The Detective a Jealous Husband Hired, and Who His Wife Left Him For

A fifty-two-year-old man, afraid his wife (fifteen years younger and very attractive) would be unfaithful, set up a surveillance system in his own home with detectives, recordings, and bans. Walter Riso tells the ending himself, and it’s more ironic than any script would have dared write.

In ¿Amar o depender? (2003), psychologist Walter Riso describes one of the mental schemas that, in his framework, sustain much of problematic affective attachment: the illusion of permanence, the belief that a relationship can be made completely secure and stable if it’s controlled enough.

A marriage turned into a surveillance operation

The case he uses to illustrate it involves a separated, remarried man with a wife fifteen years younger. Over time, his jealousy drifted into what Riso describes, bluntly, as “a miniature, personalized, homemade KGB”: hiring private detectives, recordings, all kinds of bans, and, at times, physical violence.

When his wife dared to hint at the slightest disagreement, he’d respond with a phrase that sums up the underlying issue well: “You’re worth little,” an indirect way of saying “you’re less than me.” The underlying goal, according to Riso, wasn’t so much love as certainty: he wanted a guarantee that she would never leave, regardless of whether that permanence rested on affection or on fear.

The submission that was actually something else

Riso makes an interesting clinical observation about this case: the wife’s apparent submission wasn’t a form of attachment, but a survival strategy toward someone she rightly perceived as dangerous. She wanted out of the relationship and was waiting for the right moment to do it, something very different from the affective dependency her husband suffered from.

That nuance matters in Riso’s theory: not every instance of staying in a difficult relationship is attachment. Sometimes it’s calculation, patience, or simply waiting for a real chance to leave without risk.

The ending nobody saw coming

That entire control machinery, Riso writes, was little more than a facade without much real substance: the husband was, at bottom, far weaker than his wife. And as often happens with this kind of strategy, according to the author, the constant surveillance ended up causing exactly what it was meant to prevent.

The wife eventually left him for another man. The detail that makes the case memorable is who that man was: the very private detective her husband had hired to spy on her. Riso closes the story with a line that works almost like a moral: “Nobody knows who they’re really working for.”

What Buddha had to say about this, two thousand years earlier

Riso frames this “illusion of permanence” schema by citing a teaching attributed to Buddha, tied to what Buddhism calls the Second Noble Truth: attachment as the origin of suffering. The core idea, in short, is this:

• Clinging to something impermanent creates misery, because sooner or later what we cling to changes or disappears.
• The more you try to fix and control what is, by nature, uncertain, the more suffering the attempt generates.
• The paradox, as Riso notes while revisiting this idea, is that the fear of losing something tends to speed up precisely its loss, not prevent it.

Why this case, however extreme, is useful

Few people go as far as setting up the kind of home surveillance system Riso describes. But the underlying mechanism (wanting to turn a relationship into something absolutely guaranteed and risk-free) is, in his clinical experience, far more common in smaller, less visible versions:

• Systematically checking the other person’s phone or social media, not just occasionally.
• Needing to know at all times where your partner is and who they’re with.
• Demanding constant explanations for any brief absence or delay.
• Reading the slightest distance as a sign that something’s wrong.

None of these behaviors, Riso notes, delivers the security it promises. On the contrary: the more they’re practiced, the more fragile real trust between two people becomes, because the relationship starts resting on surveillance instead of on the bond itself.

The case of the husband and the detective works as an extreme, sharply drawn version of something that, in smaller doses, shows up in many relationships: the idea that more control equals more security. Riso’s story, with its almost comic final twist, suggests just the opposite. It’s the same paradox that appears, from another tradition entirely, in Erich Fromm’s list of historical false solutions to the anguish of feeling separate: no control strategy actually resolves the fear that gave rise to it.