers that one married guy, creeping out to meet a model, and filling up his car with gas. On the video, a look of pain and sorrow that showed just how difficult it was to live a double life.
“He was thinking, ‘Boy, if I could get out of this, I would do it.”
It is a time when people are torn between a lover and a wife and it’s a sad thing,” he explains.
There is, reportedly, a lot of work in San Antonio. In 2015, a group of hackers broke into a database belonging to a website for cheating spouses called Ashley Madison. There were 99,157 user accounts linked to San Antonio. That’s the seventh most in the United States.
Some may have been duplicate accounts, or linked to someone who had moved away, so an accurate count is impossible, but it gives a glimpse into potential pool of cheating spouses.
But being the proverbial hunter, chasing a deer in heat, isn’t his only job this time of year.
With the rise in social media, there is fewer stigmas surrounding the search for a long lost flame. Last year, he was hired by a retired Colonel who was reminiscing about a former flame. “He waited one month too late. She had died. We had to call him back and tell him. It was tragic.”
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