She's Involved in Phone Sex

Visitor's Question from a 31-40 year old Male
I'm a 39 year old CPA who has been very happily married to the same woman for 15 years. We have 2 thriving children ages 12 + 7, good careers, money, a wonderful sex life, and in my opinion a nearly perfect marriage. My wife enjoys playing games on the internet in her spare time and recently I discovered that over the course of the past few months she was having internet and phone sex with a handful of men that she had met while doing so. Initially I was crushed and my reaction was to kick her out of the house. Her position is that it's only masturbation - which we use as part of our sex life - and she says being pursued by these men excites her without her actually cheating on me. When she finally admitted to me what she was doing - after lying to me about it repeatedly - we had a huge fight in which at its peak she said she didn't love me enough to spend the rest of her life with me and that she wanted to see other men. She later recanted those comments and said she regretted saying them but I still can't help but wonder what is truly going on in her heart.

She claims if I just leave her alone everything between us will be fine but I still can't shake the thought that what she's doing is wrong and is merely a symptom of some other larger problem. My wife is a gorgeous woman who recently lost 30 lbs and is feeling very good about herself again - as she should she literally has model good looks. I fear if I press her on this she'll resent me, do it anyways, and ultimately leave me.

I desperately want to keep my marriage and family together but I'm confused as to whether I've taken too much or should just roll with her wishes since it appears everything is more than OK between us. I just don't understand how we can have such a great marriage on the one hand while strange men are calling her when I'm not home and talking dirty to her. HELP!!!!

RomanceClass.com Advice
First, this is a REALLY common situation now that the internet makes it so easy to get involved with strangers that want sex. It's an easy lure, sort of like porn magazines were for men for many years. When excitement with your many-years partner can seem hard to come by, a quick 'instant high' and arousal can seem like candy.

But as much as she says that it doesn't affect your relationship, obviously it DOES affect your relationship, and the primary thing it did was destroy your trust. It would have been one thing if she'd come to you, said she was interested in this, and you thought it would be a fun thing to persue together. That happens often and can make a relationship fun.

But every relationship is based on TRUST and RESPECT. For her to lie to you about what she was doing destroys the very basis of the relationship. Relationships are primarily about trust and friendship. She was lying to you. In the end it doesn't matter if she was lying to you about a real affair or about stealing or anything else. Why was she lying? If it wasn't a big deal and didn't matter, wouldn't she have told you the truth? She's betrayed your trust and she needs to understand that you were wronged by that.

Sure, you both could learn to live with this as a part of your sexual lives, just as you could learn to live with other things in your sexual lives. But it has to be a decision that you both make TOGETHER and stand by together. Relationships are about joint decisions. She can't go lie to you, decide to do something and then tell you in essence that you better go along with it or she'll leave you. That's emotional blackmail.

You might want to investigate couple therapy to see what is at the root of this. It seems that there was more unhappiness involved and this is a symptom. If you both want to work on the relationships, it'd be a good step to take.

-- from Jenn
One of Your Friendly Advisors at RomanceClass.com

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