I don’t even know where to begin. My wife, Lia (43F) and I have been married for ten years. We have two beautiful children: our five-year-old son and our two-year-old daughter. I thought we were happy – or at least, I thought we were trying. But four weeks ago, my entire life came crashed down.

I (46M) started to notice when she was glued to her phone more than usual. Lia has always been private, but this was different. She’d smile at her screen, then immediately lock it when I walked into the room. One night, after she fell asleep, I couldn’t resist. I checked her phone.

What I found still makes me sick to my stomach. There were messages with a coworker, Eric (48M), going back years. Explicit texts. Photos. Promises of love. Even references to secret trips they’d taken while I was at home with the kids, believing she was working late.

My heart was racing, my hands trembling. I confronted her the next morning. At first, she denied it, said I was misunderstanding. But when I read her the messages out loud, her face crumbled. She admitted it. She said it started four years ago, long before our youngest was born. She tried to justify it – “you were distant, we were struggling”. But nothing could excuse this.

I started digging deeper. I followed her to work one day, needing to see it for myself. Sure enough, after her shift, she walked out arm in arm with Eric. They didn’t even try to hide it. They got into his car and drove off. I followed them to a restaurant where they sat like a happy couple, laughing, holding hands. It broke me. But what shattered me completely was when I learned they’d built their own life together. They’d been renting an apartment near work – a place where she’d go when she was “working overtime”. I saw them go inside, watching them from my car parking on the streets, a few blocks away. I checked on them for about 4 nights, and they had the same routine.

That’s when I snapped. I packed all of her belongings – everything she owned, into the back of my car and drove to her work place the next morning after spying on them. I know I did wrong. When she walked out, I dumped everything right there on the sidewalk in front of her and her coworkers. I told her she wasn’t coming home.

Since then, l’ve filed for divorce and am fighting for the full custody of the kids. She’s begging me to forgive her, saying she doesn’t want to lose the family we built. But how can I?

Friends and family keep asking me if I regret how I handled it – publicly humiliating her, kicking her out without notice. I do. She tore our family apart, and the least she could do is face some accountability, but I can’t help but feel like the bad guy for how I acted.

I had nights where l’ve felt very lonely, and I miss her. Of course, I am also attending to therapy sessions to be better for the kids and for myself. All I care about are them, they don’t deserve this chaos. And as much as it hurts, I know they are better off with me than someone who could live a lie for so long.

The Unexpected Twist: In therapy sessions, as I tried to make sense of what happened, I was confronted with uncomfortable truths about myself. I had always prided myself on my resilience and ability to handle pressure. But it turns out, for the past 4 years – precisely the period when Lia’s affair began – I had been secretly struggling with an undiagnosed chronic condition. It was a severe form of sleep disorder (e.g., severe sleep apnea or untreated narcolepsy) that left me constantly exhausted, irritable, and emotionally numb. I had dismissed it as ‘work fatigue’ or ‘stress’, but in reality, I was not truly present in my relationship. I was emotionally unavailable, I’d frequently fall asleep mid-conversation, and I had become unconsciously distant. Lia had mentioned my ‘distance’ and ‘us struggling’, but I had dismissed it, not realizing that I was battling a hidden war that had altered my very