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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The sociology professor at New York University is something of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest China. The result is her fascinating book, "Unhitched." It doesn't simply offer a mind-bending cross-cultural perspective -- you can find that in any Anthropology 101 textbook. Instead, Stacey uses her observations to underscore just out how stifling and unstable the Western romantic ideal of marital monogamy can be for some people, as well as the vast array of romantic arrangements that are already out there in the world.

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As we're continually reminded of the problems with monogamy -- most recently courtesy of Anthony Weiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- we seem to keep rediscovering this solution anew, or reinventing the marital wheel, if you will. There is at once a desire for a way to avoid the pain and humiliation of failed monogamy and yet resistance to actual alternatives. With these issues at the fore of the American subconscious, Times writer Mark Oppenheimer devotes his feature to detailing Savage's personal solution: deemphasizing marital monogamy in favor of total honesty. That philosophy can manifest itself in countless ways -- from simply refusing to let an affair destroy a partnership to agreeing ahead of time that sex with others is OK.

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"Facts" are easy to come by in this arena, in the sense that there are scores of surveys on the prevalence of extramarital affairs in America. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey famously reported that seven out of 10 men and one in five women admitted to having an extramarital affair. Most contemporary surveys estimate the number of people who cheat during a marriage at anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of women and 30 to 60 percent of men. Note, though, that in 2002 the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that 15 percent of married women admitted to an affair, compared to 22 percent of men. The best educated guess, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, is that an affair takes place within 40 to 76 percent of marriages: "A conservative interpretation of these figures suggests that although perhaps half of all married couples remain monogamous, the other half will experience an infidelity over the course of a marriage."

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I married her 60 years ago, and right away I knew it was a mistake!

Their punch lines testify to nagging, sniping, dissatisfaction and the loss of romance. Their baseline assumption is that a lengthy marriage is sexless or, at best, sexually worn out.

Darling, do you remember the first time we made love?

-- Hell, I can't remember the last time!

These days, there's a new rack of clever, grim headlines for comedians to invent:

"Maria & Arnold: Terminated!"

"IMF head sits in jail, waiting for a bail-out"

Meanwhile, I'm sitting at home, practicing my punditry and wondering why it is that after 36 years with the same woman -- with whom I have made love more than 3,000 times -- there's nothing I'd like better right now than to go into the next room to strip off her clothes.

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There are countless books on the subject that boast secrets to prevention (for example, "Emotional Infidelity: How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage and 10 Other Secrets to a Great Relationship") or evidence-gathering ("Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs"). Naturally, the Web provides even sadder examples: There are sites promoting everything from GPS tracking devices to computer spyware to lessons on "how to become a human lie detector." My favorite is the website for the guide "How to Detect An Affair," which promises "rock solid proof that your partner is cheating on you in 48 hours." It's rather poetic that it specifically promises damning proof of an affair -- rather than evidence one way or another -- because, I mean, if you're paying $50 for the eBook on cheating, chances are there's a reason. Similarly, Catch a Cheat boasts "3 sure-fire tactics of getting them to cheat right before your eyes." Buy your self-fulfilling prophecy now!

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A breach of fidelity is agonizing under any circumstances. But if you're Dean Sheremet and your wife just ran off with Eddie Cibrian, you can choose to never be in the same room with LeAnn Rimes again. If you're Shania Twain and your husband's been putting it to your assistant, it's more complicated -- you've got to figure out how to be decent, for the rest of your life, to the father of your son. But like the late Elizabeth Edwards, Maria Shriver, the woman who famously lobbied on behalf of her husband's trustworthiness after a slew of sexual bombshells eight years ago, is now dealing not just with her husband's stark public admission of philandering, but also with the fact that her four children have a new sibling.

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Researchers subjected a bunch of undergrad guinea pigs to a computer game involving photos of strangers, followed by a questionnaire. When their attention to photos of attractive members of the opposite sex was "subtly limited" in the game, it "reduced relationship satisfaction and commitment and increased positive attitudes toward infidelity." The study explains, "Being told simply not to look is probably not an effective strategy for boosting satisfaction and commitment or reducing interest in alternatives" -- and it's for the same reason that telling a kid to keep his hands off the cookie jar doesn't reduce his interest in sweets. "The story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit underscores a general human tendency to want what we can't have," says researcher Nathan DeWall.

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My wife was solidly upper middle class, very creative, a perfect social hostess. We had some mutual interests. Both of us were good skiers, we shared a common enjoyment of travel and an appreciation of music, art and architecture. But three children and 20 years later, we had nothing in common and nothing to say to each other. We hadn't had sex in years, and we did not miss it. There is nothing unusual about what caused our alienation: The long hours I worked to give my family a good life, an accumulation of hurts and resentments, poor communication. There is something unusual, however, in what happened next. Four years ago, I met an American woman and fell madly in love. She became pregnant with my child, a secret I kept from my wife.

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