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Telling fact

You can guess people's occupation by the way they smoke. People who work outside a lot tend to form their hands into a bowl when lighting a fag, even when inside. This is designed to shield the flame from the wind.
Source: The Book of Tells by Peter Collett

Signs and wonders

Do a bride and groom walk in easy unison down the aisle? Do husband and wife exchange natural kisses? When a couple hold hands, does the taller person have their hand and arm to the front, or is the shorter person dominant, creating a more uncomfortable position in which by the way they hold hands, or walk, the shorter person leads? Spotting the signs of incompatibility should improve your chances of choosing the right partner, and of being prepared for the vagaries and vicissitudes of other people's love before they even know it themselves.

Cheating

Infidelity is one of the hardest of all love's twists and spotting the partner who's cheating can be even harder. Typical physical tells include a loss of attentiveness to the other partner. There is less synchronisation of body language due to one person's disinterest and distraction. Most significantly, a lack of desire for sex can mean that the cheat is getting it somewhere else.

Mistaken identity

Are a couple in sync as they walk down the aisle?

But all these tells can have other causes too and one of the main mistakes that people make when trying to analyse tells is to take one tell in isolation rather than adding up the sum of all the tells to draw one whole conclusion. A man may well blink rapidly when he states that he is not having an affair, it might indicate that he is lying. But not if he blinks a lot the rest of the time, and not if you are standing over him with a loaded water pistol! Stress makes people's blink count increase, not lying in itself.

As with everything in the secret language, it's the whole picture that counts.

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