I mention hard work because as you’ve seen in your marriage counseling, getting in the trenches with someone you love (and you say you do love your wife) can be challenging, especially when so much is at stake—your shared history, your affection for each other, your general contentment, and the stability of the entire family. There’s a world of difference between the emotional risks you’re taking in opening up to your pregnant wife with whom you share a child and the ones you’re taking in opening up to the object of your flirtation over drinks at a bar. And they, in turn, will have different responses to what you reveal of your “true self.” Saying, for example, that you feel stifled in your marriage, that you love but aren’t in love with your wife, and that you get chills when your co-worker looks at you might be easy for your co-worker to hear but terribly upsetting to your wife.

Another thing for you to consider as you go through this process is that no one else can tell you what to do. This is especially important because, as you tell it, your earlier decision to get back together with your now-wife was influenced, at least in part, by the opinions of family and friends. That doesn’t make the decision right or wrong—it just means it wasn’t truly yours.

The thing about big life decisions is that the people saying you should do X or Y aren’t living your life. Polling your friends, scouring the internet, and even asking me to cast my vote won’t help, because the issue here is less about which woman you should choose (people will have different opinions about that) and more about what’s behind this feeling of emptiness in your life. Nobody—not your wife, not a new partner, not your daughter—can fill that hole for you, even if it seems like your co-worker is doing so in the moment.

I say “in the moment” because right now you’re in a mind-set where your whole focus is on comparing the two situations—staying with your wife or leaving her for your co-worker, someone who is choosing to have a relationship (emotional or otherwise) with a married man who has a baby on the way. But the problem with this is that they simply aren’t comparable. If you were to leave now, you would be the single father of a young child and a newborn, with a girlfriend who may not have an interest in raising these children with you—changing diapers, waking up several times a night, spending time at baby birthday parties and the pediatrician and the park. (If you think you can keep the “father” part of your life separate from the “dating” part, you’ll soon see that it won’t be easy.) Moreover, if you two eventually have children together, you may find yourself five or 10 years from now wondering how you ended up in the same situation once again: content, but with decreased intimacy, increased tension, and a nagging sense that Mocha Almond Fudge is an even better flavor of ice cream than Rocky Road.