I am married and have three children with my husband. For the most part, our lives are happy. My husband and I have a good relationship and are active in our children’s lives. However, I am utterly unsatisfied sexually. I need a bit more than occasional vanilla sex to feel content in that area (nothing too crazy, mind you). When my husband and I first started dating some years ago, I gently brought this matter up to him a handful of times during the course of regular conversation. His answers to me seemed to imply that he was the type who took some time to warm up to new ideas. With this in mind, I moved forward with him, believing that eventually our sex life would become more adventurous. It hasn’t. It has been seven years since we became a committed couple, and if anything, our sex has become more boring and certainly less frequent.

On top of this, although we are happily married as a general rule — we enjoy each other’s company, have similar senses of humor and many common interests — he has the occasional outburst. It’s never over anything serious, and I’m never quite sure why it is triggered. But when this happens, he goes from being a calm, caring person to being enraged and verbally abusive in a matter of seconds (thankfully it has not been in front of our children). He has said some truly terrible things to me when this happens, things that he is always apologetic for later but that I have a difficult time getting over. Because of this, I have largely lost confidence in his having my best interests at heart. I don’t trust him to care about my psychological or emotional well-­being. Because of this lack of trust, I am no longer in a place emotionally where I feel I can even bring up my lack of sexual satisfaction. I am at the point that when I think of attaining sexual satisfaction, the thought of attempting it with him is unpleasant to me.

Before my relationship with my husband, I had a very successful friends-­with-­benefits relationship with another man, which ended because I moved out of his area. We were exceptionally sexually compatible, enjoyed each other’s company and had a very clear understanding of our relationship boundaries. We have kept in touch just a little, and never in a sexual context since I began dating my husband.

I am no longer content to simply accept being less than satisfied in any area of my life, including sexually, and I know that this other man is able and willing to provide that for me. He and my husband do not know each other; he lives very far away from us, and I am in his area only once or twice a year. My husband appears to be both unwilling and unable to provide what I need sexually. However, our family functions well as a unit, and he is a good, involved father, and a generally decent husband, so the thought of breaking up our family is heartbreaking to me and seems very selfish. In addition, extramarital affairs are something I have never believed to be ethically sound decisions. As I see it, these are the options available to me:

I could leave my marriage, break up my family and pursue my own satisfaction, which feels like a blatant betrayal of my children and what I have previously thought to be my moral standards.