I've followed you for what feels like 10 years, as I've traversed the quarter-life crisis and crises of creativity that speak powerfully to the blood that has always run through my veins.

So now I come to you with a more commonplace problem in some ways, but still so connected to the vein of creativity that you speak so well to.

There is a man. Isn't there always? An older man, and one I work with. So banal, I know. But we've been as you might call it, "good," or as good as one can be as two married people. We've admitted our attraction to each other, but agreed it would be reckless, careless and selfish to take it any further. I am not under any illusion that I love him, but I do enjoy his company. And that's my dilemma.  After traveling with him for work this week, staying up just talking until the sun came up, I suddenly feel a wave of creativity rushing my every sense. It's like being a teenager again, but one who's actually read ee cummings, Whitman and Milton. I find myself scooping up old poetry books, reading Shakespeare and even writing down the colors of this strange, yet I imagine so universal, blend of emotions. It's addicting in the way that any other vice might be, but I'm still young (so they tell me, at 28), so still learning the ways of this strange and wonderful world.

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Normally it'd be the type of all-sorts-of-exploitative piece I'd barely roll my eyes at before moving along -- but it's the advice she's offering in particular that deserves a second look, if only because it's so pedestrian, and so misguided.

Her teaching? Have lots of sex with your husband.

To Dakin's credit, she acknowledges that there are "obviously other factors" to infidelity, but she argues that, as the Sun paraphrases, it most often "simply comes down to not giving their men enough sex." She also falls back on some classic gender stereotypes: "Men are sexual creatures -- unlike a lot of women, they can separate the act of sex from love," she said. (I will take a moment here to give Dakin the benefit of the doubt: It's hard to know where her advice ends and the Sun's sensationalist editorializing begins; I've contacted her but have yet to hear back.)

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Jenny Sanford had run her husband's previous campaign for a House seat in 1994. But that was before Sanford was forced to admit on national TV that he had an extramarital affair. According to New York mag, Sanford went to visit his ex-wife to ask whether she would be running for the House seat vacated by Tim Scott when Nikki Haley appointed Scott to the Senate herself. On learning that she would not, the former governor reportedly asked, “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign ... We could put the team back together."

The Sanfords have "barely been on speaking terms" since their divorce, New York reported. But the man who ran away with his Argentinian mistress told his ex-wife, “I could pay you this time."

Jenny said no.

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Up until recently I've been reading your columns and your advice seems clear and to the point. I am in a serious bind. My wife of five years began a relationship with someone from her past. I discovered the relationship and through many other lies told she confessed to it and stated it was best if we got divorced.

Now, to give you a brief overview of our marriage, it was mediocre at best. Sex wasn't the issue; she complained about my lack of "love," as she called it, and I never really responded past her cries for attention. Fast-forward to today, we still live together (we both have nowhere to go), we have casual sex, speak more openly about ourselves and our past relationships and future relationships. In other words our "new" relationship has developed into something better than our five-year marriage; we hold no secrets. She confesses, I confess and we love it. My problem is I have a mall intent on ruining her current new long-distance relationship with her boyfriend.

I do not want to, but it's almost a male thing to fight back, not with fists but through love and better affection and more sex!

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You are, however, not a lab animal but a human being, and right now your rational brain is frantically pointing out that you’ve met her before, at your boss’s house. She’s his fiancee. Even if she were not, you’re married, and while your sex life is rather dull, and the old urgency of your first years with your wife has dissipated, you love her. You settle for a friendly nod, a smile, and, when the elevator door opens, you retreat to your desk and sit down with an unconscious sigh.

This is self-control. Your prefrontal cortex has communicated with your amygdala (a region which plays a key role in processing emotions), ventral tegmental area (VTA, where dopamine, a chemical important for motivation and brain reward, sits) and the accumbens, and said “Cut it out!” You have just been confronted with a desire-reason dilemma -- and favored reason.

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I am hoping you can help me to navigate a difficult situation. I have been reading your column for several years and find your advice to be heartfelt, thoughtful and insightful. I am also seeking your advice because I feel I have no one else to talk to about this.

Recently, I disclosed to a co-worker of mine that I have developed romantic feelings for him. We have an easy, playful rapport and similar senses of humor and dispositions. We speak openly about our problems and often find solace in one another, as we work in a field that can be challenging and emotionally exhausting at times.  We are both emotionally intense but repressed and find it difficult to reveal ourselves to others, so have developed what I consider to be a strong bond of trust and understanding. Over the past few months, our friendship intensified in that we began exchanging frequent, borderline flirtatious texts. I felt that something had shifted in our friendship and that I had to express my feelings to him, as I was finding it difficult to conceal my true feelings and he was starting to question me about acting oddly toward him. The truth is, I had harbored romantic feelings for him for some time but, for several reasons, tried to ignore those feelings. The reasons I tried to repress these feelings are that I have been in a committed relationship for nearly five years and my co-worker, who is 20 years my senior (I am in my late 20s, he is his late 40s), is married with children. I find it difficult to describe my attraction to him. While I am certainly sexually attracted to him at times, I am most attracted to his emotional intensity, his sense of humor, and his ability to understand me when I feel no one else is able to. I also admire the many ways he has changed his life for the better; he is a wonderful father and is consistently amazing at his job. I have witnessed the ways others look up to him and respect him and believe that he has helped to change the lives of people he has worked with. For several months now, I have considered telling him how I really feel, but always stopped myself for fear that it would ultimately change our friendship in some final way.

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It got me wondering: Are these accurate reflections of what actually happens when someone cheats -- is it just a lapse, a mistake? I called upon a couple of experts -- not to psychoanalyze Stewart but rather our peculiar species as a whole.

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Both times I felt awful about it afterward. Kathy, his significant other, was a friend of mine, a sophisticated but sincere woman who would never betray a friend as I did to her. I hurt a pal, and I hurt inside.

But there was a third betrayal. It seems a small slice when you look at the whole pie, but it’s the part that’s remained after all the forgiving.

I was not asked to my friend Arjay’s party. Mike was.

That was not the end of the world for me, but it was symptomatic of the attitude of my other chums – the old-fashioned double standard. I became the “other woman.” Mike and I both screwed up. Twice. But as far as my other women friends were concerned, I was the one to blame.

Even when I was in high school, I thought it incredibly dumb when I heard two girls got into it because one “stole” the other’s boyfriend. It seemed that this “helpless” male – whom I’m sure was not hog-tied and kidnapped – was the one who should have been knocked on his can by both young women. But, no. He usually stood by the sidelines, accepting back pats and reveling in the prestige of two cats using fists and fingernails to maim each other in his name. You’d think we’d wise up and outgrow that nonsense. You’d think.

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Recently my husband of 18 years has explored his sexuality with other men. He admitted having four sexual encounters with random men he solicited from Craigslist. After a week of hell, and many a shouting match, he begged me to take him back, claiming that his experimentation is not worth losing his family. As in a textbook scenario, he, somehow, convinced himself that I, being very liberal and supportive of gay community, would understand, and maybe even approve, his urges. Having two teenage daughters and being a stay-at-home mom, I have initially agreed to let him back into the family fold, after all his STD tests came back clean.

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When we first started seeing each other, she was married, I was married and we were both having affairs with other people. She told me in very exquisite detail about many -- if not all -- of her sexual adventures (many of them extramarital with married men). She went into great detail about how affairs started, when, where, the type of sex performed (oral/anal) with each man. Her sexual experience was far greater than mine.

I have asked her in recent months to recount what she told me 25 years ago about her sexual experiences. Not only will she not discuss it and gets angry about it, she now claims that she never did any of those things. Well, of course, I have some proof that she did many.

My question is why can't I stop obsessing over her past sexual conquests (and that's what they were -- she seduced primarily married men), and why is she now denying and refusing to discuss her past?

I feel for your wife, man. You're interrogating her about her sexual past after a quarter-century of marriage. There should be a statute of limitations on such things.

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The men gathered around were rapt. Who could blame them? This was at least as good as any porn movie. And it involved a real man with huge muscles and tattoos. But Rachael sighed and walked by me in a huff, slid open the screen door leading to the living room and shut it loudly behind her. A sinking feeling pierced the haze of my high. Jason and Mandy showed no signs of letting up, so I headed inside to find Rachael.

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I want to feebly premise this by saying that we are both nice people. Ben especially (though Ben is not his real name). He spends much of his career helping others, and is adored by everyone he meets. I don’t know if this counts as much, but my hobby is chasing down lost pets and finding their homes. We both rabidly loved our wronged former partners, all of them. But that’s not the point, because it never is. Cheating is not about love.

The relationship proceeded in a cautious yet positive manner, despite our unsuccessful pasts. We are both writers, so we had enough to talk about. (Space breaks! Semicolons!) We fought well, which I always find important. I liked to watch him rearrange my books; I appreciated the scuff marks his boots left in the kitchen. The dog grew fond, after a mourning period. Ben just seemed to fit.

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The sexy alarmism of Newsweek's latest cover story is irresistible -- but it should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Mental health experts haven't come to the consensus that sex addiction even exists, let alone that it's an epidemic. The cultural phenomenon of sex addiction, which I first wrote about in 2009, is just that: A cultural phenomenon, not a legitimate medical diagnosis, and the release this week of the much buzzed-about "Shame," a sex-addiction drama starring Michael Fassbender, further secures the concept's place in the zeitgeist. Never mind that it was rejected from the upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry's bible.

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I'm writing because I feel like I'm going crazy. I dated a man for about five years. We were engaged the last year of our relationship and also living together. However, I ended it very abruptly when I found out he had been cheating on me in various ways with many different women. I had had my suspicions, and when I talked to him about it he told me I was acting paranoid and jealous and just being overall ridiculous.

However, the suspicious feelings got so bad that I hacked into his computer one weekend while he was on a business trip. I found evidence that he had indeed been cheating on me for some time, even talking bad about me to some of the women he was with. Even his so-called business trip was a weekend tryst with a woman he had met on Craigslist. To make a long, painful story short, I ended it, moved out of the apartment we shared, and several months later he moved across the country for graduate school and we haven't kept in touch.

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You don't say that you're turned on by the thought of your significant other cheating on you, so I'll direct my answer to the "some people" that you speak of. These folks, who are not you, are lucky because there is a wealth of fascinating theories on the topic.

This particular kink is called cuckoldery, courtesy of female cuckoo birds known for laying eggs in other birds' nests. Initially, the term "cuckold" was used to describe men with adulterous wives, particularly those who were duped into raising other men's offspring – a timeless, deep-seated fear that has been immortalized in the work of literary greats like Shakespeare and D.H. Lawrence. The meaning has since evolved to include those who are turned on by their partner's infidelity. Fast-forwarding to the Internet age, you have "cucks" who actually advertise for and seek out partners -- sometimes referred to as "bulls" in this sexual subculture -- for  their wives. Believe it or not, this genre of porn is currently "the second most popular heterosexual interest in English-language search engines," according to the bible on such things, Sai Gadaam and Ogi Ogas' "A Billion Wicked Thoughts."

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We've put together a slide show to highlight the remarkable rhetorical gymnastics of politicians confronted with sexy -- or, really, not-so-sexy -- photo scandals.

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I love your column and think you are very wise. I could use your advice. I am an early 40s woman who has been twice divorced. The first marriage was right out of high school, no kids thankfully, and the second one was in my early 30s. Again, no children came of this relationship. Both husbands cheated and that is the reason I left. I did a great deal of emotional work on this pattern of picking men and realized I was picking narcissists.

I started choosing men who were the opposite of narcissists -- guys with Asperger's disorder. Men who were so thankful to have a date that I knew they wouldn't cheat on me. This resulted in a history of three-month relationships. I began to feel I was cursed, that all my relationships would end at three months. My point of view is that it takes me that long to see the real person without the illusion that we tend to create in new romances. I am always the one to end relationships.

I am currently in a new relationship with a person who I have a great deal in common with. He is definitely not Asperger's. He seems insightful, caring, giving, intelligent, funny and thoughtful. However, it seems we have a lot of disagreements.

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"That is, if the man was European, and he went back to his own country after a couple of lovely afternoons together. Maybe he could be French." Gina sipped her pinot.

I agreed I'd like to have an affair. "I mean, in the vaguest possible sense with the most generalized of men," I said. "Not with a real man who exists, mind you. I don't want to have an affair with someone who gains weight or doesn't pick up after himself. A European gentleman sounds nice to me, too."

The next day, I happened to be on the second floor of my building to sign up for Lunchtime Toning and Stretching. I had been spending too much time writing about the world's latest earthquake at the relief organization where I worked, and I was ready to get back on an exercise regimen. I also knew it was the floor that Dag worked on, so I poked my head into his office to say hello. (Dag is not his name, by the way. I changed his name, along with others, to protect his identity.) I'd met Dag a few weeks before, when our sons had a play date at my house, and we discovered we worked in the same Upper West Side office building. Not long after, he'd called me and we'd lunched in the cafeteria together.

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A few years ago I went through a period of "sowing wild oats" following a breakup with my former fiancé-to-be at the age of 30. Looking back, I see this period of my life now mainly as confused and on the verge of danger. Nonetheless I came out of it just fine -- contracted no STDs, didn't get hooked on drugs (although I did have some scary moments overdoing it with the booze).

Anyhow, this "living it up" phase included times when I'd go through several sexual partners in a month. In fact whenever an opportunity came up, I usually said yes, or even, when I felt safe and self-assured (which was almost always) I initiated sex -- be it with strangers in a club, friends, or friends of friends at parties, on the bus, just anywhere you could meet people basically. Most of my flings were single men around my age or younger, or men whose status I didn't know (in case of ONSs).

My best friend has liberal social views but leads a strictly traditional life. She married her high school sweetheart, never gave anyone a blow job, etc. After I broke up with my fiancé I used tell her about some of my "love affairs" but soon stopped, because I felt she really couldn't relate. I did tell her that I had a lot of sex and that sometimes I think I may have gone overboard.

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