So my title is the problem in short, one year ago my boyfriend, since 7 years, had an affair for 5 months with a girl , much younger than him, I found out because I got suspicious because suddenly he always was too tired to have sex with me, even just once a month was not happening, while we were trying to conceive... so then one day my intuition said; check his bag, and I found a long love letter, from a her to him, talking about love, the last phrases were saying that; " there is nothing wrong with telling someone you love them, but that sometimes people are too shy to tell them like wise " ... I confronted him with the letter and then he did admit that he was having an affair and he said he had feelings for this girl, but never told her he loved her and that what was written in the letter was all a "citation" from a book and that because she is so much younger then him, he was never thinking of leaving me for her. He said that it had happened because he was very stressed, under a lot of pressure, felt not understood by me and was not happy with our sex life, which for me was quite a surprise because I had asked him for months, what was going on, why he didn't feel like having sex anymore and he always replied that he was under a lot of stress at work and just very tired ... He asked me to forgive him, he didn't want to break up and he did want to build a family with me, so I stayed, I told myself that I would give it some months to understand how I felt and what to do, I am 38 years old ( he is 45 ) and we were looking for a bigger house to buy and trying to make a baby, it was a serious relationship that I didn't want to give up, so now we are almost 1 year further, a very difficult year for me, he is a doctor and works 12 hours a day , this last year he has worked 14 hours a day, included Sundays, so instead of working on our private life, he gave all his energy and more time to his work.. He has not taken any initiative to pick up our sex life, he said that while having his affair, he understood that he was missing things, that what he needs in our relationship, is me taking initiatives to have sex, though when he comes home he always says he is too tired to talk , just wants to eat and sleep, when I only put a hand on his lab, he pulls away or finds a reason to stand up and go to his phone or toilet or needs to check his agenda ... , so I tried to be understanding that he is tired and stressed and not putting more pressure on him, but then he says I don't take initiatives ... and after learning about the affair, I also think , that it is him that should show me that he wants me .. To make the story complete, a while before finding out about his affair, I also found viagra pills in his wallet, ( which started my suspicion ), I confronted him with it and he said; that because he was so tired and stressed out, he just felt more secure with having them with him, just incase ... Now, after the affair, he says that because I've found out about the viagra, he just doesn't feel comfortable with me, knowing that he might have taken viagra to have sex, that me knowing this, takes away his desire to have sex, because I might question if he really desires me or if it's the viagra talking.. I have made some harsh comments about the viagra, I felt hurt and very insecure about it, he was only willing to having sex with me once or twice a month ( when I was ovulating, as we were trying to conceive ), and he needed viagra to make that happen, it made me think he didn't find me attractive enough, I made it all about me, instead of trying to understand him better .. So now we are not having any sex since a year, we are not looking for a house anymore, all the serious future projects are off the table, he is working more then he ever did, we are kind of ok as long as we don't talk about all the serious things, but at least twice a month ( while I'm ovulating or before my period ) I really need to talk about it and his way of dealing with it is avoiding it and when I bring it up, he says I'm not understanding his needs and issues, that he does desires to have a family, that he is not seeing that girl anymore but that he feels blocked ... Anyone who went through something similar, any advice about what to do?

I didn't ever want to have to talk about this. It's so hurtful, but here I am. My boyfriend and I have been together eight years and it has been so amazing after ironing out the beginning, which should have just smacked me and clear then but nope. In the last three years, we haven't had sex. Nor kissing with passion. I get the same smooch his mother gets! No tight snuggles, no lying watching a movie together. It's him on his phone and I watch TV alone. I have tried and tried to start something but it's play-stupid and rollover game. After three years a person has been over-patient. It started as me trying to walk by him naked or spray my perfume on before bed, or sexy panties. I'm a small woman. Nothing has changed with me, and I get nothing from him, not even a rollover for a kiss. He faces away from me and turns his head to the side for my magical goodnight kiss. In the last seven months, I have started to say "I'm here why don't you want me"? But I get excuses or it gets turned around on me so I am made to feel bad. Now it's to the point of me crying and crying, "Why don't you want me?" "What can I do to change?". I was made to feel his sex drive was low and he is so sorry, blah blah blah.. Screw that! His sex drive isn't too low for porn! He hasn't been touching me but he sure has been doing it to porn... We have watched porn together. I'm up for it, for sure, to help get a little dirtier but when he doesn't touch me unless he's been watching porn... no thank you! And you know what kills me? After I sat many times over like an ass thinking he would stop, he won't. I told him it makes me feel ugly and unwanted and just discarded that he doesn't get aroused by me but has to use other women. I thought "My man isn't like that, he will stop, he knows it hurts me, and he wont hurt me". Boy, was I wrong. He not only keeps watching it alone but hides the page or clicks the home button when I walk in the room. I'm not a complete idiot. So again last night, I cried and begged him to please stop watching it alone. Touch me if you're horny, I'm right here, why aren't I good enough? And I get deny, deny, deny and now I'm crazy, I didn't see porn, he isn't watching that. I have problems, I'd better go see a counsellor. I'm an embarrassment, I'm being an Idiot... I'm told to f off, get out of his face, he's tired of my bullshit. Last night, I lay in bed with so much going on in my mind. I kept to myself, watched a movie and fell asleep. Woke up at 5:15 cause I rolled over and, hmmm, he was gone. I got up to pee and, lo and behold, there he was on the couch on his phone. As soon as he saw me, that phone was flipped over faster than you can imagine. So I asked, "Hey, wanna prove me wrong? Let me see your phone. Show me the last page you were on. Prove me a paranoid crazy woman, just show me something", and as I stood there crying, pleading to him to prove me I'm wrong he tells me he's tired and will show me later... And his phone is hidden. Weird how it isn't on the end table like it is every night for the last eight years! My last comment to him was, "If you can't show me your phone and prove me wrong, then I now know I'm 110% right." He isn't going to stop. He doesn't care how it makes me feel and what am I doing still writing this? No sex for three years, over-excessive pain and anger, that's how my life has been. But I do see I'm not alone. To any woman or man that has a partner that makes them feel this way – please don't keep hurting yourself by letting someone stomp on your trust and heart. You're amazing and don't let anyone tell or show you different. Sorry it's probably all over the map, I'm still shaking from this morning's hidden phone event! Someone, anyone, talk to me please.

This article was written by Prof Janet Reibstein, (co-author of Sexual Arrangements: Marriage and Affairs). The views expressed in this article are not necessarily shared by Click or OnePlusOne. Twenty years ago, I began an interview study of couples in which one person (at least) was having or had had an affair. As a new parent, I could not fathom how contemporaries of mine had the inclination or energy, never mind the time, to conduct one. Yet affairs, even among new parents, were happening and some of these couples presented themselves to my consulting room. The discovery of an affair at any stage of the relationship is still a chief reason couples come into therapy. I found, and so have others who bravely try to research this most difficult area (how do you study people’s secrets, for that’s what most are?), that people usually have affairs because they feel disappointed by marriage and are estranged in some way from the person they wanted to love and honour. They’d lost their way in love. Affairs struck me as primarily a symptom of people’s inadequacy in negotiating the changes of married life.  How do affairs start? The arrival of children, work taking one or both away into different worlds, not managing disagreements and conflicts and resentment building in consequence, all contribute. Or all of these combined can lead to the start of an affair. The upshot of not catching things early is feeling misunderstood, neglected, unappreciated, unloved, or undesired. Drift sets in. With it goes hope and effort. Attention wanders. And couples find renewal arises away from home.  Affairs can begin – and sometimes remain, a remedy for what particular light has gone out: just about sex, just about fun, just about talking and feeling understood. But sometimes they grow and become about love—the most dangerous kind for marriage (this applies even to ‘open marriages’). However, it’s possible, as research has shown that sometimes those affairs that stay limited and those that stay secret do not actually disturb the stability or commitment to the marriage (and the children in them), even if they might disturb the person having one. Dealing with the consequences But once an affair – except those tiny few ‘open marriages’ – becomes discovered or revealed, all marriages will suffer. This is related to how we understand marriage. We’re supposed to marry our best friends. We’re meant to be ‘intimate’ - to share innermost thoughts, private joys and troubles, ideas and pleasures. Thus, an act of intense intimacy and pleasure shared with someone other than our partner is like a dagger thrust first and then – the final betrayal- if kept secret from your ‘best friend’, repeatedly, is continual knifing at the heart of modern-day, best-friend-and-lover partnerships. Sometimes there’s a happy ending – sometimes not. But, as with all deep wounds, sometimes not. This marital drama’s been replayed over and over again in all my years in clinical practice. First I manage the wounds, and then return to the marriage: where, when, why the lights went out, before the wandering began.

This is my first post, and I'm writing it after having just confronted my wife over messages on her phone. About 2 months ago, I start having suspicions over the amount of texts she was getting, so rightly or wrongly I managed to get her phone (which she normally guards like a monkey with nuts). I quick skim through her messages showed me that my older brothers best friend had been texting her with some really dodgy stuff. With this information, I entered my wife facebook page, and found even more messages in her trash that she obviously thought she had got rid off. I confronted the problem then, telling her to stop talking to him. For a while it seemed to be ok, then it started again last week. I walked in to the study to find her click off of a conversation on facebook she was having with someone.. i deliberately hung around till the reply pooped up on her screen, and guess who... its that fella again!!.. this time it didnt seem to be rude though. I asked her why she was talking to him again, to which I got accused of being a control freak and not letting her talk to anyone. That night I took myself downstairs to sleep on the sofa, next morning a gave her another clean slate and said nothing of it. However the issue must be on my mind, because as soon as she left her phone unguarded i checked again. Probably the wrong thing to do, but there were no sexually explicit texts this time thatI saw, just a few with some strong sexual references, suggesting sex on the beach.. and asking her if she was all wet?! (sorry if that offends anyone). I confronted it again, once again being accused of being a control freak.. and being told I should leave. However as soon as I suggested that I would seek custody for our son, stating he deserved better than a woman that would do this to her family it all changed... she wanted relationship counselling etc. What do I do? Just so you know the background, My wife was in a previous relationship, and had 3 children. She found out he was having an affair with a man at work and so they seperated, however I have heard part conversations of other versions, stating actually my wife was sleeping with his brother (yet again more secrecy). At 21 years old I took on the role of dad to these 3 boys that I now see as my own, however I know legally I have no standing. But Joseph is mine, after a very late miscarriage two christmases ago, where we lost a daughter at 7 months, we were lucky to conceive Joseph... and he is a little star.. his first word is Dada... and to be honest is probably the reason I've stuck around.

My wife and I have been together for 15 years. We are very compatible and get on well but for some years we have been drifting and not appreciating one another. We have two wonderful children whom we both adore and who we love raising together. A few years ago my wife decided to focus more on herself. Where previously I would have considered that we were soul mates it was painful to see her separate from me and I couldn’t rationalize how the desire to set up a business meant no longer sharing her thoughts and feelings with me. I realized a couple of years ago that I was no longer her priority and then about a year ago I asked if she was still in love with me. She said no, nor did she know if she wanted to stay with me. I wondered about an affair but she always said that she’s too busy and that this wasn’t her. She is obsessed with time on her own, in part because of her perception that I am clingy and also mainly because she just needs a break from the kids and her day to day life. She went away for a weekend in June with some girlfriends. She mentioned that she’d met a guy there that she used to go to school with. Because I trusted her I thought nothing of it. Sex has been patchy between us since having kids and we started sleeping together more regularly after this trip away. I just put it down to the fact that she’d had a good time and I felt happy that I had been able to support her in doing this. We spent some time with her family in France this summer. I needed to return home to work and my wife was very keen to stay in France for two further weeks. This confused me as she hates the countryside and she gets stressed with being alone with the kids. Clearly she wanted some time apart from me. Just before I left she mentioned that this guy was to visit her with some girls. Again, I thought nothing of it. While I was alone back home I think we spoke about three times and the communication from her was friendly but very matter of fact. Things were awful when she came back and she seemed very cold and distant. I felt suspicious of this guy and asked our son where they’d both slept. He said one thing and my wife had said another. She’d left her inbox open on the PC and I saw quite a passionate email between her and him and a photo of them together during the original weekend away and I knew that there had been an affair. When I confronted her, her reaction was to say I was crazy and that we have problems. I told her what I’d read and then she admitted emotional infidelity but she denied sex because she had her period at the time. I asked her why she did it and she said because he desired her and made her feel like she did when she was young. It turned out that while we were apart she spent hours and hours on her own reading letters from when she was a teenager and listening to music from that time too. I guess she’s having some kind of mid-life crisis, something that she recognized and promptly signed up for therapy with a relationship counsellor I’d located a few years ago to try to do something for our stagnation. This discovery has prompted the most amazing rekindling of our relationship. We have started to have an extremely active sex life and are close physically in a way that we hadn’t been in years. We have started to diet together and to exercise more. I recently ran my first half marathon and I have lost 15kg. We are attending a tantra course together and have two weekends alone planned plus concerts and holidays. We spend our evenings talking and planning and sharing and feeling very connected. For the last few years she has been telling me that there is no such thing as unconditional love. What this experience has shown me is that this isn’t true: that I am still in love with her and that I love her unconditionally. I have told her that I forgive her and I believe this. I have also apologized sincerely for all the million and one things that I did over the years to make her distance herself from me. She feels now that I really listen to her. Our children are so important to us, but I feel that our relationship is more central to our family now. The children see that we are in the bedroom more than before and don’t sleep with our pajamas on but they are happy to play with each other and we still do a lot with them. The one remaining cause for difference is that I don’t really know what happened between them so much as “nothing really happened”. My view is that if this is the case then just tell me what happened and let’s move on. Of course I have doubts that they slept together or at the very least shared our bed but I’d rather know that than feel that she continues to hide things from me. And I’d rather know this now than to discover this years later. Her view is that she is an individual and entitled to her privacy. I agree but not with regard to infidelity. I don’t want to bring it up any more and she has said that she won’t tell me although annoyingly that she was going to tell me. He lives in another country and I’ll never meet him. It hurts that she had him come to stay with our family in France especially that this was literally hours after I left to go home. But that’s it. She did what she did and it’s over. Things are great between us now - really great. I actually feel that she could fall in love with me again. Maybe she already has. So should I just stop wondering what happened during this brief affair or am I entitled to know?

I am at such a loss as to what to do and feel that I cant talk about this with anyone I know. It just feels embarrassing or too honest. My boyfriend and i started dating a year and a half ago. We immediately connected as friends and a month later, after a night of drunken fun, we had sex. I was just getting out of a toxic relationship and wasn't ready for a relationship or public dating but we continued sleeping together for months. It felt passionate and fun and I actually really enjoyed who he was as a person. We talked to each other every day and I looked forward to it. I started being able to see a future with him and fell in love. Eventually, though I was terrified of being vulnerable to hurt again after my past relationships had ended so badly, after 4 and a half months of this, I took the leap and committed to an exclusive relationship with him. We used to have sex all of the time, sometimes multiple times a day. As I committed to him and only him, i thought we would be so happy and everything would magically fall into a place. I guess still had some hope for a happily ever after. When we became exclusive, the sex came to a screeching halt. We talked every day. He cuddled me and spooned me at night and softly kissed me goodnight and goodbye in the mornings, reminding me that he loves me. We spent every night together and carried on with routines, but still no sex. Feeling shy but like I had to do something about our sexual drought, I initiated things when we would be in bed and he would hold my hand and tell me he was tired. Night after night, I shyly pushed myself to touch him and kiss him and hope that things could progress but he always cut me off. Months went by. The happily ever after train I'd accidentally secretly hoped for had been derailed. "Was it me?" I wondered. "Did I need to work out more? Maybe he wasn't physically attracted to me?" I decided to focus on my own confidence and hoped the rest would follow. It didn't. Many awkward conversations about our lack of a physical relationship transpired though. He assured me time and again that it wasn't because of me. He just wasn't in the mood. When he knew more he would let me know. One day, he handed me his phone and I saw porn that was bookmarked on his phone. My heart dropped and in my mind, I immediately sunk to the ground on my knees in defeat. He still had a sexual drive. It had to do with me. I've developed such a resentment for the fact that I've been in two unhealthy relationships with men who constantly used my body and I found someone who i truly love, but he doesn't want to be physically intimate with me. I've had a rough sexual background that took years for me to move past, cope, and see sex as being a beautiful thing again. My boyfriend knows that I've been a little damaged in the past but how could I ever tell him that I had to move past being raped by three different men to the point of being drugged, beaten, threatened, and/or passed around over 100 times? For years I saw sex as a punishment and it feels incredibly unfair that I've worked through it and I want so badly to experience positive intimate sex in a caring loving relationship and I can't. How is it that I could deal with these things, but he didn't want to have sex with me because he just "doesn't feel like it?" If I told him how broken I have been, he would REALLY never want to have sex with me again. When we've had discussions about it, he's implied that I'm superficial for needing that in my life and made me feel shamed for bringing it up at all. I worried that having an open discussion with him about it could make things feel even weirder but at that point, it had been months and months since we'd last had sex so i felt I didn't have tons to lose. He tells me to give it time. I gave it more time but found myself looking to fill my sexual drive in other ways. Before i knew it, I was web-camming with a stranger just so I could feel seen. It only happened one time and didn't feel worth it to me. Just sad that I had gotten to that point. More months went by. I found myself hitting a joint in a car after work with a friend and he kissed me. After months and months of not feeling touched, it felt nice to feel so wanted again. He kissed me and grabbed me and I insisted on keeping clothes on and then as we were kissing, he came. So now I had not had sex with my boyfriend in at least nine months and I cheated on him with someone that came in about five seconds in his pants. I drove away, horrified at my actions, crying. I told him that I had cheated and how far it had gone (minus him going in his jeans) and that our lack of affection was escalating to me looking for other things and that was a problem for me. I told him that if we didn't reconnect sexually, we were doomed. He didn't say much. However, a few days after, he grabbed my hand in bed and put it on his hard-on. I felt optimistic that maybe we could have a sexual relationship again. Then he came in my hand in about five seconds. The same thing happened later. It didn't used to be like that. I know he's capable of having sex. A few months after that, he woke me up with it while we were spooning and then got behind me. I was so happy to be having sex again and it felt so great. Then it happened again the next week in the same positions. Then the next week, woken up and in the same positions. I took initiative and got on top for a while. His alarm went off during, I jumped off to turn it off, and he got soft. He said he'd gotten off already. I'm 90% certain he was lying. So now, he's finally giving me just enough sex to get my by to where i wont break up with him but it feels like he doesn't want to look at me and pretend I'm someone else? The sexual aspect is the primary fault in our relationship and it feels like if I got better, so would we. Any plans I could be building for the future, I'm hesitant with because as our physical intimacy is this rocky, it feels like our relationship is unstable in my mind too. I've thought of many possibilities as to why we are here. Was he gay? I've seen his porn history so no. Was there someone else? I really don't get that feeling either. I wonder if it's hard for him to see someone he loves in a sexual way? Is that common? I've heard of the madonna vs. whore thing. As soon he confessed his love for me and "won me' he stopped seeing me a sexual way. I miss being touched and feeling wanted in every way. I want to be kissed, touched, and feel passion again. All I'm looking for is to feel like i'm enough with someone. I love him and we've somewhat build a life together in the last year and a half. He talks about the future all of the time and how we should buy a house, etc. Should I throw in the towel and give up on our relationship? Am I ready to give up a good relationship because of sex? I have no idea what the reason could be that he doesn't want to have sex with me but it makes me feel incredibly undesirable in every way and as much as I hate to admit it, has really hurt my confidence and made me needy, annoying, and desperate. Am I beating a dead horse? Am I hurting myself more? Should I say or do something or should I run?

My best friend at work recently confessed that he was attracted to me and wanted to be with me physically. He is in a LTR and I am married. He told me he had been feeling that way for over a year and that he liked me a lot. He said he knew the feeling was mutual and the sexual tension between us was off the charts. I agreed that I was always attracted to him but I felt safe flirting with him because I'm married and he's 9 years younger than me. He was always honest with me about cheating on all his girlfriends. He said this is the longest relationship he's been in that he hasn't cheated yet. He hates commitment. He always said he doesn't want to get married because he can't imagine being with one person for the rest of his life. I told him this was crazy and it could ruin our lives and our friendship. He kept trying to convince me it would just be two friends having fun and it doesn't have to mean anything. I said I should be honest and say that at home everything is good. I really do love my husband and family and we don't really have an major issues. Two days after this conversation this guy kissed me. Not just a quick innocent kiss. He came up to me, held my face and looked in my eyes and kissed me very passionately. It was extremely intense. I stopped him and told him I needed a minute and he just held me tight and said "I've wanted to do that for so long" then we kissed some more. After that things got hot and heavy. Lots of sexting and some more make out sessions. Then we had sex. It was an amazing night. Without going into details we clearly both enjoyed it. He begged me to stay the night and I did. We had sex in the morning again. The next few weeks we talked a bit about it and if it was going to happen again but he started to get distant. I confronted him and he finally told me he felt guilty about cheating and that has never happened to him before. He said he wasn't over this whole thing he just needed time. So I tried to give him space. Then a few times just to see where his head was at I asked him if he wanted to hook up and he just said maybe but nothing happened. So I confronted him one more time and asked him flat out if all of it was just a game to sleep with me. He said absolutely not, he said he just felt guilty and he was still trying to process it. But then he tells me not to worry cause it's definitely happening again. Well after a few weeks I hadn't been sleeping right and tired of wondering what was going on I decided I needed it to be over. I told him I thought we should both agree that we lost our minds for a few weeks and we should just be friends. I said I need him more as my friend than I need to have sex with him. He agreed and that's where I left it. Things have been ok at work but now I find my self wondering what the whole point of this was. If he was ever really my friend why would he want me to risk everything just for sex? He's a good looking guy and I'm not really the type of girl people are making moves on. I'm cute at best but I'm not hot. Part of me thinks he had feelings for me and being with me scared him and part of me thinks he really just needed something to chase to get out of a rut with his girlfriend. I just hate not having answers. Does anyone have insight into this kind of thing?