Once upon a time … when I got caught

I’m 47, have been excelling in my extracurricular activity since 2013. A few years into misbehaving, my youngest daughter got me caught.

At the beginning (about 12 years ago), I had no official concept of OPSEC—-I just knew I needed to keep my shit under wraps. Because of my personal freedom in my relationship and my line of work, which required my devices be locked down, I was confident in that ability. I was on OKCupid and CL (those were the days!) and had great luck. I both liked to play with people online and meet for rendezvous, and also had an anonymous pre—OF online porn portfolio for my exhibitionist tendencies.

It was this activity that did me in.

One day, in October of 2017, while I was on a work trip, my then-two-year-old went rummaging through an old bag of mine, and found a thumb drive. The way my husband tells it, she was so excited to give her daddy something cool that she found, and unknowingly handed him a couple dozen photos from my unmonetized pre-OF account that were on the thumb drive. My vain self thought they were too good to just delete and my overconfident self never thought it would be an issue.

The photos sent my brilliant tech guy spouse on a two-day expedition following my breadcrumbs and finding the porn portfolio; looking up my internet search history, and (remember: I thought I was goooood to go OPSEC-wise), finding the emails to one guy—Hot Professor—with whom I communicated through my regular email address.

But Hot Professor wasn’t my affair—he was just a friend I fooled around with. My spouse still didn’t know about the man I had fallen for (who is still important to me but it’s complicated). In the course of events, that came to light too.

My spouse stayed because he loves the idea of me and is terrified of being alone. I stayed because of kid needs that were expanding at that moment, and because I had professional and financial chess pieces to put in place. We are still together, but I’m initiating divorce this summer. He deserves more than me, and I deserve to live an authentic life—as much as any of us “deserve” anything. (I have my problems with this concept.) I do know that I love him enough to want his happiness, but not enough to deny my own—especially while he still falls short at achieving his.

P.S. That batch of emails he found to and from Hot Professor years ago? Apparently he forwarded them to himself and stored them in a folder called “Infidelity”; my other daughter found it when she was on his computer last summer. (I deleted them and I am not sure if he has noticed or not.) So now she knows, and it is what it is.

Life hurts, but it also does go on, eventually.