Dear Jane,

My husband and I have been together for almost a decade.

Around four years ago, he began taking business trips regularly, but ever since these trips began, our sex life has fallen apart.

He is usually gone for about a week, and when he comes back, he is 'jet-lagged' and 'exhausted,' so intimacy is the last thing on his mind.

A year after these trips started - and our sex life became nonexistent - I met an extremely attractive man at the gym who asked for my number. And I gave it to him. When he texted me and asked me to go for dinner with him, I agreed.

We started meeting up every so often when my husband was away, but now it's been three years, and our relationship has spiraled into a full-blown affair.

I have to go to great lengths to hide it from my husband. 

Sometimes, my lover sleeps over in our bed, so I have to wash the bedding before my husband returns. I even scrub myself so vigorously in the shower that my skin hurts because I don't want to risk smelling like another man.

I also have to be careful with what I spend money on, so that my husband doesn't check our bank account and grow suspicious. 

Whenever I pay for dinner or buy us a bottle of wine, I take cash out and tell my husband it's for my manicures - meanwhile, I've learned how to paint my nails meticulously to make sure they look professionally done. 

Honestly, this affair has turned into a lot of work, and I fear I'm in too deep. My lover is putting pressure on me to leave my husband so we can be together properly.

I love my husband, and I don't want to split up, but he doesn't satisfy me in the bedroom. On the other hand, I don't love the man I met at the gym, but he gives me everything my husband doesn't, and I don't know if I'm ready to give that up, either.

How can I have the best of both worlds without all the exhausting sneaking around and guilt?

From,

Savvy swindler

International best-selling author Jane Green offers sage advice on readers' most burning issues in her agony aunt column

Dear Savvy swindler,

I understand how abandoned you must have felt when your husband started traveling and your sex life fell apart. 

I also understand how alluring it is, particularly when you feel ignored in a marriage, to fall under the sway of an attractive man who made you feel alive again.

But, Savvy swindler, you cannot have the best of both worlds. 

Living with secrecy and shame is no way to live, and I’m going to be firm with you: you have to make a choice. 

Either you end your marriage and are free to explore with other men, or you end the affair and focus on strengthening your marriage.

It sounds like you have a good husband, just one who perhaps doesn’t fully understand the impact of his exhaustion and lack of willingness to have sex. 

And when it comes to the issue of the sex, I wonder whether you have had an honest conversation with him about what turns you on. 

While great sex is, well, great, it isn’t a relationship. A marriage requires so much more. 

I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you that even the greatest of sex at the beginning of a relationship has a tendency to dwindle. And the qualities that sustain a relationship are so much more than that: mutual respect, communication, shared values, growing together, and, of course, trust.

An affair breaches that trust.

There are no circumstances in which an affair is the right thing to do. It causes tremendous pain, and there is never an excuse. It is far better to be brave and confront what isn't working in your marriage or walk away.