I was turned on by my wife's newfound exploration of her sexuality, but I was a mixture of curious and concerned about how I would figure out where it was all coming from. Should I question her about it? Should I hire a private detective to see if she was having an affair? Should I investigate on my own? I had some tough decisions to make.
Amber and I had been through some hard times. We had been to some counseling at her insistence about a year before. Our sex life had been HOT before we were married but as with most couples, it cooled over time after we got married. As we began having children, it cooled even more as our time for each other grew less and our focus on the kids grew larger. She knew I wasn't happy and was frustrated, and it caused some tension for us, but we never came to a good consensus on what was "enough" time for each other.
Several years ago, she had found some magazines stuffed away in the new house we were renting. While I had looked at and read some porno magazines over the years, those had NOT been mine. She made it clear that she did not believe me and got furious. She told me it made it seem like she wasn't enough and our sex life deteriorated even more than it had after our children. We grew even further apart and that sent me further downhill and made me more resentful of the lack of desire she seemed to have for me. I was often angry with her, not only that she didn't believe me about those magazines, but that she was "punishing me" in my mind by withholding sex no matter what her reasoning. That eventually sent me looking more into online sites for pictures and video and even talking with people via IM's and email about my predicament.
About a year before her recent "awakening", she had found some of those sites on our computer and one of those conversations between myself and another woman about my frustration. I explained to her that I had never cheated on her with anyone and I was simply trying to understand what she was dealing with; to get a woman's point of view and that was true. I had never gone outside our marriage, but I was chatting with other men and women about my predicament and how did they handle it in their relationships. NOT healthy, but it truly was not nearly as bad as she thought it was.
Amber was devastated and furious and asked me how she was supposed to believe anything I told her. She demanded that if I wanted to stay married, we seek counseling so we did. It was positive and it helped us work through things together and things had slowly gotten better over the last year. We went completely without sex for a few months but over the last six months things had slowly gotten better and she had warmed up to me more. It was hard for me to understand if this rather sudden change in her sexual personality was her effort to make things even better now or were there more sinister reasons..... I was terrified of the answer, but knew I HAD to find out.
I decided I'd look through the laptop we shared to see if there were any tell tales signs of something going on. I went through the history to see if there was anything that tipped me off to anything inappropriate from her. Earlier that summer we had found some inappropriate sites that one of our children had visited when they borrowed our laptop so it wouldn't be inconceivable that she would have thought to delete anything in the history if she WAS doing anything she wouldn't want me to know about. I found nothing other than her typical sites and no pattern of her using the laptop that was outside her normal use. After she had found those sites I had visited the previous year, we had agreed that both of us should have passwords to the others email. I had never really bothered to look into hers but now I did. Searching through the trash, her sent messages and received messages, but there was nothing that led me to believe anything was wrong. I felt a sense of relief and yet frustration that I wasn't finding any answers.
I was contemplating how to proceed and had decided I was going to just be upfront with her and question her about things. I had to admit that when we had been the most straightforward with each other in the past year, it had been difficult at times, but we were moving in a positive direction and it truly had sparked some good conversations and changes in us both. I spent a few days thinking about how to approach that conversation. I went online and did some looking around on some marriage therapy sites and counseling sites at how I could proceed and approach the conversation in the least confrontational way possible. IF this was just her trying to make things better for us, I didn't want her to feel like I was accusing her of sleeping around and damaging a "good thing" that had come my way. At the same time, I didn't want to go blindly forward and be made a fool of if she was screwing around and that was the cause of the changes in OUR sex life.
We both had to be out of town for a few days on a business trip. While we would be traveling together with the entire group we worked with, due to the way we were set up to work, we would not be able to share a room. I decided that trip would give me enough time to think through things and when we returned I would approach the conversation with her.
Since I was staying in a suite with the people I was working with and she was with her work group in another suite, we saw each other every day, but were separated in the evenings to save money for the company. That gave me plenty of time each night to continue my research on how to approach the conversation. One evening, I opened my email to find a reminder from a company about computer surveillance software. We had installed a 90 day free trial of their software and it was going to expire in 5 days. I had TOTALLY forgotten about that software. When we had a problem with our children using the laptop, we had tried a 90 day trial of this software on the laptop we all shared. Since that time, we had purchased a desktop for the kids and bought a license for another "cyber safety" program for that computer, but I had forgotten that I had installed that original surveillance software on our laptop to test it out.
I began searching for the codes I had saved to bring up the hidden info it had saved. I had already resolved in my mind that the computer was not her source of whatever was going on, but this would give me even more peace of mind. I eventually found the codes I had saved for the passwords to open the program and kicked it open. I literally had not cleared the memory for almost six weeks so the volume of what was there was overwhelming. I began looking back through to see screen shots of our email, our news sites, our work programs but nothing amiss. Our children's use seemed innocuous as well since we had made it clear we would be watching their every move. It was getting late, I was getting tired and I was contemplating uninstalling the program and not bother to look through all the contents as it truly was overwhelming. It took a screen shot every 10 seconds while the laptop was in use and recorded every key stroke as well.
I decided to look a little closer to the time frame all these changes had occurred. I was still seeing nothing out of the ordinary and was reconsidering my decision just to uninstall and delete everything. As I continued to get greater comfort by not finding anything, I came across a picture that gave me pause.
It wasn't anything inappropriate, simply a screen shot of Amber sitting on our bed looking at the computer with a puzzled look on her face. That shot piqued my interest so I kept looking. As I continued I began seeing some screenshots of YouTube and various women in different kinds of sexy poses. Then there were searches for the words "nudity", "boobs", "breasts" and "naughty" with appropriate screen shots of some videos associated with all those words. My interest was definitely piqued.