I never got caught from the A that brought me here.
I did get caught in an EA I had years ago......erased text messages, but never erased a number that was calling my cell 2 or 3 times a day. It was bad and ironically the suspicion still exists...but I did it anyway and this time with a "real live" A.....Hence, therapy.

my AP and i had two D-Days...one with his wife and one with my hubby. On his end, he left his cell phone out and his wife was apparently already suspicious of us and the time we spent together. well she woke up at 4 am (why I do not know) and saw the last text i had sent him that said "Love you too" our every day relationship died but we were able to try to reconnect as friends but the temptation was still there every time we talked (once every few weeks instead of every day).

on my end, i kept a journal in which i wrote of my "love" to my AP after we could no longer talk as we wanted to because of D-Day #1. Well my hubby saw me writing in it and he got suspicious because i always seemed to hide it when he came into my office. He thought it was notes for the book my AP and I had originally been writing. So he went into my office when I was at work and read the journal (where i wrote about loving my AP and recalling some of the memories we had) and then my hubby (a computer techie geek) was able to get into my email account and recover emails that I had thought were protected and saved and found "incriminiating" emails, pictures, etc. and sent them on to my AP's wife and family. and she sent my hubby back texts that we had thought were long deleted (but if you are the owner of a phone account...you can get old text messages from Verizon....) that also showed the extent of our virtiual/emotional/pseudo physical affair.

Needless to say the second D-Day ended all contact for good and very nearly ended my marriage and his marriage. Thank GOD for a wonderful husband who loves me despite my flaws and failrues and we are now working on rebuilding our marriage and our trust in each other (he in me with other men and me in him because he had always told me that he would confront me directly if he ever had a problem and would never use his computer skills to hack into my private emails....)

I got caught, because in addition to the first A which was never a full on PA but close, and in addition to the second A, which was definitely a full on PA, I was also participating in a good deal of cyber sexual activity which had nothing to do with the active A I was in. It was just on the side activity for fun. I had a rule to never mention anything about my real life or the A's to anyone on the computer. My cyber play was on an anonymous site. I broke my rule one night in a chat to someone I had been getting to know a little better. He had confessed to me about an ONS that he had and so i confessed to him about the A I was in. What I didn't know was that my H had been getting suspicious of what I was doing on the computer so much and I had given him a few red flags, so he had put keylogger spyware on my computer that very day. Late that night after I was asleep, H logged onto my computer and read the chat and my full and complete and detailed confession to that man. He was completely floored. He was thoroughly unprepared for that kind of revelation. It was the most shocking and fully devastating moment of his life. Trauma.

This is an excerpt from the second journal he wrote upon joining this site in 2011 only a week after the discovery:

:Tuesday rolled around and I went to work as usual, and didn't think too much about it during the day. But once home, I felt strongly that I needed to find out what the extent of her chatting was going on, and planned once she went to bed to look on her cell phone (strangely, she never set a password on it) to see what text she was getting and pictures she was sending. It so happened that she worked a big house that took ten hours to do that day. So she was late coming home. Didn't get home till around 7 or 8.
So I had plenty of time to download and install a key logger onto the computer she used. Then I went back to my normal work on my computer in our bedroom. She finally came home, and as usual sat down after getting some dinner (I had fixed it knowing she was getting home late) and started chatting away as usual.
When she went to bed, and was clearly asleep, I went into the living room to check the logs. I started reading. She was telling someone about the sex we'd had the night before, how good it was. And then, out of the blue, she says "Oh, so we're both cheating on our spouses." My heart came to a crashing halt. As I read on, she described having sex earlier that day with the guy, then working all day with him cleaning the house. She described what they'd done at the gym, that they had had sex, and that this was the first time she'd told anyone.
I rose from the chair saying, "NO NO NO NO!" over and over again. I sat in a big chair in the room, in total shock. Not believing what I had just read. I was in total shock. I went back and finished the log, read how she compared sex with me and sex with this other guy. I was torn to pieces.
Torn because of the deceit. Torn because of what I'd lost that could never be restored, that level of intimacy where I was the only person who had ever been in her, had ever pleasured her like that. That had been totally violated and could not be restored. And she talked about it in such glowing details, I couldn't imagine in a million years how she could talk like that about another man, have sex with another man, then come home and have sex with me as if everything was alright, normal, nothing unusual going on.
I know, I know. It happens all the time. I'm still in a bit of shock over the whole thing. But I've moved to anger and grief at the moment. Which are emotions I'm still trying to deal with.
But I'll go into next time what happened when I confronted her and where we have come to at this point in the past week. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was our 29th anniversary weekend. To say the least, it was the most different weekend we've ever had for an anniversary getaway. More next time."

I can understand the distress very well, the anger, the frustration, the asking for WHY?

I think it is important to make a distinction - not all As are the same and there are a number of different motivators. All of us who have As have emotional turmoil as I gather from postings on this site - and certainly my own experience. I think we need to really distinguish two groups:

1. those that are simply opportunistic and generally don't actually mean that much - with exceptions.
2. those that have been conceived in a planned way and/or actually are very meaningful

No. 2 is the difficult one for all involved. We are all feeling trapped in the wrong space and we have some space for some very happy times and then no space when we have some very unhappy times. So forever we are caught in this roller coaster.

As for the party that has been cheated on I would recommend: assess if this is something that results from what you have been doing/are doing/have not been doing or are not doing? OR is it something completely separate? In the latter case there may not be much you can do other than see it run its course. In the former case a lot of very sensitive talking needs to happen without putting up a fight.

The other comment I would dare to make - and I know many people will not appreciate this: why are we not more open about sex with each other? We all have secret fantasies - why not explore them with our partners together? - Just a thought and a concept I am currently trying out.