Sex advice with Suzi Godson: Marriage is passionless after my affair

Q: My marriage has been going wrong for a while and last year I had an affair. I have two small children, so I decided I had to call it off. But now the very thought of sleeping with my husband makes my flesh crawl. Will it ever get any better? My husband doesn’t know about the affair.

A: As Phillip Hodson, a psychotherapist and fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, says: “The price you pay for having an affair is learning to live with the guilt.”

And the trouble with the kind of infidelity you describe is that the problems that propelled you into the arms of another are still there now that the liaison has ended.

To compound your discontent, you are now judging your marriage against an idealised relationship that was never subject to the same stresses and strains; it is not a realistic comparison.

The day-to-day domestic dust that builds up on the once shiny marriage never has time to settle in an affair.

Thanks to maid service and minibars, half- hour trysts in hotel rooms remain honeymoon-fresh, whereas the greying sheets at home hold no surprises, and you have to wash them afterwards.

Guilt will drive a woman to trade high-octane excitement for passionless normality, but it is not an easy trade.

Part-time love is a champagne-fuelled fantasy that is exempt from gas bills, trips to the supermarket and cleaning out the guinea pig’s cage.

Being desired makes a woman feel fabulous; a combination of lust and anxiety can eat away 5kg overnight.

Ironically, a husband can feel so threatened by his wife’s emotional detachment that he will at last begin to pay her the kind of attention that might have stopped her from straying in the first place.

It’s a heady cocktail but, ultimately, infidelity is a hopeless trap because, as you are beginning to realise, the demise of the affair creates intense dissatisfaction.

It is a rare woman who can switch off feelings for a lover overnight. But she can hardly tell her husband this when he asks her why she seems so depressed.

Instead, she turns her back on him in bed, leaving him in no doubt that whatever is the matter, it is all his fault.

Guilt, if not neutralised, can be very corrosive, eating away at the foundations of a relationship until it seems as if the only solution is to be brutally honest.

Invariably, however, the wronged spouse will most likely interpret a retrospective confession as brutal rather than honest, and the relationship will hit the buffers anyway.

If your marriage is to have any chance of surviving, you need to find a way of dealing with your guilt so that it does not impede your progress.

I doubt that there are many people in whom you can confide about what has happened, so some individual counselling would be helpful.

It would enable you to process your confusion in a neutral environment and help you to work out what has been driving your behaviour so that you could then engage ‘honestly’ in relationship therapy with your husband.

Counselling is a subjective process and the quality of the help and advice is largely dependent on the skill of the therapist you choose.

It is also worth pointing out that studies have shown that integrative behavioural couples therapy has a higher long-term success rate than traditional couples counselling.

Rehabilitation is going to take time and your sex life will improve only when the ghost of your former lover has been exorcised.

Remind yourself that you have chosen to stay with your husband for very valid reasons.

You’ve made mistakes, but ultimately you have put your children’s needs first, and that is truly commendable.

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