The Hidden Photos I Wasn’t Meant to See

We’ve been together for four years, two of which we spent living under the same roof. Everything was fine-at least, I thought it was. Sure, our sex life had slowed down, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Or maybe he just wasn’t saying anything.

He’d left town for the weekend, and last night was the first time I tried using his MacBook because, honestly, I didn’t really feel like getting mine. I shouldn’t have done, because in my head I knew that curiosity killed, but I really just needed to know what his camera roll looked like-it is, after all, connected to his iPhone.

That’s when I saw it.

Here’s a screenshot from OnlyFans model’s Twitter account, just in case you’ve forgotten what he looks like. See how he was always saying

“I hate Twitter,”

and how he rarely-to-never used it? Well, here’s a piece of evidence to contradict all that he said he hated and rarely-to-never used the social networking site. My stomach started churning. And then, like a moth attracted by the fire, I could not help but dig deeper.

I scrolled through his deleted photos, and that’s where I found them — pictures of other women. Some of them naked, others just posing, smiling into the camera or on vacation. But the watermark

“Fapello”

was plastered on every single one. What really made it worse was one woman looked suspiciously like someone he works with.

I had plummeted this low. I opened the photo’s info and saw that he took these screenshots while we were home together. Tuesday morning at 8 AM; getting ready for work, or a lazy Sunday at 11 AM when we were lounging around. All the while, he was sneaking these photos onto his phone.

Sick of it all, I opened his Reddit and it is totally laced with pornography and a lot more OnlyFans nonsense. I opened Pandora’s box. I could not close the Pandora’s box.

We have talked about pornography on various occasions. He knows my opinion—I believe that places like OnlyFans exploit women as financial objects for comfort in the eyes of men. His obsession with such content is that he views women as sexual objects and not human beings.

I don’t have control over what he chooses to ingest, and I wouldn’t even ask him to stop for his own sake; the practice doesn’t resonate with my values anyway. Still, seeing those photographs, especially knowing that he saved them when I was home, just broke something inside me. It’s not the porn itself, but the deception, the hiding. And somehow, seeing selfies of these women, smiling, posing in mirrors, seems so very personal, a betrayal.

Now, I lie here wondering how to do this. Sleuthing crosses a line, and I cannot deny that I did it. What I see, however has laid my heart to rest – I can never forget what I saw. How should I tell him? Should I say that I saw him cheating so that he does not feel accused of being watched? Do I even have the right to be angry about all of this after snooping through his camera roll?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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