[mdpair]

I came here looking for advice for a very similar scenario. Wife and I have been together for twenty years. I have always thought of our relationship as a strong one, except for a period 14 years ago when my wife(girlfriend at the time)had an affair with a mutual friend. It was outrageously hard to overcome the pain and the disrespect that I felt. It took years of work to build it all back together. But build it back together we did. We learned to put it all back together in a way that was so much stronger and closer than we had ever been. About a year ago our friendship and communication and love and ,especially sex were still expanding and strengthening. As we reveled in our ever more fantastic sex, we started talking about swinging and sharing. She asked if maybe we were opening up those old cans of worms, but I told her if it was done for us -for our shared sex/love life -that it was just adding to our love not undermining it. We proceeded with great excitement. It was so arousing to start to work this new dimension into our psyches. We were nearly always aroused and quadrupled our sexual encounters. She was more aroused than I had ever seen her. It was great. She couldn't believe how fun it was to fantasize about all these sexy men joining us in our bed. We went to on-premise sex clubs and were shy and stayed to ourselves, but had explosive sex in crowds. We both agreed that we were so lucky that after 20 years our relationship was immeasurably stronger that it had ever been. After maybe 3 months of this new plateau she tells me she is attracted to someone at work. I tell her that I know because I had met him and seen them together and heard the way she talked about him. At first I say that is okay ,I ask her to tell me all about it. Well, It was more than attraction. She did not have sex with him or kiss or touch. But she carried on a secret love that was getting to big for her to handle for about a month. She sent erotic emails to him describing the intimate and sexual attraction that she felt for him. He was only here temporarily and went back home across the ocean and that is when the feelings went crazy. She became obsessed--told other mutual friends about it before she finally came to me. We had sex at every opportunity for the duration. Well I am really hurt. Damn devastated! She can't explain what went wrong. She can't believe that she was so stupid to destroy the great thing that we had going. You can all understand the nuance here. I was really encouraging her to explore the world of Male sexuality. I was talking about her having sex with other men. We were both exploding in a new world of unlimited possibilty and arousal.

We are in love with each other but are both depressingly resigned to having just a fraction of what we just recently had.

I guess I just want fresh voices to help me see this clearly