Expert: Eirene Nayar - 4/1/2010

Question
Here is my question in a more discrete format

I have been married to my wife for 6 years. The beginning of the year I discovered she was involved in a online D/s relationship. She won't give it up and says he understands her better than me and listens to her. I try to listen but she doesn't confide in me.

I think she wants to leave me for him. My question is how do I win her back, do I demand she stops or have I lost her already?

Answer
Hello Limbo

I am so sorry that all of this is happening for you.  The reality is that we cannot make anyone do what they don’t already want to do.  It sounds like she has made up her mind to leave.  The more you fight to hold her the more she will wish escape.  

Your hurting, that is so very obvious and my heart aches for you.  Your anger, resentment and frustration will just have her packing her bags that much faster.  I have no answers for you other than to ask you to let her go if that’s what she thinks she needs and wants.

Let me just say this.  Online relationships have a mysterious alluring quality that for the most part cannot withstand the realities of day to day RL.  He can promise her anything…be anything.  And what he leaves out of his descriptions of this wonderful life she can have with him…  her imagination will fill in. He then becomes the man she thinks her heart and soul cry out for.  You, as a flesh and blood male cannot compete with her mirage.

Online relationships can and *do* work.  They are not easy. And I would say that 75% of them never transcend into having a real life relationship.  There is too much fantasy filling in the gaps.

If she must go then let her go.  It’s quite probable that she will return but even if she does not.  You deserve someone that wants to be with *you*.

The BDSM lifestyle is hypnotic and potent once someone enters into it, it is very doubtful that they will ever return to strictly vanilla.  There is more going on here between the two of you then that though.

I am sorry I could not give you more clear cut answers or a definite direction to go in.  It’s a difficult time for you and I wish you well as you go forward.  

Eirene Nayar