Dear Joely: The Affair Was Perfect. Then He Went Down on Me.

Dear Joely,

I am 44, married with two children, aged 12 and 8, but the relationship is all over bar the shouting. It won’t be easy to leave. My husband is abusive, not physically, but through a complex web of coercive control. I am seeing a psychologist. That’s just some background.

For a long while, I have felt as though I am ripe to have an affair. As I said, there is nothing between my husband and me, and I am constantly left alone while he works long hours and travels abroad for work. I work as well, but the childcare has somehow worked out to be my responsibility.

About four months ago, I met a man through work and we really hit it off straight away. He is intelligent, kind and generous, and we have heaps in common. We get together for meals whenever we can, normally lunches because of our commitments. We talk and talk and talk. He gets me, and for the first time in years I feel understood.

I should mention that he is also unhappily married. That’s just the start of it, though. Our lives are so similar it’s actually spooky.

Over time, we built up quite a closeness and, yes, an attraction as well. We ended up making a date to spend a night together at a hotel away from the area where we live. My children were spending the night with their grandparents.

It was really quite lovely being with him in those circumstances. I got to dress up, and we had drinks at a nice bar and then dinner together. It had been years since I had done anything even remotely like that.

After the drinks and food, we ended up back in the hotel room. Things progressed to kissing, then touching, and soon afterwards we were naked in bed.

He went down to give me oral sex, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

It was awful. It didn’t turn me on at all. He was all over the place and didn’t seem to have the first idea about female anatomy. I found myself in the really difficult position of not knowing whether to fake it or say something, which I think he detected.

I tried to encourage him to have normal sex, but that didn’t work either. He wasn’t erect. After all the weeks of build-up, talk, closeness and caring, followed by the drinks and dinner, it was a terrible outcome. I felt like crying.

He ended up pacing around the room, not naked, and I tried to get him to talk about it. He wouldn’t speak for ages. Eventually, he told me he had never gone down on a woman before and had felt enough about me to make me his first.

My reaction was not what he had hoped for, and he felt ashamed and embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say.

We spent an awkward night together, and the atmosphere was horrible. Since then, things haven’t been the same between us. I miss him terribly because the messages and conversations haven’t been as they were.

Worst of all, I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams ever having sex with him again. It has completely turned me off. I wish I could change that, but I have the ick. A serious case of it.

If I’m honest, I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that he had never given oral sex to a woman at his age, he is 39, or that his first attempt, with me, was so bad.

I feel down in the dumps, lonely, sad and disappointed. To be honest, I wish I had just given an Oscar-worthy performance.

Pathetic in Putney

Dear Pathetic in Putney,

First, you are not pathetic. You are disappointed, lonely, sexually underwhelmed and currently living inside a marriage where your freedom has been slowly parcelled up and handed back to you in supervised portions. That is quite enough misery without adding self-contempt to the buffet.

And no, you should not have given an Oscar-worthy performance.

An Oscar-worthy performance might have spared him one mortifying evening, but it would have sentenced you to an entire sequel. Possibly a franchise.

The problem is not simply that he was bad at oral sex. People can learn. Female anatomy is not guarded by riddles, fire-breathing dragons or a subscription paywall. A willing, attentive adult can improve enormously by listening, asking and resisting the urge to approach a vulva like an unfamiliar control panel.

What seems to have killed the mood was the whole peculiar bundle: his inexperience, your shock, his shame, the pacing, the silence, the failed erection, and the crushing distance between the night you had imagined and the one you actually got.

You had not merely booked a hotel room. You had booked passage out of your life.

For weeks, this man had been intelligence, kindness, conversation, recognition and possibility. He made you feel understood after years of being controlled and neglected. By the time you reached that bed, he was carrying the combined weight of romance, escape, sexual resurrection and proof that another life was waiting.

That is an impossible amount of luggage for one man to bring into a hotel room, particularly when he has never previously travelled south.

Your ick may be permanent. Sometimes desire disappears with the speed and finality of a stage trapdoor. But it may also be protecting you from the humiliation and sadness of that night. You cannot order yourself to want him again, but you also do not need to decide immediately that the entire connection was fraudulent.

The more revealing question is whether the two of you can talk honestly now.

Can he say, “I was inexperienced, frightened and ashamed,” without making you responsible for repairing his pride?

Can you say, “I was disappointed and overwhelmed, and I did not know how to guide you,” without turning his lack of experience into a character defect?

And can either of you discuss what happened without pretending the evening was solely a technical malfunction involving his tongue?

Because there is another awkward truth here: neither of you is free. You are both using this relationship partly as refuge from unhappy marriages. That does not mean your feelings are unreal. It does mean the relationship has been growing in a greenhouse, protected from school runs, bills, domestic habits, difficult decisions and the full weather of ordinary life.

Before deciding whether this man deserves another chance in bed, I would concentrate on something more urgent: creating a safe, independent plan for leaving your abusive marriage.

Coercive control often intensifies when the controlling person senses separation. Please continue working with your psychologist, and seek specialist domestic-abuse support to help you plan practically and safely. Do not make your escape dependent on whether this affair survives. You need a door that belongs to you, not one held open by another unhappily married person.

As for your lover, one honest conversation is warranted. Not because you owe him another sexual audition, but because you miss the friendship and closeness that existed before the hotel. Tell him the night affected you, that his withdrawal has hurt, and that you would rather speak plainly than let embarrassment rot the whole relationship in silence.

Then see what he does.

A man can be forgiven for not knowing where everything is. At thirty-nine, however, he should be capable of having a conversation after getting lost.

Yours in better exits and considerably better sex,

Joely