“I have been with the most wonderful man for over 15 years. I love my husband and have no desire to leave him. However, he is the only person I have ever had sex with. Even though I have always known that we do not have great sexual chemistry, I have lived with it because he is wonderful in so many other ways. I am getting older and feeling bitter and cheated out of one of life’s greatest experiences. Despite my many attempts to improve our sex life, he shows very little interest. It is to the point where he has even said I should go out and have sex with someone else (one time) to get it out of my system and realize it’s not as great as I think. But I know he will be hurt and probably hold it against me as an act of betrayal.
I feel like I will become more and more bitter the way things are now. However, I’m afraid if I have an affair, it will ruin my marriage, my family and my life. I do not know where to find an answer.” – Sexually frustrated and morally confused.
Answer:
You offered a lot of information in your letter, but I want to begin with the last thing: your last words, your signature, “sexually frustrated and morally confused“. These seem important words, and while you’re probably feeling them all at once, I want to impose something artificial on the situation and separate them out for a moment. Sometimes it can be helpful to consider different parts of our experience one at a time.
I want to think about the “sexually frustrated” part of your experience first. There are lots of things in your email I might read as sexually frustrating. One of my first suggestions is about taking time to figure out what it is that is contributing to your frustration. Sexual frustration can have a kind of frazzled chaotic quality that makes it difficult to untangle.
But it’s a worthwhile exercise. If the sexual frustration comes from a sense of loss, is it that you imagine a sexual world out there that you’re missing out on? Or are you frustrated because what you want is a satisfying and hot sex life with your husband? Frustration may also result from years of keeping something to yourself, and while your husband needs to be an equal partner in figuring this out, you too will have to take responsibility for your own role in the build up of frustration. The frustration is probably caused by many things. Try and get specific with yourself, and get to a point where you can describe:
- how the frustration feels,
- what you think is causing it,
- what you believe would relieve it. If you can do this, you may be better able to move in a direction away from frustration and toward satisfaction.
One question you’ll need to answer for yourself is whether or not you can get past (or through, or around, or over; whatever direction and method of locomotion suits you) the fact that your husband is the only person you’ve had sex with. Do you feel like you’re at a point where trying to be sexual with someone else is the only way you can make change? That’s possible and completely understandable. If that’s the case, what does acting on that look like?
If you want to ask for a change in the rules of monogamy, so that you can be sexual with someone else and not “cheat” then what are you actually asking for? Do you want to be able to go out and flirt with strangers? Do you want to go online and find a casual hook up? Is there someone in your current social circle you’re thinking of? Where would you find someone to have sex with, and what kind of sex do you want to have? These might seem like specific questions, and maybe too much too soon, but for you both to agree to a change in the relationship you may need to be able to answer them eventually. Dreaming about it now isn’t a bad thing (since it seems as if you’re already distracted).
I also want to suggest that sexual frustration can be addressed in many ways and on many levels. If part of your sexual frustration is about wanting sex, wanting to feel sexual pleasure and release, and feel good in your body, there are all sorts of ways you can start doing that on your own. It’s not that masturbation is a substitute for sex with a partner. Nor do I believe that you have to learn to love yourself before you can be loved by others. But, sex on our own can be fun, and physically releasing, and can get us in touch with our bodies and be part of a change in the way we feel about ourselves. You may be all over this already. But if not, and if you only think about masturbation as something for young or single people, you may find some of these masturbation articles useful. This isn’t a solution to the relationship problems, but it may come in handy if you need time to work through things.
I was also struck by the second part of your sign off, “morally confused“. It struck me because in the subject line of your email you refer to an “extramarital affair” and in your letter you framed the extramarital relationship question as being about whether or not it would ruin the marriage, not about whether or not it was morally wrong. It’s good that you’re feeling your moral confusion because this is absolutely a moral question.
There is no scientific, objective, or factual answer to this question, there is only a moral one. Setting aside your desire, you need to answer for yourself if you think having sex outside a marriage is wrong. If you do, that’s okay. It isn’t the end of the conversation, only the beginning. After all, we often act in ways that don’t conform perfectly with our morals or values (how many of us get through life without lying or stealing when we feel it’s necessary or harmless?). It’s more important to be honest about your moral quandary and know that you can work through it, than to deny something that feels true for you.
Because this is a moral question and not a scientific one, no one can tell you whether having sex with someone else will help or hurt your relationship or make you feel better or worse. Monogamy is neither natural nor unnatural. It is a frame we impose on our relationships. If it helps I can tell you, having spoken with hundreds of couples and thousands of single people who have been in relationships that many relationships do survive one partner having sex with someone outside the relationship. Sometimes it happens without the other partner knowing (what gets called cheating), sometimes it is a situation that has been agreed upon. In any case, relationships can survive and even thrive when the rules of monogamy are shifted, even for just a short period.
So what can you do? I want to acknowledge that you’re already doing things (and encourage you to feel good about yourself for that). You’ve talked with friends, you’re emailing a well meaning, informed stranger (me), and it sounds like you’ve had at least a few conversations with your husband, which, even if they haven’t solved the problem, point to the possibility of more conversations. When we’re feeling stuck in our lives it is easy to get down on ourselves about not being able to get unstuck as fast as we’d like. Kicking ourselves when we’re down is something we’re subtly encouraged to do by most self-help books, magazines, and television shows. It’s an invisible thread of meanness that winds its way through the advice and neatly packaged philosophies of even the most popular and beloved of media personalities. You may not be able to stop yourself but if no one else has said it to you, let me be the first; try to be gentle with yourself as you grow. And even when it feels like nothing is happening, remember that things are always happening.
More concretely, here are a few thoughts on next steps.
It’s my bias, but if you can afford it and have access, I would recommend counseling or therapy of some sort. Maybe first just for you, so you have the opportunity to unpack what you’ve been keeping to yourself for so long. But then to have a place where both of you can talk through these issues with a neutral third party who is there for both of you seems important. Some people think about couples counseling as “giving up“, as if we should be able to fix our problems ourselves.
My experience is that we can get so tangled up in our relationships, particularly when we love the other person, that we often need an outsider just to help us be able to hear each other clearly, and speak honestly without fear. Sex therapists receive specific training around the sexual parts of relationships, but it’s possible that a couples therapist (sometimes called a marriage and family therapist) would be good too. If you’re a member of any religious community there may be counseling available to you, and that may either be what you want or exactly what you don’t want. Be aware that therapists will have their own biases, and some will believe that anything other than compulsory monogamy is going to be bad for your relationship. You’ll need to decide if that’s the kind of therapist you want.
If you are interested in learning about how people are consciously changing their relationships, there are a few books I can recommend. The book Mating in Captivity is less about how to do alternative relationships than about how to keep desire alive in long term relationships, but it challenges the idea of compulsory monogamy and the exercises in the book can open up conversations in that direction. For something more direct, Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up is one of the newest books to cover the whys and hows of alternatives to monogamy (she maintains a website for the book). I can also recommend a very long article by psychotherapist Tammy Nelson called The New Monogamy. I don’t necessarily agree with all the approaches in these texts, but I can recommend them as thoughtful and certainly thought provoking.
If you’ve decided that you don’t want your marriage to end, then talking more with your husband is going to be necessary. It sounds (from your letter) as if the burden for this relationship rests entirely on you. You are initiating sex, you are initiating conversations. You’re the one who wants things to change. This is a classic dynamic in relationships. It’s also a distortion. The idea that one person feels “things are fine” and the other wants change is an illusion. Life is always changing. Our bodies change as we age, our hearts and minds change (both literally and metaphorically) with experience comes new ways of seeing the world. The idea that once two people enter into a monogamous relationship nothing will change is a false premise, and it is one that leads to a great deal of dissatisfaction and sadness. In asking for change now you aren’t breaking the rules, you’re simply asking that the two of you become more thoughtful about the direction of change your relationship is naturally taking.
It sounds like this issue is already out in the open. That your husband has said maybe you should go have sex with someone else seems important. It may feel like it was a glib comment, but it’s certainly an opening for a conversation. What would happen if you asked him more about what he meant? Would a conversation like that feel safe?
The question is, how can the two of you talk about this in a way that isn’t about blaming each other and that allows you to be respectful and loving, while still getting what you need? This isn’t easy. And it’s where a good therapist or counselor can make a world of difference. If that’s not an option, you may want to think about establishing some communication ground rules and then starting the conversation (here are a few tips on talking with a partner about problems).
One of the things I read in your email is fear. Fear of doing something that will end the relationship. Fear of doing nothing and growing more bitter. Fear can keep us stuck. I don’t know if it helps, but I’ll say that you’re right to be afraid. After all, your relationship is going to change. You want it to change. That is not a bad thing. You aren’t happy and it’s hard to imagine that if your husband loves you that he could be that happy knowing that you are growing more and more bitter. If you and your husband are both committed to staying together, then that’s a good start. But you need to know that whatever you do, there are no guarantees (either that you’ll stay together or that you’ll break up). Of course even if you do nothing there are no guarantees. But it doesn’t sound like doing nothing is an option for you anymore.
Making change, taking care of ourselves, is scary but it’s also brave. We aren’t supposed to do it. We’re supposed to do as we’re told. We’re also supposed to do it alone. I can’t offer anything more concrete but if you continue to try and be honest with yourself and your husband, and reach out to others for help and support, I can’t see how the future couldn’t be full of more possibilities than the past or present.
