Should She Dump the Amazing Man Who Helped Her Get On Her Feet?

I’m a bisexual mid-30s female who’s been with the same guy for 14 years. Our relationship has been through a lot of ups and downs, with me intermittently getting crushes on other folks and wondering if I needed to go out and date other people (I was a late bloomer). I also intermittently struggled with anxiety and depression, and felt like I was leaning too much on him for support. I thought maybe I needed to develop the strength to be okay on my own. I was open with him about all this, and he was understandably not happy about it—he really wanted to be together. I brought up taking a break, but he was adamant that he didn’t believe in breaks, and that just meant a break-up. Which was reasonable.

Anyway, I sought advice from a therapist, my family and friends: the therapist and my family all strongly thought that I should stay with him at least until my anxiety and depression got better and THEN decide whether or not to leave the relationship. (A couple friends thought otherwise, but I chose to trust the professional in this case.) I still felt really guilty about leaning on him if I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be with him, so I left for a while and went back to my family. My family’s abusive in some ways, though, with major anger issues, so I couldn’t lean on them, and I was so deep in my anxiety that I had a hard time reaching out to friends for support. And my therapist kept saying to go back to him, because he was my main support system and I really needed support to get better. I was at the end of my rope, so I did.

After that, things got better. I’m doing a lot better, and our relationship is doing a lot better. He’s an incredible person—he’s the kindest, biggest-hearted, most generous person I know. He’s given me a lot of unconditional love that I never got growing up. I feel lucky to be with him, and it sounds sappy and fake, but my heart seriously gets all big and fuzzy around him. He really helped me get better, he gave me amazing support, and I sincerely feel forever grateful to him. I had reservations about our compatibility—he can be pretty reserved and self-conscious, and I’m kind of a no-filter clown and sometimes I wish I had more of an adventure partner, but I made a conscious decision to give the relationship my all. And it paid off because I think I pulled my head out of my ass with all the fantasies of a perfect relationship and learned how to put work into reality. Turns out, relationships can change and get better if you actually put work into them. We have a lot more chemistry now, in a way that’s silly and companionate. We got engaged, and we’re making plans to have an elopement gathering. We both want to have kids, and we’re getting into our mid-thirties, so there’s also not a lot of time left to make those babies. I think we could make a great family together. We’re very compatible in almost every way.

Here’s the thing: Our sex life isn’t great and never has been. We just aren’t very sexually compatible. He’s vanilla, reserved, and all about the sweet and cuddly. I like that, but I also like stuff that’s more aggressive. However, that wasn’t really a problem for a long time, because my sex drive was almost nonexistent when I was deep in the depression and anxiety. Lately, though, my sex drive has gone way up. As I mentioned, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be with other people (I didn’t date or sleep with a lot of people before him), but I figure, I’m always going to think the grass is greener, and I have this incredibly loving person in my life who has stood by me through a lot of shit, so it’s fine, you inevitably miss out on some things in life in order to nurture other really good things. So I got to feeling good about that.

And then…

I recently reconnected with an old guy friend. I’m starting to feel uncontrollably attracted to this dude. He basically represents all the things in my relationship that I had reservations about—he’s more adventurous and has a bigger, more playful sense of humor than my fiancé. He’s more assertive and from our interactions it’s pretty clear that we’re really attracted to each other and have a lot of chemistry. However, he’s nowhere near as committed and selfless as my fiancé. No one is. My fiancé is amazing. (I’m not trying to make it out like now I’m destined to go be with this other guy and that it’s all about which-one-is-better, but I’m not sure if this attraction means something important. And in the middle of all this impulsiveness I’m feeling, I want to consciously remind myself how special of a person my fiancé is.)

I’m not in therapy right now. I recently brought this up to my family and they were like, “You’re being a dickhead! Your fiancé has proven himself to you over and over again, and he’s been waiting for years for you to be certain and be all-in, and you keep sticking your head in the clouds. You made progress, and now you want to throw it all away for some hotter sex?” I’m pretty sure they’re right. I’m having trouble getting this guy out of my head though, and part of me feels impatient, like goddammit, I’ve been a nun for twelve years, and now I’m going to be a nun for the rest of my life? But maybe that’s just my attitude. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, right? And I know that it’s possible for my fiancé and I to work more on our sex life and for it to improve. Like I said above, relationships take work.

I seriously don’t know what to think. I don’t want to throw years of hard work and companionship with an amazing person away just to go have some hot sex but at the same time I’m surprised by how intense my impatience and my attraction to this other guy is. I’m having crazy dreams about him and I feel like some kind of mid-life crisis cliche. It feels overwhelming. (BTW: opening up my relationship with my fiancé is definitely not an option. He’s absolutely against it.)

What is the right thing to do here? How do I get this intense impulsive feeling to run away and boink this other dude to go away? Would it make sense to cut off my friendship with him? I figure my fiancé and I should go to sex therapy or couples counseling? Please tell me if I’m being a selfish dickhead. I would appreciate having someone I can trust (other than my family) give it to me straight, so I can feel more solid about what the right thing to do is. I just wish I could trust myself more to know what’s right. I suspect that I’m pretty self-centered at my core, and I’ve been fighting to learn how to be a better person for a while, but I keep reverting here and there.

Would be grateful for your perspective.

Sad Horny Eeyore

I don’t know what to tell you.

On the one hand, it sounds like you’re in a great-but-not-perfect-but-none-are relationship. You clearly love and enjoy spending time with your fiancé and you want kids and from the way you describe him—all that unconditional love he’s capable of spewing—your fiancé would make an excellent father. And he was there for you when your biologicals weren’t and he helped you work through your depression and anxiety and it would be a shitty move to dump this guy now that you’re feeling better/hornier when you have him to thank for feeling better/hornier in the first place.

On the other hand… well, before I go any further I wanna acknowledge that my sample might be skewed. Actually, my sample is definitely skewed. I get very few (read: no) letters from people who made monogamous commitments to partners they didn’t feel a strong sexual connection to and/or weren’t sexually compatible with who are at peace with their choices. The letters I get are from people who made the commitment you’re thinking about making and want out or want my permission to cheat or slammed their hand down on the self-destruct button so hard and so clumsily (read: they cheated and got caught) that they’re getting out now whether they want to or not.

So thanks to my skewed sample, SHE, I’m sitting here in this WeHo Starbucks thinking, “SHE shouldn’t marry that guy because it’s going to end in tears, sexual resentment, cheating, drama, chaos, and most likely divorce.”

And I seriously bumped—as they say in conference rooms in the Los Angeles area—on your use of the word “companionate.” You want a loving relationship but it doesn’t sound like you want a companionate one, i.e. a sexless relationship. You want a strong sexual connection with—well, you wanna experience that at some point with someone. And you don’t have that with your amazing fiancé (who does sound pretty amazing) but you could have that with someone else… or a series of someone elses.

But… gah.

Now that you’re feeling better, thanks to your fiancé, now that your depression and anxiety are under control, thanks to your fiancé, your reservations about sexual incompatibility are coming to the surface—along with some feelings of regret about never having lived on your own as an adult. But you’re not talking about leaving your fiancé to strike out on your own… you’re talking about leaving one man for another… a man you don’t know as well as your fiancé but you’re guessing/hoping you’d feel a stronger sexual connection to.

But if you tell you to leave your fiancé and run off with Mr. Old Guy Friend—if I advised you to do just that—and your relationship with Mr. Old Guy Friend didn’t “work out” in the stay-together-forever sense of the term—and most relationships don’t work out in the stay-together-forever sense of the term—what then? Would you be happily single, out there on your own, swiping right (or left? I can never remember which it is) on Tinder, looking for other assertive, sexually-aggressive guys?

Or would you fall apart?

I’m sorry, SHE, I’m not really giving you advice here. I’m probably replicating/regurgitating your inner monologue. But when I hear you say, “My wonderful fiancé is my support system and helped me so much and now I’m stable so maybe I don’t need my fiancé anymore?”, I’m reminded of people who do so well on their meds that they don’t think they need them anymore, go off them, and quickly learn they still need their meds. You’re doing well where you are now, with your fiancé/meds, and maybe that’s not something you should take for granted—particularly since you can’t rely on your biologicals for support if you go to pieces again.

But! Sexual fulfillment is important! And sexual frustration makes people miserable and undermines relationships over the longterm!

That’s why I’m so torn: If I tell you to stay and you’re miserable a decade from now and you write back, I’ll feel terrible. But if I tell you to leave and you’re miserable a year (or a week) from now and you write back, I’ll feel terrible.

But! This isn’t about me. This is about you, SHE, and what you should do.

So without further ado/handwringing/channeling, SHE, here’s my advice: Stop seeing Mr. Old Guy Friend and focus your energy and attention on your fiancé. But you have to risk being honest with your fiancé about your discontent (if not your crush) and you have to tell him there’s one last area of your relationship you two need to work on before you elope: the sex. Relationships can change and get better if you actually put work into them, as a wise woman once said, and that applies to sex too. Your fiancé is clearly willing to do the work, SHE, but he can’t do the work if he doesn’t know it needs doing—and he needs to know what’s at risk if he isn’t willing to work on this with you.

And if the work doesn’t work, SHE, give some serious thought to not marrying this amazing man.

P.S. I’m just going to leave this old column here. In case you need it. In 30 years.