Why don't my wife's affairs bother me?
Q. After more than 20 years of marriage, my wife had a brief sexual dalliance with a family friend. Since then I've been shocked to discover that I find the idea of her with another man both excruciatingly painful and extremely arousing, and she has had a few liaisons with other men, each of which I have known about. Is it perfectly healthy to accept that I find other men desiring my wife very erotic and she loves the validation of being desired? Or is this the beginning of the end for our marriage?
A. This is a really complex question that on the surface challenges the concept of marriage being synonymous with fidelity. Dig a bit deeper, though, and it is really about why you choose to tolerate a situation that a majority of other people would find completely intolerable. Yes, it is true that a growing number of couples seem to be embracing polyamory and open relationships, but the story you tell does not fit that narrative. Your wife made a unilateral decision to have sex with a family friend and, when you found out about her betrayal, you were hurt — but you were also turned on. What happened next made things even more confusing. Because you didn't at any point hold your wife to account and seemed, in one sense at least, to enjoy the experience, she has felt at liberty to repeat her behaviour several times.
What strikes me is how emotionally distant you are from what is happening. In my experience, most men would feel deeply humiliated in your situation. Perhaps you are in all other respects a very alpha person and your response to your wife's behaviour is an inversion of who you really are — it may be a clichéd sexual trope but there have been numerous exposures of very powerful men who enjoy being humiliated during sex.
You ask whether it is healthy to accept that you find other men desiring your wife very erotic but that question is in itself a distortion. Yes, lots of men enjoy the envious glances they get when they are out in public with a desirable partner, but only because they know that their partner is not going home with any of them. Anything that is taboo can heighten sexual arousal — it's how and why porn is so successful — but within the confines of a marriage it could make for a pretty exhausting and risky relationship.
You wonder whether tolerating this situation might be a way of licensing yourself to explore other sexual relationships in future. In all honesty, unless you and your wife come to some sort of agreement about what this is really all about, I doubt you will have a future together. If you want one, you need to figure out how you got to where you are now. That requires you both to be honest about what your relationship was like before your wife's extramarital sexual activity.
Did you love each other? Did you like each other? Did you feel emotionally connected? Did you have regular sex with each other? And what changed after 20 years? Could her behaviour be a bid for recognition, an attempt to get some sort of response from a man who no longer 'saw' her? Are these flings really her way of trying to find a new partner to move on with? Are you both actually considering an exit strategy?
These are difficult questions and it will be much easier for you to find the answers if you have the support of a good couples therapist. This may be the beginning of the end for your marriage but, whatever happens, it is a turning point.
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