Sex File: My husband of 20 years is happy for me to take a lover

Mon, 05 Aug, 2024 - 10:44

Suzi Godson

We've been married for 20 years, have three teens and a happy life, but sex has dwindled. Recently, I've felt attraction towards other women, as well as men. I don't want to leave my husband, but it feels like there is a side of my identity that I can't explore. He's told me that he'd be open to me experimenting outside our marriage. Is that a bad idea?

The phenomenon of women who have previously been in a long-term heterosexual partnership pursuing a lesbian relationship relatively later in life is increasingly common. Traditionally, women who left their marriages for female partners were accused of having hidden their true sexuality, but female sexuality seems to be much more fluid than male and this appears to be particularly true in midlife.

Lisa Diamond, who is associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, followed a group of 79 women who reported some same-sex attraction for more than 15 years. Every two years, 20-30% of the women changed the way they described themselves - gay, straight or bisexual - and 70% changed their orientation over the course of the study. In her subsequent book, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire, Diamond suggests that younger women may be more driven by an evolutionary desire to have children, but after the menopause, female sexuality becomes more malleable.

Your husband sounds very accepting, but be aware that theoretical openness does not always hold up in practice.

There is honestly no failsafe way to anticipate how you, or he, would respond to the reality of this radical change, but one huge risk, which you have not even acknowledged, is how you would feel if your husband decided to pursue the same sexual freedoms. You need to assume that he won't be sitting at home knitting, so it is critical that you talk about the potential implications of this decision for everyone. What actually happens when two primary partners juggle three children and two extramarital relationships? How would it affect family dynamics now and in the future?

The only way to protect yourselves is to have serious conversations about boundaries - yours and his. You need to define, in minute detail, what is acceptable and what is not. That includes discussing how you might go about finding potential partners, whether you already have people in mind, how often you might see them, how much you will share about your experiences with him, whether the agreement is kept secret and what would happen if you develop strong feelings for someone else. By the time you feel completely sick of the conversation, you will have covered about half of what will really happen if you move forward.

Sometimes exploring the realities of opening up a marriage becomes an intervention in itself. Being open and honest always helps to increase trust and connectedness, and being brave enough to discuss the feelings of jealousy that might arise can inadvertently heighten intimacy and sexual desire. Discussing the potential emotional challenges might be all it takes to jolt you into appreciating what you have with each other in a way that you have been failing to do of late.