I started the miles and points about 15 years ago. I used to get instant credit card approvals all the time. But something happened 6 or 7 years ago... All of a sudden I stopped getting instant approvals. Maybe 2 out of 20 applications. And of those 17 pending, probably 3 got rejected for some reason. Meanwhile, my wife has since applied to just as many and she has the inverse rate - almost every single one of her applications gets instant approvals & has only been rejected once.

I assumed this was a result of some sort of credit monitoring that I forgot I signed up for, but I've checked all my credit reports through annualcreditreport.com and have never seen anything indicating some sort of freeze or fraud alert or credit monitoring. What could it be?
How do I get back to instant approvals!??