Sex File: Can I make my marriage as hot as my affair?

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After a short, doomed but exhilarating affair, I confessed all to my wife, whom I still love. After counselling, we committed to rebuilding our relationship and sex life. I know I've done the right thing in choosing my marriage, but how can we start a new chapter that excites us both?

Sometimes the things that people leave out of their letters tell me more than the things that they put in. You say, for example, that you and your wife have been through counselling together, and that you are certain you have made the right decision to stay in the marriage, but you don't say anything about your wife. How do you think she would respond if you posed this question to her? Do you think she might be keen to think of some new and imaginative approaches that would make the sex that you have with her as exciting as the sex you had with your mistress? I don't think so.

Unlike infidelity, making marital sex more exciting is not a unilateral endeavour. You and your wife need to be on the same page before this can happen, and your letter doesn't give me much confidence that this is the case. I know you have ticked all the boxes. Disclosure: tick. Apology: tick. Counselling: tick. Move on? I don't think so. 

I've written about the phenomenon of cheap forgiveness before, but when a betrayed partner is terrified of losing the relationship, sometimes they will brush their emotions under the carpet as a way of escaping the pain. They forgive in order to forget. It's a valiant attempt to turn the clock back to a better time, but trauma always finds its way to the surface. I say this because unless you are certain that your marriage really is back on track, making additional sexual demands on your wife will do more harm than good.

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Infidelity rocks a marriage to its core, and rebuilding it can take years. When two people genuinely find their way back to each other after something as traumatic as an affair, the knowledge that they love each other and that they have decided to spend the rest of their lives together is normally enough to revitalise their sexual connection. Honesty, trust and intimacy are inextricably intertwined and as one increases, so do the other two. The fact that you are still pining for the sexual excitement that you felt during your affair suggests that there is still work to be done at an emotional level. 

The only way to really move on is to go through the painful process of full disclosure, and by that I mean everything. Keeping your dissatisfaction with your sex life secret is just another form of deceit. Affairs rarely happen for no reason and the fact that the truth may hurt your partner should not be used as an excuse to avoid it. It may be that your relationship has always been great but the sex has never been enough for you. If this is the case, expecting the marriage to suddenly become something that it never was is naive.

You saw a counsellor, but perhaps what you needed to do was to see a sex therapist. You don't have to go with your wife. Going on your own might help you to understand where your beliefs about sex come from and if your expectations in a long-term relationship are realistic. I suspect not, but you need to find that out for yourself.