I didn’t arrive home from my bus trip until after 9 p.m., and I was exhausted. Luckily, my fiancé, Ryan, had dinner waiting for me: seared tuna and couscous. He poured us each a glass of white wine from an open bottle, and I gratefully took it, not stopping to wonder why he had a half-drunk bottle of wine when he always prefers a beer.

After dinner, I immediately opened my laptop to catch up on work, but Ryan called me into the bedroom. He wanted to talk. I finished my email, and then went in to join him on the bed.

He took a deep breath. “I had an affair while you were traveling,” he said. For a microsecond, my heart plummeted. Two decades of movies, literature, and lyrics have ingrained those words in my mind as a deal breaker. It’s the end of a relationship. It’s the signal that he doesn’t love you, that he’s actually a schmuck. That your life with him is shattered.

“I whipped the shit out of a girl here in this bed,” he continued.

I remembered myself, leaned forward, and — smiling seductively — said, “Tell me everything.”

I wasn’t upset. I was elated. Because he had gamely fulfilled a request I had put to him a month before: I had asked him to have a secret affair.

Now would be a good time to tell you that Ryan and I are in an open relationship. But, as I am quick to point out to anyone concerned about my welfare, it is a healthy one. I was the first one to bring up the idea of opening up at the beginning of our relationship, but he had been considering it since before the demise of his former marriage. So we’ve approached it as partners and equals. We also communicate — a lot. We follow rules, we keep each other apprised of any development in our dating lives, and we have veto power if, for whatever reason, we are uncomfortable with what each other is doing…or who. In fact, there might be too much communication.

A couple of months ago, we started going through a hard time, sexually. My libido just couldn’t keep up with his, and we were caught in an (I suspect) all too typical circle. He’d tentatively put it out there. I’d feel pressured to have sex to reward his gentlemanly behavior and fulfill that commonly accepted quota floating around of having sex once a week, in order to have a healthy relationship. Then I’d feel completely unsexy because of the pressure I was putting on myself.

He was doing all the right things — touching the right places, saying the right dirty talk, taking his time with foreplay — and yet, I found myself getting so wrapped up in my thoughts that I was unmoved by his ministrations. What happened to wanting it so badly that just a soft touch could make me orgasm? Could I ever have that feeling back?

After thinking back through my sex life and all the times in which I have been electrified with sexual longing, I realized that it always had to do with doing something new and exciting that was formerly taboo. Think watching porn; attending life drawing classes and sketching a muscled nude model; hooking up with a coworker; getting nude photos taken of me and then hooking up with the photographer; anal play; anal porn; making out with women; dating a tall, dark, divorced, South American musician who’s nine years my senior; opening up our relationship; threesomes; sex parties; foursomes… Each time, I dove into the foreign and forbidden activity with the need and delight of a child from an organic hippie commune tasting her first Hershey's Bar. I wanted as much as possible, and I wanted it all the time. Then, eventually, I would abandon it when it became too familiar or normalized.

So it was, I decided, with my fiancé. My wonderful, trustworthy, grocery-shopping, dishes-doing, cat food-buying, permission-seeking fiancé. Up until the end of last year, I thought it was perfect and necessary that he so diligently told me when he got a woman’s number, when he scheduled a date, where they were going on the date, how the date was going, and when the date ended and he was on his way home. He always made absolutely sure I was comfortable with everything that was going on, even though my answer was always, without fail, “That’s great! Have fun!” He even spent significant portions of dates with other women talking about me and our relationship, so there could never be any doubt about the fact that I was his primary partner and one true love, and that these other dates were just for fun and nothing more.

This made me comfortable and built up my trust in him to stratospheric levels. But it wasn’t actually sexy. It was safe. On my end, when I went on dates, I didn’t talk about us. Not that I don’t think our relationship is amazing — when I’m with my girlfriends I can’t shut up about it. But on dates, I wanted to feel the crackle of sexual tension that comes with being secretive. I wanted to feel like I was doing something wrong. And I realized that I wanted Ryan to feel that too, without the ghost of his girlfriend tagging along as a third wheel, looking over his shoulder at every interaction.

So no, I didn’t really want to hear about the mundanities of his back and forth on OKCupid, about when he’s turned down for a date, his long conversations spent convincing them that I know about the open relationship and I’m perfectly fine with it, or when he takes a women on several dates and she decides getting involved in an open relationship isn’t for her.