Anxious Fiancée

Steve Almond: You can do the math here, Anxious. Of course it was hot when you were just boozing and schmoozing with the manager at work, when the sex was something forbidden (or at least covert). There was nothing enduring at risk, so it was safely partitioned from your anxiety. Now that hot lover is your potential life partner. You’re talking mortgage rates and babies. Of course you’re yearning for the days when the sex was a one-way ticket to bliss, not the avenue to adulthood. The question for you to confront is whether this crush reflects what I’ll call “manageable ambivalence” or deeper misgivings about your engagement. It’s best to be honest with yourself — and your partner — in either case.

Cheryl Strayed: Steve’s right that so much of answering this question has to do with figuring out how strongly you feel the sense of loss you describe, Anxious. I don’t know one person in a long-term monogamy who isn’t nostalgic for the nights of whiskey and cigarettes, but most are O.K. with the fact that they’re gone. That you’re so tortured about it gives me pause. You write that you don’t have lust and passion in your life anymore and if that’s true, I’d say you should let your doubts and anxieties be your guide. Sometimes you want the hot guy at work because it turns out the hot guy at home isn’t for you. (This is especially true when you’re 26.) Sometimes you want the hot guy at work because the hot guy at home has become more complicated and the deepening aspects of your maturing love scare you.

You ask if it’s normal to feel platonic love for your fiancé and the answer is yes, but not if it has entirely replaced romantic love. Has it? Or is it that the companionate love you have for your fiancé runs alongside your romantic love for him and that feels new and uncomfortable to you? In most long relationships, the two kinds of love coexist. Finding a balance between them is among monogamy’s greatest challenges.

SA: The psychotherapist and researcher Esther Perel refers to this as the “love/lust split”: As we become more stable and secure in a relationship, we lose a sense of novelty and adventure that fuels the erotic imagination. Your infatuation with the new Mr. Dangerous is, as you seem to recognize, an attempt to recapture that magic. (Check out Ms. Perel’s excellent book “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence” for a deeper discussion of the hows and whys.) All that being said, you still have to figure out whether you’re ready, at 26, for the long, good promise of monogamy. The toughest aspect of honoring that promise, by the way, isn’t the diminishing of lust. It’s the requirement that you be truthful. I know this crush is causing all kinds of drama for you. But it might be more helpful to see it as a necessary confusion, one that will force you to clarify your feelings about the commitment you’re considering.