I (43M) have been with my wife (43F) since we were teenagers. We had our daughter (25F) when we were very young, and the pregnancy was so difficult that my wife was never able to have another child. Because of that, our daughter became the center of our world, and I always believed we had a close, loving family.
Everything fell apart in 2026.
I discovered my wife had been having an affair after I logged into her Facebook account. I know checking her account was an invasion of privacy, but I had a gut feeling something wasn’t right. What I found confirmed my worst fears. The man she was seeing wasn’t someone I ever expected, but he had one thing I couldn’t compete with, that is MONEY.
After finding out, I called my daughter and asked her to come over because I needed to confront her mother. When she arrived, she seemed unusually nervous, which only made sense later.
I confronted my wife with what I’d found, and she didn’t even try to deny it. Instead, she blamed me. She said I’d become emotionally distant, that our relationship had lost its intimacy, and that she’d felt neglected. Looking back, I can admit I had been focused almost entirely on work because I wanted us to reach financial freedom and retire early. That doesn’t excuse what happened, but I understand why she felt unhappy.
At first, my daughter defended me and criticized my wife for cheating. But then everything got even worse.
My wife revealed that my daughter had known about the affair for a long time. According to her, the affair had been going on since after the pandemic, and the other man had been giving my daughter money to keep quiet. My daughter immediately apologized and tried to explain herself, but I barely heard a word she said. I wasn’t just betrayed by my wife. I realized the person I trusted most had been hiding it from me as well.
I couldn’t stay there.
I walked out of the house, ignored every call and message from both of them, and came back later that night only to collect my clothes and a few personal belongings. My wife wasn’t home anymore, and I didn’t care where she’d gone.
I checked into a motel, blocked both my wife and my daughter, and decided I wanted no further contact with either of them. Right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive either of them.
So… AITA for cutting them both out of my life after learning they kept this from me?