I've been married to my husband for one month now, though we've been a couple almost six years. We are in the process of moving and I've stayed behind to pack up, while he's looking for apartments in our new city. We agreed that I should go through our old iPhones and get any pics off of them and just toss them, or try to sell them. Well I found no pics on his, but I did snoop on his email to find out if he had pay stubs in there and saw a folder called "work." I opened it and found on four separate emails to himself of four different pics of his old co-worker, and she's posing naked in all of them. They were dated two years ago—about 4 months before he proposed to me! Needless to say it felt like a punch in the gut.

I immediately confronted him. At first he couldn't be honest with me. He admitted that he had the pictures, but thought he deleted them a long time ago. He played the blame game a bit, saying we were in a rough spot in our relationship and we weren't having much sex and that he wasn't sure where we were going at the time. I believe that he did delete them from his new phone, but the old phone still has that folder.

Long story short, after a few days of crying and many interrogations, he came clean about the whole thing. It only lasted a couple of weeks. It started out as innocent flirting and it escalated to sexting. In the heat of the moment he emailed her pics to himself and deleted them from his phone. He said he thought he got them out of his email box. He never made it clear to this girl that he made a mistake and he has continued to be friendly with her since. He said the mistake made him realize that he really needed to decide if I was what he really wanted in life, and he obviously felt I was because he proposed to me a few months later.

We have always been very open with each other and try to stay creative and spice things up. We regularly listen to sex podcasts and read books, articles and talk about what we learned from them. Ultimately I feel that he cheated on me and completely disrespected me by lying about it. But I also knew that I had to find out why he did this—what did he get from her that he couldn't have gotten from me? And why did he choose not to tell me? And moreover, why didn't he cut ties with her?

I have decided to try to work this out with him. He has admitted to having a lot of issues. He said he didn't cut ties with her because he has huge insecurities about what other people think about him and he didn't want her to "not like him." He said he felt he could sext with her, and be open with her, at the time, because he didn't care what she thought because he didn't really know her and felt safe doing that with her. And when it was all said and done he felt so much shame that he buried it, and basically pretended it never happened. Finally, he insists that there were no physical acts between them. I believe he is remorseful. He cries every time we talk—and I have only seen this man cry once in six years. But I'm worried that I won't be able to get over this. That it will eat me up inside.

I just want to know what your thoughts are on our situation. 1. Do you think he should be forgiven? 2. How can we recover from this if he is? 3. What are your thoughts about his sexting relationship? 4. Do you think this was cheating?

We have been together a long time now, but our marriage is still young, and I'd hate to see the last six years go down the drain. Help!

Blindsided Recently In Dreary Encounter

Why did he choose not to tell you? Read your letter—the snooping, the confrontations, the interrogations. It's a wonder he tells you anything at all.

And all of this mishigas over what? Years ago, before you were married, before you were engaged, before he even proposed to you... your husband briefly flirted with another woman. And he flirted with her the way most people flirt today: text messages and sext messages. But when he realized that you were the one he wanted, when he decided that you were the .64 he could round up to The One, he knocked it the fuck off. He stopped flirting with this other woman, he stopped sexting with her, and committed himself to you. (I have no doubt that you scoured his phone and his email and found nothing else that was the least bit incriminating—no plans to move from sexting to sexing, no other women, no other nothin'.) Yes, he failed to delate the pics. (Maybe he forgot, maybe he liked them‚ maybe they reminded him that, yes, he was desirable and that affirmation made him feel better about himself.) And yes, he failed to punish this woman, a woman who didn't do anything wrong, by treating her like shit and driving her off after he ended the flirtation and proposed to you. So he committed the awful and unforgivable sin of—gasp—remaining cordial.

Here are my thoughts on your situation:

1. He should be forgiven—and you should ask his forgiveness for snooping.

2. You can start by apologizing to him for snooping and end by growing the fuck up.

3. I think it's perfectly understandable—lots of people have private little rumspringas when they're making up their minds about whether to commit to someone for life; it's not uncommon for people to say (and sext) things to people they don't know well because the stakes are so much lower—and you have got to stop raking him over the coals about shit that went down before you were even engaged. Stuff it down the memory hole.

4. I do not think this was cheating. It was flirting, and it may have crossed a line (presumably you two were exclusive before you got engaged and he knew you wouldn't smile on this), but if your marriage can't weather a big nothing burger like this, BRIDE, it's unlikely to survive the kinds of conflicts, traumas, and, yes, betrayals that sooner or later touch every marriage. (Google "Ashley Madison" and think about how much worse it could be.) Forgiving him for this—really forgiving him, which means dropping it (no more interrogations!)—will be good practice (you'll probably have to forgive him for something else at some point in the future) and a good example (he'll probably have to forgive you for something at some point).

I think you should stay with him. I'm not sure he should stay with you.