I’m trained to detect red flags, and I was unable to see them in my own relationship

This Morning’s Michelle Elman, 30, had been engaged for less than a day before finding out via Instagram that her fiance had been cheating on her. Here, she explains why the experience has made her question whether you can ever tell if someone is lying and the impact it has had on her career as a Life Coach.

I understand it makes a great headline: A Life Coach Got Dumped; Someone Who Gives Relationship Advice Had A Relationship Go Wrong! But, at the end of the day, I am not qualified as a life coach because of my life experiences; I am qualified because of my qualifications. You wouldn’t ask a doctor if they had your illness in order to trust their diagnosis.

Of course, a part of me worried this would make me less of a life coach. I wondered if anyone would take my advice anymore. After all, I’m trained to detect red flags, and I was unable to see them in my own relationship! But then I had to stop myself. This man had made me doubt enough. From our relationship to my memories to our love, I would not let him doubt my ability to do my job too.

When it comes to infidelity, there’s often an undertone of ‘there must have been signs’. We get told, “With every lie, there’s a tell”, and if you can pick up on the ‘tells’, you will know, unless you’re willingly burying your head in the sand or wearing rose-tinted glasses. This narrative is categorically false. I didn’t realise how false it was until I was in the position myself. The fact is, if someone wants to lie to you, they will. It is not your job to continually assess whether your partner is lying to you; it is their job to tell you the truth.

The only way a healthy relationship can work is if there’s trust - if the worst thing I did was trust someone I shouldn’t have, then so be it. I think we like to believe there must have been signs because we don’t like the idea that there’s a chance it could happen to us, too. It creates too much fear and uncertainty. It’s easier to blame the cheated party.

We have become a culture of red-flag detectors. ‘Red flags’ is a term that is deeply misunderstood and misused. Red flags are warning signs; they are different from deal breakers. Every human in the world has red flags, and if you run at the first sign of a red flag, you’ll never have a relationship, let alone a healthy one. At its core, the idea of ‘red flags’ puts the onus on the individual to detect them, and sometimes, they’re simply not detectable.

When it comes to cheating, there’s often a cliche that the cheater is the person who all your friends and family hate and warn you about, and when they tell you to steer clear, it falls on deaf ears. This was not the case in my relationship. All my friends and family loved him. If there is a person in my life more emotionally intelligent than me, it’s my life coach, and she met him, too. She thought we were a good match and created a lot of balance for each other. I often joked that my friends and family loved him more than me, and when we went on holiday with my university friends last summer, they made the same joke, saying that they were only using me to spend more time with him! Only one person said anything bad about him because she was concerned early on in our relationship that I had just gone for the ‘safe guy’. She said she wasn’t sure we were a match, but “at least he would never cheat on you”.

I reminded her of that statement last week, and she said she’d actually changed her mind about him on my birthday last year. We had gone away for the weekend with all of our friends, and she said the way he looked at me and the way he treated me, it was clear he adored me, and she had regretted being so harsh on him. If there is any solace, I find it in the idea I was ‘tricked’. I didn’t see something because I couldn’t have, and I wasn’t the only one.

We had been together for three years. Our lives were intertwined. His family became my own and my friends became his, and no one knew. Not a single person picked up on anything other than that we were a happy couple. And so my message to anyone in the same boat is to stop the self-blame. It’s not your job to detect lies; it’s their job to tell the truth!

Michelle Elman is a five-board accredited life coach, boundaries expert, and an ITV This Morning broadcaster. She is the author of several award-winning and best-selling books, her latest release being a children’s book named, How To Say No.