Sex File: Should I confess to my hot crush? 

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After a group holiday this summer a dormant crush on an old (also married) university friend developed into a full-blown emotional affair. I stopped things before anything physical happened, but I've been fantasising about him constantly since. I feel incredibly guilty about it. My husband can tell something's up. Should I confess?

That's such a hard question to answer and the truth is I don't know. 

I do know that when you are in the throes of a hot crush it is difficult to think rationally about the real-world consequences of infidelity, so let me spell that out for you. Confessing to your husband will create a huge amount of distress. Emotional affairs destroy trust just as effectively as sexual affairs, so brace yourself for a tsunami of anger, insecurity, jealousy and sadness that will exacerbate your own shame and guilt. Post-disclosure, you'll probably end up in couples counselling.

That can help for a while, but research at the University of Washington shows that 53% of couples that endure infidelity are divorced within five years. The research, carried out by Rebeca Marin, estimates that the odds are three times higher when infidelity is a factor. Even with a "no fault" clause, divorce is messy, emotionally traumatic and extremely expensive for the family (here, potentially two families). 

The idea that women are financially advantaged by divorce is a myth too. Numerous studies have shown that compared with men, women are disproportionately penalised in terms of losses in household income and associated increases in the risk of poverty.

As things stand, nothing has "technically" happened between you and your friend and my advice would be to keep it that way if you want to remain married. You had a holiday crush triggered by a combination of history, chemistry, proximity and the complete absence of normal routines and responsibilities. Now that you are home, your feelings of guilt are keeping the fantasy alive.

Ironically, one of the most effective ways to control unwanted thoughts is to expose yourself to the thoughts you want to avoid in a controlled way. Try setting aside some time and allowing yourself to think about what has happened and why. Ask yourself what it is about this guy that attracts you? Is it a genuinely mutual chemistry, or are you just flattered by his attention? What's in it for him? Is he unhappily married? Are you just a distraction? Has he done this before? What's missing in your life, or in your marriage? And would having sex with him make any of that better, or worse?

Right now you are having a fantasy that ends in orgasm. That's better than having an affair that ends in divorce. Your husband may already suspect that you and your university friend have a connection, so the quickest way to assuage your guilt would probably be to tell him what has been going on. The fallout from full disclosure will be huge - as I highlighted earlier - but it may still be the right thing to do. When Marin separated out couples who had disclosed their infidelity from couples where one person had been unfaithful but had never disclosed it, she found that 80% of couples where the infidelity was kept secret had divorced, compared with 43% of couples where it was out in the open. Either way, I don't envy you.

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