I discovered my wife, 49, female, of 17 years, had an 18-month affair when I updated our fan filter on the app it uses. Here’s some background. We’ve been married 17 years with no children of our own. She’s been divorced once and had two daughters that I helped to raise, now 28 and 23, prior to our marriage. We’ve really only had minor bumps and issues, in my opinion.

We’ve had an open-door type of communication with each other, whether it be work issues, venting, sexual issues, or just how we are feeling. Often we will just talk on the couch about life and philosophy in general. I felt that we had a great connection and a pretty heavy, fulfilling sex life. We are both in good shape and maintain a healthy lifestyle. I work in the medical field and, due to things being what they are, have been putting in a decent amount of overtime over the past five months.

She works in a legal consultancy and has been working from home for the past five months, which has made things a bit distant. But on our days off, we are tight. I changed the filter on the Dyson fan in our bedroom last night and asked my wife if I could use her phone to update the app in order to reset the change filter alert. Mine was on the charger next to the front door. I noticed she had put on a pattern unlock and kind of wanted to ask her what that was about.

As I was finding the app on her phone, a notification for Snapchat popped up. My stomach dropped immediately as I read the small tag: “I’ll bring the special toy,” it said. My brain understood the words, but my mind just stopped functioning. She asked what was the matter after several minutes of me just sitting and staring at the bedroom fan. My wife has an obligatory quarterly out-of-town meeting that puts her two states away for five days every business quarter. I knew it was about this coming trip Monday.

I’ve perused Reddit for years anonymously. I’ve read hundreds of stories that began like this and never once have I thought I would be me, sitting on my bedroom floor in such a cold, dumbfounded state. I recovered and said, “Oh, just getting info about the IPN router. That’s how the fan communicates through the app. I have a Chromebook that she logged into Facebook with yesterday.” I took a week’s vacation on short notice. My supervisor is a cool chick, and once I laid it out about what I may have discovered and have to do, I’m going to need the time off.

I’ve been up all night reading her chats. She left to go to the office just now, and I made sure the Google location history was on and my phone was active. I’m so suspicious of everything she does now, I can’t look at myself in the mirror. She doesn’t know I saw the message notification. I logged on to the messaging system that Verizon uses and have signed in under her number and my name. There are at least 15,000 messages, memes, flirty pics, and some x-rated ones, too. She stopped texting him this way about three months ago.

She didn’t stop texting him, but stopped using the message app through Verizon. I’m guessing they switched to Snapchat because it’s discreet. I’m not on any social media in any way, shape, or form. I am clueless. I just figured out that you can’t log into Snapchat through Facebook, but it just takes an email and password, and she has used this Chromebook to do that. Hell, she used it just three nights ago, lying in bed next to me, rubbing my back while I went to sleep. She messaged him and texted him lying next to me.

It’s a younger man from work. He is married and has three young children. He and his wife have Facebook. I’ve met him twice, shook his hand. I’m at a complete loss again and have wandered my house that I custom built for her for hours. I almost can’t feel anything. What little I am processing is just white-hot rage. I logged on Snapchat and there it all was. I have called my best friend who has been divorced three times. Don’t get me started on his partner picker. He recommended a vicious lawyer. I plan on recording and saving everything. There are pics of them. I’m sure her phone or his has video. I desperately want this to be a bad dream.

She said terrible things about me. She’s told him my insecurities. She’s told him I love you. They have made no long-term plans. So this feels like a purely sexual relationship. It almost makes it better, but also makes it so much worse. Like, she’s literally throwing away our life for this. She knows cheating is an absolute dealbreaker for me. Our usual routine on the day she leaves for her meetings is for me to take her to the airport and drop her off with a long goodbye. I can’t even think about what I have to do now.

My friend says, “Print out the entire thing and see if I can recover things from Snapchat.” From what I understand, I can’t unless I have her phone. My plan is to see the lawyer today. I’m paying a ridiculous amount to jump in her appointment line, get the ball rolling, and hopefully have a plan of action from her. I really want to book a flight and follow my wife to the hotel she’s staying at and catch her in the act. I have access to her hotel booking options and have put myself as a contact person so I can get a room key without alerting her.

I think I’m just going to log into the messaging apps when I get into town and watch it happen in real time. If I could get the papers ready in time, I’d hand them to her. Instead, I’m just going to hand her the printouts. It’s a 600-page PDF. His wife accepted my friend request. I’m debating sending everything now. I am seething. I just don’t want to lose any advantage. I’m going to fly there Monday afternoon, log in, and see what they’ve talked about. Get a room key to my wife’s room, and drop off the package in a room with my wedding ring. I’m going to sit in the bar and watch my phone blow up.

I’m going to call the AP and tell him to meet me in the lobby or bar and to bring my wife down, then tell him that a similar package has been sent certified mail to his home address, to his wife, as well as a Facebook message that I plan on hitting send on as I tell him. It feels petty and weak. I want to rage and scream, but I’m helpless. This morning, all I could do was give her a peck on the cheek goodbye. I really can’t stand to look her in the eye. I somehow have to get through the weekend.

I guess I’m asking: is my spiteful, hate-fueled plan worth it? I just want to inflict pain at this point. I want to hurt her emotionally. I feel eviscerated, emasculated. I will not entertain an apology. This is the one act that is unforgivable. It takes so many steps to cheat on someone. They all can be stopped until the sin is complete, then it is done. Should I just confront her tonight or catch her? I don’t think I’ll update. I’m truly thinking about never using social media again and only being with a partner that has a similar outlook moving forward.

ETA: I found the special toy. Keep in mind, we have a chest full of adult fun devices. It was already in her carry-on. It’s one of those remote control vibrators, the ones that can be controlled by an app. It looks expensive. I met with the lawyer in 90 minutes. Update number one: I met with a lawyer. She was actually kind and, I dare say, compassionate with me. She told me point-blank that her job was to represent me in this fight for my future. My job in all this was to tell her the complete truth and not make her job harder.

I went to Kinko’s and printed the file out. Cost $534 for color because I wanted the pictures to pop. Shout out to Chris at Kinko for not making a scene when the nudes started coming out. He asked what it was all about, and I told him. He was taken aback but shook my hand and said sorry. I went home and crashed for about three hours. My soon-to-be ex-wife came home around 19:30, usual time. My lawyer said to forget any Hollywood confrontation in a hotel bar; it would look pretty crazy and was not coming at all.

Ultimately, there are two routes to take with divorce: contested or uncontested. She would have to be notified that I have retained counsel and, in order to proceed, either contest the divorce or we would go through mediation and file from there. She got home about two hours ago. I asked if there was anything going on that she wanted to talk about. She said nothing other than the election. She then asked what was bothering me. I wanted to cry, but truthfully, I was cried out. I said I was curious as to why she had a remote control vibrator in her luggage.

The look on her face was more telling than anything I’ve ever seen. She looked panicked, pale, and began to breathe faster, sweat forming. I asked why she would have something like that. Who had the code and the app to it? She stammered, and tears began. As I pulled out my three file folders worth of text exchanges, I asked if the AP’s wife would have it. She cried and pleaded that she could explain. I said she had five minutes to do it. Of course, she couldn’t. I told her my attorney instructed me to tell her. I also told her to leave.

She screamed it was her house, too. I calmly told her that maybe, but I would be notifying everyone about her affair and betrayal, even the girls. Or she could leave now and find living arrangements for the time being. She was speechless. I calmly pulled up Facebook and showed her the AP’s wife. I said, "Do you want me to tell her or are you going to do it right now?" Tears and moaning, pleading with "I love you" and "it wasn’t supposed to go this far." Then my favorite: "You can’t do this." I said, "Well, it looks like I’m doing it."

As I sent the AP’s wife a message with the file of their escapades, I prefaced it with apologies and a brief explanation. I haven’t heard back from her. I leaped through the stacks of paper and started reading random excerpts out loud to my soon-to-be ex-wife. I just wish we could spend the day attached to each other. Just you inside of me. You feel so much more intense than any other woman I’ve ever been with.

She is still sobbing and asked to talk about us. She says our marriage can withstand her mistake. I told her I would never forgive her. Her word is "no," and that she threw away the last 17 years. I’m still entertaining the whole tell-HR thing, and I’m going to tell everyone about her decision to end our marriage by cheating. Thank you to everyone who responded. I feel bad I couldn’t respond to all the PMs and responses. I have a therapy appointment scheduled Tuesday. I feel extremely elated. I’m shaking and incredibly low right now. I kind of want to die.

The house is pretty quiet except for her crying and moaning. I told her not to come back after her trip. I’m currently sending friend requests and trying to get everyone on my page. I’m going to wait until the morning to call the girls. I raised them when they were 11 and six. They are women now, 28 and 23. I don’t know what to tell them or how to handle them. Update two: To those that kept saying that’s not how Snapchat works, yes, you are correct. She had that running in the background. It was WhatsApp.

I don’t really give a… I saw it. I again need to thank Dyson for their app and the kickass fan I got from my brother-in-law for Christmas. Here it goes. I’m going to give a deeper background on our situation to help with some perspective on why I feel the way I do. My original post was pretty much a stream of consciousness and felt as disjointed as I did then.

I went to college in Las Vegas in the mid-’90s. I graduated in ’99. I had a blast there. I got around. It was during this formative time I decided to never marry. It was an outdated concept that essentially removes your agency, and I definitely did not want children. When I graduated with my degree in nursing, I quickly excelled in cardiovascular intensive care. I moved home to Texas in 2001 and pursued my master’s degree to be an advanced practice RN nurse practitioner with a specialization in CV surgery.

While I was achieving this, I decided to pursue medical school and shifted coursework to fill in what I needed to apply. It was then that I met my soon-to-be ex-wife. She was a short, chubby—what kids today would call thick—red-headed firecracker. We met in a code. It was intense, both the attraction and the dating. We were saying "I love you" within three months. She was a mother of two. I wanted to be child-free. She had been divorced about two years.

We dated for about two years, and she slowly introduced her daughters to me, 11 and six. She sat me down one night and gave me a heartfelt but pragmatic talk about us, what she needed and expected from me or any other partner. Essentially, she said it was time to either get married or move on. I was still pretty anti-marriage, and she respected that. She was telling me this to give me a chance to think about us and what the future looked like. She had a point, as we had been living together eight months and even had each other as persons to notify in an emergency. She joked that all that was missing was having each other on our insurance.

It was a good, honest talk, and we agreed we would continue on for a bit more, but I would ultimately have to make the decision. Two weeks later, I had an acceptance letter to a medical school about two hours away. I was ecstatic and crushed at the same time. I had just had my 26th birthday and was about to accomplish a huge life goal. Then I realized I’d never see her or the girls. My self-doubt got the better of me. Being a medical student, then resident with a fellowship, was going to be a roughly seven-year process.

All the while, I could not make the money or support the lifestyle we had grown accustomed to. I thought about the prospect of at least seven years of loans, debt, and work and losing her. So I declined and switched back to a master’s in nursing administration. We got married in July 2003. It was an intimate and personal ceremony with just immediate family and friends. While my parents adore the girls, they have always been standoffish with my soon-to-be ex-wife.

On Monday, when I told my parents what was happening and that there was a real possibility the girls could stop being as prevalent in their life as they have been, they told me that they still felt that my soon-to-be ex-wife was damaged goods. To a certain extent, they were correct. After I graduated, I didn’t want to be a manager or director. I’m a hands-on guy who likes taking care of patients.

The hospital I was at offered a certification in ECMO and a perfusionist credential. It was highly competitive, but I got in. For the past 11 years, I have been doing ECMO and all related work. I have had a blast, and it has been challenging as well as heartbreaking at times. My soon-to-be ex-wife decided about five years ago that being an RN on the floor had run its course and she wanted a more 9-to-5 job that did not involve patience or drama. She got on through a friend at a multi-state legal consultancy that specializes in medical legal suits. She abstracts data from patients’ charts and presents it as requested.