My Boyfriend's Secret Life

The man I was dating may have been a little boring, but I thought he was sweet and safe and totally “husband material”— until he turned out to be Anthony Weiner 2.0.

- Adeline K. Frost

Steve* and I had been dating for six months when I found myself alone in his apartment, watching snowflakes whirling in and out of the red-orange light of the giant, neon New Yorker hotel sign that blazed outside his bedroom window. He had gotten last-minute tickets to a basketball game and was running late to meet me, but he’d called earlier to tell me that his roommates would let me in and that I was welcome to use his laptop while I waited.

My plan, as I opened the computer, was to look for secondhand furniture on Craigslist. When I got to the website’s home page, most of the links were blue, signifying that they’d never been clicked on. But under the Personals heading, the words “Casual Encounters” were purple. As in, previously visited.

That was an innocent discovery. The not-so-innocent one came next, as I weighed my options. I’d always been anti-snooping—even people in relationships deserve their privacy—but if Steve had been casually encountering other girls all this time we’d been together, how could I not investigate? What if a silent STD was ravaging my reproductive system while I sat there debating the ethics of looking through my boyfriend’s browser history?

Once I clicked on the history, it took me less than a minute to find what I was looking for. That afternoon, the laptop had been used to visit a Hotmail account I’d never heard of, and someone had sent an attachment with the curious file name “NakedSteve.jpg.” I searched the laptop for that file and found a folder. There were hundreds of images in it.