RACHEL WILBUR: I took a lover because my marriage was a sexual desert. But I don’t want to divorce my husband

Every January, my extended family has a big get-together.

Each person brings their children and partner or, in my case, partners — my husband Marcus and my boyfriend Neil.

Yes, you read that correctly: I have a husband and a boyfriend.

But far from being a source of intense animosity, often the two men end up talking to each other about history or politics. I wouldn’t say they’re best friends, but they respect each other and exchange birthday presents, recipes and occasional emails.

There’s no tension. It draws amused smiles from my siblings; I’ve always liked men with strong opinions and now I have two in my life.

As for our children (one still at school, the other at university), they are at ease with the situation. It means I often spend time away from home, but their father, 69, loves his own hearth, so nothing much has changed over the course of their childhood.

Our situation is often misinterpreted. When new friends assume I’m poly amorous, I firmly disabuse them of the notion. The boundaries of both relationships are clear-cut and don’t overlap: Marcus and I bring up our children together, co-own a house and have a deeply loving familial bond, as well as shared finances.

But we haven’t had sex for 16 years and our love life slowly dwindled for a decade before that.

My lover Neil, 59, and I have been in a monogamous romantic relationship for nearly nine years. While we socialise together, our domestic life is largely limited to cooking and watching Netflix. He has an adult son, has never been married and lives in a bachelor-style apartment with an epic sound system, but few creature comforts.

I know some people would find this easier to understand if I was divorced or separated from Marcus. But they have no idea of the background events that led to this unconventional arrangement.

When Marcus was 13 and in his first term at boarding school in the late 1960s, he was sexually abused by a predatory sixth-former. The episode left mental scars that exist to this day and, over the years, I’ve come to understand this is almost certainly the reason he’s found it hard to sustain physical intimacy within an adult relationship.

I also understand only too well that there are few things as lonely as a marriage where one spouse lies awake pining for intimacy, while the other turns their back on sex. And yet I stayed as I loved Marcus. Neither of us understood how destructive his past would prove when we fell passionately in love 30 years ago.

I was just 25 when I met Marcus at work. A colleague had already informed me that the handsome man sitting on the other side of the room (older and senior to both of us) was ‘posh’ and had been ‘interfered with’ at school, before listing his achievements in the arts.

I found the information intriguing and even exotic, like something from a literary memoir. I came from a far more modest background and had grown up watching Brideshead Revisited on TV. There was something of Jeremy Irons’s character, Charles Ryder, about him: darkly handsome, accomplished and a bit tortured.

When Marcus and I fell for one another, he told me the whole story. He was part of the last generation of schoolboys to experience ‘fagging’, which requires new boys to complete tasks for prefects, like making toast and fetching post.

The prefect assigned to him expanded the remit to demanding sexual gratification. Nowadays, a court of law would frame what happened as an 18-year-old boy raping a 13-year-old one.

It’s clear, looking back, that there were some masters who knew what was going on and who probably preyed on boys themselves. I’ve spoken to other men who suffered at the school and said there was a culture of abuse. Marcus’s mother was desperately ill at the time, making him exactly the sort of vulnerable, unhappy boy that groomers seize upon.

When she died near the end of that first awful term, the abuse abruptly stopped. My husband believes someone senior had a quiet word with the prefect. Even so, the after-effects were profound and far-reaching. He remained a sensitive, artistic boy, at odds with the brutality of old-style school life, so left early with a year to kill before he could start university, setting off for Europe on his own with just a passport and rucksack. Once again, he became a target.

When he was hitchhiking across France, an older man in a sports car picked him up and offered him some booze from a hip flask. Marcus told me, quite matter-offactly, that he slipped into unconsciousness and woke up later, abandoned on a grass verge. To this day, he has no idea what happened in the missing hours.

Despite all this, Marcus came across as quietly confident and intellectually sophisticated when I met him. He was 15 years older than me, but so youthful and attractive the age gap didn’t matter. The attraction was clearly, deeply, crazily mutual and utterly fulfilling. All my previous relationships felt hollow and meaningless compared with the emotion that now overpowered me.

We loved the same people, books and films and held the same moral values. The first time we kissed, we both drew back and said ‘I love you’ simultaneously, and before two years had passed, we were walking down the aisle. Our love life was properly passionate in those early days and I’d never felt so happy. Even so, with the luxury of hindsight, there were clues my new husband was suffering from trauma. He found it hard to look into my eyes when we were being intimate and after making love he’d retreat deep inside himself, as if a large toll had been taken.

We never spent all day in bed as I had in previous relationships. Sometimes he underwent long lasting periods of gloom that put such a wall between us. I would weep and implore him for answers. But he denied his school experiences were a factor.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Marcus withdrew his ability to bestow easy physical affection on me. Within five years of marriage, it was not unusual for four months to pass without us having sex. If I tried to instigate intimacy, he’d find an unconvincing excuse: he was exhausted, despondent, had a migraine or was stressed about work.

I come from a large, outgoing family where we discuss problems openly, so I repeatedly tried to draw Marcus out, but it was to no avail. I told him the situation was dangerous and warned my building frustration might lead me, eventually, to stray outside the marriage.

All the more so, because Marcus was becoming ever more of a recluse, refusing to go to social events with me. He would reply, “Yes, I must do better”, but nothing would change.

I sensed my requests for a normal love life felt like unbearable demands to him. When something as precious as sexual innocence has been ripped away from you, it’s not easy to give affection. I never doubted Marcus loved me (and still don’t), but I began to doubt my own physical attractiveness.

It’s hard to feel sexy if your own husband shows no inclination to make love to you. By then I was in my early 30s and had worked my way up to a high-profile job in the media. The disconnect between my private and public life was increasingly distinct and unsettling. But I was also painfully aware that Marcus’s greatest, unspoken fear was of being abandoned.

There were still many things we enjoyed doing together, like long walks in the countryside or hours spent browsing in bookshops or walking around art galleries. I should have sent Marcus for a proper course of talking therapy then and there — no excuses accepted. Instead, I weathered my way through the misery. Eventually, as long predicted, I succumbed to a brief fling with a single colleague, a move born of sheer frustration. It made me realise I’m not one of those people who can enjoy sex when it’s detached from deep emotion.

I told him I loved my husband and would not be decamping. I didn’t tell Marcus about it — I was worried it would push him over the edge — but I felt some marital instinct alerted him to what was happening and spurred him to be more attentive.

During a weekend away, our first child was conceived. Three years later, I coaxed him into trying for a second, pointing out that being an only child hadn’t panned out well for him. Marcus welcomed fatherhood and, in many ways, those early years were the best of our relationship as he lost himself in tending to the babies.

We both loved the old-fashioned pleasures of British seaside holidays and a house full of Lego. I was working part time from our house in Buckinghamshire and Marcus occasionally commuted to his London office, but preferred being at home and overseeing bath time. He expresses love in terms of acts of service: cooking food, cleaning the house, making sure bills are paid on time and wheeling infants down to the childminder.

When we did broach my pre-children affair and the reasons for it, Marcus told me he didn’t blame me, that I’d constantly alerted him to the risks of a sexless marriage. He seemed to feel guiltier than I did. Yet, as the years passed, the underlying problem came no closer to being resolved.

I went back to work full time once my children started school, making me ever more aware my marriage was a sexual desert. I felt like a harridan whenever I tried to raise the subject with Marcus. Eventually I talked to other survivors of sexual abuse. And it was clear many harboured a similar fear of intimacy.

As one explained to me: “Sex isn’t my safe place. It’s the area where I’ve been hurt and betrayed, so I don’t want to retreat there for pleasure”.

My husband scorned this theory, and yet I’d be woken on a regular basis by him wailing in his dreams — a horrifying sound of pain that told its own story. One day I moved to the guest bedroom, using my husband’s restless sleep patterns as an excuse, but knowing I would never return. It was when our oldest child hit 13 — the same age Marcus had been when he was abused and become deeply unhappy at school — that I began to sense a generational trauma. Bullied at school, he began acting out at home and I expected Marcus to feel empathy and offer comfort; but he became hysterical, as if he was the one being victimised.

I felt like I was dealing with two deranged teenagers simultaneously. I told Marcus that an emotional abscess from his school days was bubbling up, but he waved the idea away as cod psychology.

It wasn’t until we got weekly family support from a social worker, who was trained in dealing with male anger, that I finally met someone who agreed with me.

My husband mentioned the abuse with his usual “didn’t do me any harm: postscript and this kind, calm man looked him squarely in the face and said: “Marcus, you’re a survivor of sex abuse. Anyone else would call this rape.”

It was a turning point of sorts and my spouse finally embarked on a course of counselling, in his 60s.

Over the four years that followed, my older child became happy again and my husband was more reconciled with the past. Sadly, it was too late for our love life to recover.

Too many doors had been slammed shut. Marcus often confesses he’s perplexed by how much store others put on sex, while I cannot imagine a life without that form of comfort and togetherness.

Sixteen years into our marriage, I embarked on a second affair with a freshly divorced man my own age, but this time I told Marcus everything from the start. He understood his own retreat from physical love had left a void in my life.

This second entanglement lasted a couple of years and was conducted well away from my young family. It might have carried on longer if I hadn’t been introduced to my current lover Neil at a bar after a work event.

We were both friends of the main speaker, who connected us a month later. We began talking and arguing, before realising we had the kind of sexual tension and love of banter seen in screwball comedies.

It’s a conversation — not to mention an intense, physical connection — that’s been ongoing for eight-and-a-half years.

Neil’s kindness, and basic decency, was soon apparent: one of the first pledges he made to me was that he would never ask me to leave Marcus. He simply requested that I didn’t hide him from my family or friends, as he hated any form of subterfuge.

Openness within our family from day one has proved an excellent policy. In most aspects, we remain a deeply loving family and my children are aware of the fact their parents’ marriage is fond but unconventional.

I resolved to always answer questions as truthfully as I could, without subjecting my kids to “Too Much Information”.

All the people closest to us have accepted the unusual arrangement because they can see the children come first and no one’s being marginalised. And for the past three years, we’ve even spent Christmas Day together. Marcus and I have long agreed that the worst-case scenario is kids shuffling unhappily between two houses because of the adults’ wayward romantic lives.

I’m not sure what shape the future will take — when you’ve lost all four grandparents before your children turn ten, you don’t make huge assumptions about the future.

We sometimes joke about buying a rambling country house as a family commune and I could see it working.

Neil would look after the electrics and plumbing, Marcus would tend the garden. They are both tall, clever, rebellious, only children, scarred by difficult childhoods. Both can discuss Churchill’s military strategy or the finer points of a Rolls Royce engine ’til cockcrow. It’s just that one had his innocence ripped away by a predator.

I can’t help wondering now how many other partners of abused men have suffered the distress I have, as their sex lives dwindle, or vanish.

Some won’t even guess at the reason, as these stories tend to be deeply buried. In a way, I’m lucky my husband talked about the past from the beginning. But it’s a part of him, not his defining feature, and his generosity transcends the trauma.

On a recent car journey together, my husband asked: “Who would you say is more difficult? Neil or me?”

I thought about it and said honestly: “You’re both equally difficult. But together you make the ideal husband.”