Expert: Kate Rosling - 10/8/2010

Question
I'm 50, have been married almost 20 years and my husband feels I am being afflicted with menopause and midlife crisis.  My hormones are a mess.  I've never felt so miserable and out of control in my life.  We have a terrible marriage intimately but have no other problems and share a teenage son.  I have never felt passion with him and we haven't been intimate in a year. My husband and I have agreed to living together separately in order to complete raising our son together and my husband also feels that if he gives me the space during this midlife crisis I may come back to him.   My intense desire to feel loved and wanted and attractive allowed me to fall into the arms of another man although he was not someone I ever would have desired and I soon became tired of him. But during that time I learned how wonderful it is to really make passionate love and now find I cant live without it.   Now I have begun soaking up the attention of yet another man who I have become obsessed with.  His attention gave me the ultimate high and made me feel so alive and so good about myself.  But I am not sure he is really that into me because he is inconsistent with his attention to me.  He says he doesn't want to get hurt and has a history of broken marriages and relationships.  His primary interest in me is the subject of sex.  I really want to have an affair with him and totally desire him but feel that he does not really care enough about me and I desperately need to be adored.  His intense attention to me over the last 6 months has me so obsessed with him and when he interrupts his attention to me I cannot cope with anything in life, I get so very, very upset.  I'm afraid of the pain that may follow if I become intimate with him caring greatly only to be hurt because he is just using me for sex.  I don't want to be alone in life and would rather live in a passionless marriage than live alone but cannot turn away from the chance to have passion with someone especially since I feel so fortunate to have this attention at this age.  I've just never felt so obsessed and miserable about anyone because I feel they do not care as much as I care.

Answer
Hi Kim.

Discuss it with this man and see what he is looking for, if it is just sex, then don't bother.  It is not worth being used, especially with your current situation.  Get intimate with him on a mental level first before sex.

If that doesn't work, maybe you and your husband can re-kindle the fire you once had.  Marriage counseling may be a great option.