'I just can’t forget my sexy ex-boyfriend'

In the 2010 movie, Scott Pilgrim must defeat his new girlfriend's seven evil exes in order to win her heart.

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QUESTION: Much as I love my husband, I can’t help fantasising about my ex. He broke up with me five years ago and though I’m completely sure our relationship had no long-term future (he was a serial flirt with no interest in commitment), our sex life was red hot and far more exciting than my ‘vanilla’ marriage. Otherwise, wedded life is good and I know my husband would be hurt and furious if he found out what was going on in my head. How can I stop?

ANSWER: Most of us have at least one former partner who has a pernicious grip on our erotic imagination.

Almost invariably it’s someone who called a halt to the relationship, because there’s nothing like unfinished business for messing with your mind.

You never experienced sexual tedium with that person, because they let you go before you fell into any kind of routine and now you credit them with a prowess they almost certainly never had.

Your former boyfriend clearly has a particularly strong hold on you, and no wonder: he was clearly a master of the art of short-changing women.

It sounds as if he had read the player’shandbook to treating women mean and keeping ’em keen. He flirted with every other female around and wasnever going to offer you any form ofcommitment.

As a result, you panted after him, like a kicked dog that loves its master more each time it is mistreated.

Most people have sexual fantasies about people other than their partners at some stage of a long-term relationship (as the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter - a committed Christian - once confessed: ‘I have committed adultery in my heart many times’) and there’s generally no real harm in them. They often revolve around film or TV stars, or some figure we don’t really know.

The truth is we wouldn’t want to act upon these imagined scenarios if a real-life opportunity presented itself. However, your daydreams about your former boyfriend aren’t so innocent, because it’s clear there’s a large part of you that really does hanker to get back between the sheets with him.

That is why the knowledge of the obsession would be so painful to your husband and why you feel the way you do about your secret sexual desires.

You are constantly comparing your happy marriage to a love affair that made you feel undervalued, yet you’re finding your current relationship wanting by comparison.

It’s time to radically rethink your attitudes, before your dissatisfaction forges a rift in your marriage.

You need to recognise that if you had stayed with your ‘red hot’ lover, the sex would have eventually become more pedestrian or ‘vanilla’, because that’s invariably what happens in long-term relationships when the first rush of electrifying passion subsides.

The compensation for your love life becoming more routine is that you care for one another on a more profound level, are willing to give more to your partner and to really strive to reach each other’s sexual trigger points. But if someone is as careless with emotions as your former lover, they don’t care a fig about that kind of erotic generosity.

If you had stayed with the guy, you would be in a loveless union with a man who was serially unfaithful - and there’s nothing sexy about that scenario.

You need to focus on the reality of this man’s personality and the cheap emotional tricks he plays on the women he encounters.

Next time you feel tempted to fantasise about your ex, you must strip away all the romantic illusions and bring negative feelings into play, so that you start associating him with sleazy, feel-bad emotions.

Instead of imagining him making love to you expertly, visualise him cheating on you and exposing you to the risks of sexually transmitted diseases.

That may sound extreme, but you need to engage some powerful weapons of mental warfare to strip this man of the mystic sexual expertise you have endowed him with. Because, believe me, this fixation is all in the mind.

Finally, you need to ask yourself howyou would feel if you discovered thatyour lovely, kind husband was similarly preoccupied with a sexy former lover. Distraught, I would imagine, and deeply jealous.

In fact, it might be the one scenario guaranteed to make you transfer your obsessive feelings to him.

But your spouse shouldn’t have to behave in an immature manner to make you desire him.

Instead, you need to develop a mature attitude to your past. It’s time to move on and relish the present. - Daily Mail

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