Thanks Anita. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend and I think it would be as you say very wrong to get in contact. I want to stay with my higher self and think about the values of being a good person.

I think i’m going to talk to my partner about our intimacy. After the affair when we re-built our relationship we had couples counselling and did get back to a place of having better sex. However I still find myself thinking about this other guy during sex, which is not good, considering it’s been years.

I feel like the affair was a symptom of really not knowing myself well. Since my teens when my parents were slightly absent due my dads problems, I have gone from boyfriend to boyfriend. Even when single I’d get hung up quite a lot on particular guys, obsessing over when they’d text back etc.

I think with my relationship now, I’ve been in it since I was 21, over 10 years. You change a lot as an individual in that time and i certainly didn’t know myself sexually, until I probably met this guy I had the affair with, he brought out a different side to me, a side that felt more empowered, sexy, like a woman.

I don’t want to hurt my partners feelings, but feel perhaps I should talk about this with him in a careful way. I think my fear deep down is I don’t want to get married to the wrong person, or someone who doesn’t meet all my needs, but then I also feel like I need to grow up and accept that marriage is about accepting someone as they are and loving them all the same.  It’s hard to get the balance between being selfish and being a good person.

Hi Anita and Nekoshema,

Thanks so much for your comments.

Anita – yes I think it has started to come back a bit, the closer we get to the wedding. I’d say it’s always been there but I’ve always been able to manage it. Whereas lately it’s bothered me a lot more. I think the big mistake I made was even entertaining the affair, I did it because I had never felt such attraction/passion and I immaturely believed i deserved to explore it. When it ended I kind of left it on a cliff, if it had a of been a relationship in normal circumstances it would have ran it’s course in one way or another. But as an affair that you suddenly stop, you grieve what could have been with another person, even though you know it may not have been right. Secondly I do think I have a bit of fear about getting married, it’s a big deal, so perhaps these fantasy thoughts act as an escapism.

I think what’s always kept my on the straight and narrow since is that I believe you could hop from one relationship to the next and 10 years down the line you might be vulnerable to external attention again, but you can’t keep hopping from one to another, if you are going to create a marriage, you have to commit and knuckle down. I don’t think I had the maturity before to realise that.

Nekoshema, thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like you’ve decided to knuckle down and stay put. I very much agree with what you have said about listing qualities. I did just that, the new one was fun, made me feel alive, sexy, he was easy going, fun, up for a laugh, cute etc. But you notice there I haven’t written anything there about qualities. Things that put me off him were how he said I was too emotional, he once said he didn’t feel bad about the affair as he didn’t know my boyfriend and also other little things like he once said he thought he was quite a selfish person. Things like this made me see that perhaps he wasn’t the most emotionally mature, and how I was behaving wasn’t either!!

Whereas my partner is the kind of man who is strong, resilient, caring, the kind of man that in the future of marriage if I was sick or we had a baby screaming at 3am, he’d get up and take charge.

I think you are also right about giving up freedom, I think a lot of this is often about how I feel a bit trapped in giving up that care free part of me who can do what she likes. When I was a kid my father when through a five year spell of alcoholism and during that I grew up too fast, trying to look after family and I think part of me just wants to be care free. I fantasise about going off on solo holidays and meeting new people etc. I think that would always be there though, if we split up now and In future I found someone else to commit too, i think i’d still crave that freedom.

It’s refreshing to chat about what can scare us, in a world where places like instagram make relationships look perfect.