Be his obsession, because it is only vanity.

They come to me you know. I mean your husbands. Especially if you and he are in your late 40's and early 50's. Haven't been having sex regularly for a while. Yes, he comes to me. He comes not for the sex itself, since we don't have physical sex. Perhaps he has his hopes, in fact I know he dreams of luring and seducing a beautiful young woman with promises of financial security. His hopes, in the general sense are not impossible, may december, or may late october, relationships are not unheard of.

Spare me the ev-bio theorizing about reproductive fitness. It certainly is a factor, but in truth it isn't for children either. That requires physical sex, or at least exchange of bodily fluids. And that doesn't happen either.

So why does he come to me? Other than he long ago found your touch cold and your nose turned away from him? Before sex comes mystery, intimacy and allure. Before sex comes the fit of people. Much of what goes on on second life is something more the pornography, and less than sex. It is most definitely cheating under just about any relevant definition of the word.

So what is it that he is paying for?

Obsession. There is, someplace in him, a raw nerve of vanity that you do not meet. Men are vain creatures. The ones who berate me for not sucking their virtual cock for free, as one arrogant old man did yesterday, want that vanity of being wanted for free. Vanity. He is here for his vanity.

And that is what you, the wife who is left alone at night, do not feed. You don't feed his sexual vanity. You don't feed his personal vanity. You are no longer the gem on his arm. He knows he isn't sleeping with you, so his masculine territorial vanity does not mean as much when you are out, because he is not yours and you are not his. Vanity. Vanity. Vanity.

And that is precisely what you have made it your task to humiliate. You can no longer tolerate his vanity, or his pride, or even a scrap of self-respect, and you carve him up. Yes, he is cheating on you, but he isn't. There must be a country song someplace that goes "I ain't a cheatin' cause were not havin' sex." (No that's not my joke, I am not sure if I wish it was...) It's playing on that little radio in the back of his mind. He's not unfaithful, because you aren't keeping the faith, and you have no faith in him. That's his tory, and he is sticking to it, any way.

I don't know first hand what it is to be disappointed in life, and I think that tempers the cruelty of my advice, because I am not sure I would do any better. However, I can only report on what I see first hand from the refugees of older loveless marriages, some close friends, many clients, and uncounted crates of them jerks I brush off as they attempt to engage in crude brow beating for sex. They call me a whore for not having sex for free, when I don't feed their vanity. They call you all sorts of things when you don't either.

My advice for some is to let go. There is no hope and had not been for a long time. But I think most women who are married to the men I see, want their husband's back. Men need three things I think, they are simple creatures. Money, esteem and sex. All of these play to the depths of their vanity. All of them say that they are better somehow than other men. They may have their fetishes: some want money, or the esteem of a very narrow group of people. But it is still vanity which makes them obsess.

Now I am the last person, avatar, or other self-identifying entity to say we are not vain to. But our vanity is different. Very likely you have carved up his self-image, precisely because your vanity has fallen, and he no longer feeds it. But let me be straight forward. You've become a double ledger accounting system. A calendar program that nags at regular intervals. And endless series of warnings and wearing wishes. He gets that at work. You talk of nothing that he is interested in, and don't move a finger to try. Maybe he is trash, and not worthy. But then, you should let go in that case, no?

There are time honored strategies for dealing with this situation. One of the cruelest, and oldest, is, of course, to feed your vanity by controlling his. This is a very self-conscious way of doing things, and it's trademark skill is to be the lady mistress of oral sex. For my generation oral sex, giving and receiving, is a normal part of relations between people. Oral sex on the first date does not mark anything as special, it just is. Controlling a man through the simple mechanism of controlling his release, and then having a flush faced vanity in it is a Glenn Close sort of smile to have, but works. He's not going to go to the computer to engage in banter with me, if you have drained him dry.

It doesn't make you a whore. The whore road is different, it involves giving in wholly to lusts and sexual fetishes, and opening your self, not merely using your mouth in exquisite ways, to whatever his wished needs are. You will see a great deal of BDSM here, one aspect of that is the strategy of simply giving in and being a cohort in sexual outlawry. It is growing both rl and sl, because the bonds that make traditional romantic marriage, or its nuclear suburban cousin any way, have frayed beyond the ability to take the stresses and pains that the world places on our self-esteem. That's the back drop you see, we treat people very badly in this world, and when they get off of work, they need a deeper and more potent form of ego enhancement than mere consumer ism offers to most.

The next solution, four if you are counting, is to become something else, namely, his courtesan. I am, often enough, a courtesan rather than whore or even prostitute. It is not just the virtual sex, but the whole shell which wraps it, the whole elegance and exhilaration of who I am in second life. You too can be this in second life, and in real life as well. Many, many, many women come here and make themselves into the creatures they wish they could be in real life, and create spaces which are beyond what their ordinary economic means could afford. For relatively modest prices a person can buy a low prim count sim and turn it into a glamorous estate. Play with your husband here, or in real life, and you will find that he will not be thinkin gof other women very much.

All of these roads have costs, I know this, but they are costs that are necessary. At a certain point a 50 year old man realizes the same thing 20 year old woman does: having something the opposite sex wants very badly. This is what tilts the playing field between men and women. A man in his thirties and a woman in her thirties are roughly equally desirable and have roughly a parity in the number of partners, by the late forties, it is completely the other way. Attrition has taken its toll on men, and now there are far more women who are desperate to settle down. One reason so many of the older men I meet believe there is free sex, is because the older women are far more willing to have virtual sex to get a chance at a longer term relationship than they would have been at say, 25. Many of these men respond to this by playing the field, and the internet makes that field much larger and easier to move around in.

So that is what I see looking down the long end of a Sexgen diamond sex bed. If you are an older woman, and you want the attention and fidelity of your older husband, then the road back into the central place in his life is through his vanity. There are many ways to do this, from a knowing manipulation of his sex organs directly, to a more indirect stroking of his ego by becoming the woman he imagines having on his arm. Second Life helps make that possible, and coming to play here, as a couple, is a very direct route to a kind of magnetic cache that couples create around them. But here or there, if you don't want him having virtual sex in my virtual bed, you must take it to become his obsession. He is obsessed by the thing that completes him, but that softness or grace or powerful mystique that he lacks. There is nothing wrong in being that, as I am, as the great loves in history have been.

There is no shame in being that living temple of Isis to which men's spirits seep in their waking dreams.