The new infidelity

If there was a moral decision to be made at this point, I was unaware of it. She had left her e-mail up on the computer many times in the past and I had never thought of looking at it. Of course, that she no longer did this was -- like the cellphone she no longer offered -- an absence that said a whole lot. I knew she was hiding something from me and I knew precisely what that was. So I went into her inbox without a second thought, clicked on a message from a man, an ex-lover, and then saw, right before my eyes, his message to her and the message from her to which he was responding.

As I read and re-read their most recent love letters, the first of dozens that I would pore over for several hours that morning, I felt absurd. Was I now reading the e-mails that I might have sent to Louise had I not stopped myself in my tracks and had she not decided to fall for a different old school friend? Or was I reading the messages that I would have sent to my girlfriend if we had just renewed our erotic connection? It was ridiculous.

I signed out of Yahoo. And then I realized something truly sickening. I knew my girlfriend's password. It had never occurred to me before. This time I did entertain second thoughts. Ethical thoughts. And then, selfish thoughts. Did I really want to subject myself to more of those ghastly intimate messages? Could I handle reading criticisms of me, shared with a new lover? (There were none. But there was something almost as bad -- shared concern for me.) But still, I wanted to know things. Things like, When did it start? (Not long ago.) How serious was it? (Extremely serious, if read one way, and not serious at all, if one used a different hermeneutic.) And, could I take this guy on? (Oh joy -- it was immediately clear that I am the better writer.)

Nervously, and also with a strong sense of something like exhilaration, I went back in. And soon I discovered that the vile experience of looking at your lover's love letters bottoms out after the first half dozen or so. You don't feel worse the more you read. You just feel sick and sad, and the sickness and sadness hits a low point beyond which it cannot go. So I continued reading, and I fortified myself, on some unconscious level, by trying to take control of the situation.

Having printed out all the e-mails received, I went into the sent e-mails and printed those out, too. I felt like a diligent graduate student undertaking an important research project. My morning was devoted to the job of collating both sets, in chronological order, whereupon I embarked on the task of annotating them, with comments such as: This guy is a jerk! And (my favorite -- I think I even smiled at the time): Barbara Cartland would be proud of you!

But no amount of literary criticism could shift the shock and rage that had settled on my body. There is something keenly voyeuristic about reading personal e-mails. It is as if you are looking at some ghastly combination of journal entries and transcripts of private phone calls. You can see the person thinking, in real time, and you experience, albeit at second-hand, the thrill of events recalled and of new plans being laid. It is pornographic (which by one definition means "erotic writing") because it is real. After all, the frisson of porn exists precisely because the participants are not acting (hardly!) and we are therefore seeing something that really happened. In fact, my experience was literally obscene: I was seeing what should have been kept unseen, off the scene, beyond the gaze of prying eyes.

It was several hours before I remembered what I had forgotten I knew about e-mail: that sometimes we say things that we do not really mean, or mean only at the time, in our lust for something to happen, our desire for change, our mad rush for quick thrills.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Four days later, my girlfriend emerged from the mountains, still on the road, but back within reach of a cellphone signal. She picked up 17 voice-mail messages from me: the angry me, the compassionate me, the enraged me, the understanding me, the baby me, the adult me, the controlling me, the loving me. I had played Buddha and the devil on her message center and hit most of the available slots in between. She called me from the road. She wanted to talk.

My girlfriend had been ready to move out, for good, racked with guilt and determined to hide the affair from me. But we had been saved by the computer and the cellphone. If I had not discovered the secret affair, and if e-mail had not rendered that knowledge so total and so undeniable, we might never have started talking again. If I had not left her those crazed messages she would not have known how I felt during the first hours after the truth came out. And in the age before cellphones (remember that?) there would have been nowhere to call. I might have written a letter, but it would hardly have had the same impact as my charged-up real-time extemporizing.

That evening, my (ex?) girlfriend feigned indignation about the intrusion into her private life even as I feigned anger that she had the cheek to complain to me. We were "arguing" now like a couple from some TV sitcom -- a rather well-written one, I like to think. We took a shower together and had a water fight. She said she was appalled that I would read her e-mail. But she never stopped smiling. She was outraged at my Barbara Cartland insult. But she found it amusing. She asked me for my e-mail password. And I told her.

We were back doing our infamous double-act again, and it was easy enough to forgive and forget a fling with an old flame that had started up only after she told me she planned to leave. I swear there were moments when I thought she might wheel out the old "Friends" classic: "But we were on a break!"

The next weekend we took a road trip together and listened to the Pet Shop Boys in the car: "Send me an e-mail/ And tell me/ I love you." We spent a romantic weekend away as flesh-and-blood lovers, beyond the tentacles of virtuality. When I started writing to Louise again, she told me about her new love and her impending divorce, but I stopped sharing intimacies about my relationship with the woman I love.

Slowly but surely, things settled down. I showed my girlfriend a draft of this article, and she corrected it, matter-of-factly confining most of her comments to questions of grammar and style. A few weeks later, she bought me a cellphone.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Just five weeks after I found out about the affair, my girlfriend sent me this message: "I get such a rush of excitement when I see an e-mail from you in my inbox!" It seemed to me that the e-mail was saving us.

And it was. But there is no escaping the implications of the new technologies of inner life. The computer could be used not only as an electronic Romeo device but also for surveillance. It was possible to see if my girlfriend had changed her password. If she trusted me, she would not. But if I broke in again, she shouldn't have trusted me. I considered this paradox and decided to do the right thing. However, it was also possible for me to tailor my e-mails now that I knew she could look. Probably she would not. But, like a journal left lying around for your lover to explore, my e-mail had two potential readers now. I tried not to shape my communication with her in mind, but I could not un-know that she could read it too.

In jealous moments I saw that the double-edged nature of e-mail and cellphones (they can be used to expose the liaisons they invite) was still very much in play. If I sent her lots of e-mail messages, carefully spacing them throughout the day, I would have a pretty good idea of whether she was really at work. And I could use the cellphone weapon to identify the location of the target -- calling to determine her whereabouts. Or as a guerrilla force -- to disrupt enemy behavior.

Eventually my fears subsided. My girlfriend broke off the relationship with her old lover. And she did so, of course, via e-mail. But it might really be that in a world where passwords can be changed and multiple e-mail accounts created, where everyone is increasingly available, available in new and hitherto unimaginable ways, no one is really safe. Not even from themselves.

• View blog reactions