Why do i enjoy my wife talking about former lovers?

"I find it very erotic when my wife talks about her former lovers"
A reader wants to know why he enjoys the thought of others making love to his partner of 30 years even though the reality should be upsetting.

Suzi Godson
Fantasy allows us to explore sex in a way we would never dream of doing in real life. In fantasy, there is no risk, no accountability and no consequences, so ideas that a person might find simultaneously fascinating and repellent can be tested without fear. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that because sexual fantasies trigger arousal, they may play an important, previously unrecognised, role in procreation. Freudian psychoanalysts, by contrast, speculate that fantasy is a form of wish fulfilment and a mechanism for overcoming memories of early traumatic experiences.

We know a lot more about the private adventures of the human mind than we have done in the past thanks to Sex and The Psyche (Penguin Books), psychoanalyst Brett Kahr's epic investigation into 20,000 British sexual fantasies. According to Kahr's research, about 96 per cent of males and about 90 per cent of females report having sexual fantasies. Though a good number of the fantasies described in Sex and The Psyche read like bad porn, some stand out. One man wants to bind the Queen and Baroness Thatcher with ropes and then make love to each woman in turn. Another, a woman whose parents perished in the Holocaust, is aroused by the thought of SS officers in jackboots.

I contacted Kahr to ask his views on your particular fantasy. He was keen to point out that unless one undergoes a lengthy experience of psychotherapy it can be difficult to know the precise meaning of a fantasy. However, he thought you might find it reassuring to know that during his research he discovered that “the fantasy of watching one's wife with another man/other men is quite common, reported by about 30 per cent of people”.

Because most people's sexual fantasies revolve around someone other than a current long-term partner, 95 per cent of Kahr's research subjects had never shared their fantasies with another person. However, research shows that couples who use fantasy are more sexually active, and in long-term unions it can be a highly effective way of staving off sexual boredom without compromising fidelity.

Though the masochistic and voyeuristic elements of your fantasy make you feel a little uncomfortable, fear and fantasy are rarely far apart, and it is the conflict they cause that creates the erotic charge for you. And as fantasies go, yours is a remarkably flattering one for your wife. She must enjoy the fact that she plays the central role and no doubt embellishes her sexual history for your delight.

Indeed, I have no doubt that many readers will be terribly envious to hear that your 30-year relationship with your wife is so strong that you can share and enjoy this mutually arousing trigger together.

Suzi Godson is the author of The Sex Book (Cassell, £16.99) and The Body Bible (Penguin, £16.99)

Dr Thomas Stuttaford
There can be few doctors who haven't listened to patients telling them similar stories, although to most people a husband finding erotic the thought of his wife making love to other men sounds strange, even disturbing.

The standard explanation of why men have your tendency to wallow in their wife's other sexual relationships is that they divide women into two types, whores or immaculate virgins. Whores are there to satisfy male lust. To men with this complex, sex is carnal, grubby and furtive instead of being an outward and visible expression of love. Sexual activity is, therefore, enjoyable only with a woman who can be fitted into the whore category. Sexual relations would be entirely inappropriate with a saintly virgin.

Problems arise when a man who has this opinion of women marries. Lust may have driven him into the arms of his wife, and they may even have enjoyed a happy sex life pre-marriage because at that time her sexual availability had put her into the whore category. However, once married, his partner assumed the role of the saintly mother. How could he copulate with a mother?
The answer to this problem for some men is to remind themselves that before they met their wives they had had a full and exciting sex life with a variety of partners. Their wives' pre-marital sexual frolics may, in truth, have been perfectly normal but, even so, they could later serve as an acceptable subconscious excuse for the husbands to put their wives into the whore category. This would make sex with them acceptable.

The more explicit the details of frequently recounted tales of early love lives, the more permissible it would seem for men to have sex with their wives. Probably many of the men had an overly strict upbringing that left them feeling that sex could be enjoyed only with women who they believed behaved like whores.

If you have been married for 30 years it is unlikely that the effect of your early environment can be expunged. Sexual counselling might help you to re-orientate your approach to women and allow you to enjoy a sex life that isn't dependant on a recitation of your wife's adventures with former flames.

Your wife probably finds it boring, possibly annoying, to have to recount the details of past liaisons. It is even possible that your wife might suppose that you were more interested sexually in her earlier lovers' sexual prowess than in her. Her consolation can be that some men have this complex in a more extreme form.

Some men can't fully enjoy sex unless a third person, a lover for their partner, is physically present. Variations on this foible include watching through a keyhole, or taking photographs, as their wife and her lover copulate before the married pair have sex.

Dr Thomas Stuttaford, the Times doctor, spent many years working in a genitourinary clinic