Should I tell my husband I fantasise about men during sex?

* I have a great sex life with my husband. However, when we’re in bed, I have fantasies about other men.

Does this matter and should I talk to him about it?

>> This isn’t something you should talk to your partner about. Fantasy is normal — so normal that infrequent sexual fantasy is one of the defining criteria of the disorder “inhibited sexual desire”.

Most people fantasise, but what happens in our heads is so much racier than what happens in our beds that the majority of couples do not share their fantasies.

We don’t tell researchers the truth either.

When GD Wilson and Lang (1981) asked male and female participants to indicate their most exciting fantasy, both men and women reported: “intercourse with a loved partner.’’ Honestly?

Social desirability bias aside, the top themes for fantasies are: sex with a stranger, group sex, or doing things sexually that you would never do in reality. Fantasy is our licence to thrill. It’s our private opportunity to take the risks we would never take in real life but, because we are all lazy, once a sexual fantasy pushes the right buttons, it becomes our sexual starting-block. Repetition creates a Pavlovian response, whereby we condition ourselves to equate that sequence of mental pictures with easy orgasm. Eventually, just as your favourite fantasy triggers arousal, so arousal will trigger your favourite fantasy.

When your husband nibbles on your ear lobe and those juicy sensations stir below the waist, your brain automatically dials up a stranger to boost your arousal and hasten you towards orgasm. It’s nothing to feel guilty about, but if your sexual imagination clashes with your personal ideology, it can be difficult to reconcile the two.

A happily married woman who dreams of group sex can find it difficult to understand why her unconscious brain could be aroused by ideas that are an anathema to her in real life.

More recently, psychologists such as Dr Marta Meana have explained the incongruities in female sexual fantasy as a reflection of our “desire to be desired”. In our fantasies, we are the central pivot. Everyone wants us and all activity gravitates around us. We write the sexual script and push the imaginary boundaries, but, ultimately, we are in charge of what happens, when it happens, and with whom.

Fantasy takes us to places that we don’t want to go, but it is that precise conflict between fear and arousal that gives it erotic charge.

Your uncertainty about harbouring secret thoughts from your husband is part of what empowers your sexual fantasy. Although there hasn’t been a great deal of investigation into what happens if couples reveal their sexual fantasies to each other, what little research there is suggests that the decision to share is content-dependent. If your fantasy is, indeed, “intercourse with a loved partner”, you are unlikely to encounter resistance, but if your fantasy involves the boys from One Direction, you might want to hold back.

Interestingly, although research shows that men fantasise more than women during masturbation, four studies have found almost identical figures for the numbers of men and women admitting to having fantasies during intercourse. Which means that everything you are doing, your husband is probably doing, too. Yes, sexual equality exists . . . in our imaginations.

* Email questions to: [e-mail]