People are rarely prepared for feeling attracted to someone who isn’t their partner.
At some point in a long-term relationship, you may feel sexually drawn to someone else. You may do nothing about it. You may have no wish to do anything about it. Even so, the attraction can feel loaded, because many people have internalised social scripts that suggest desire for someone other than their partner is proof that something is up.
But that may not be the case.
Being in a committed relationship requires honest conduct, respect for relationship agreements and care around anything that affects consent. A private sexual thought is different to that.
You your mind still gets to freely engage with the world.
Loving one person doesn’t stop you from finding other people sexually attractive. If you haven’t established shared consent to explore with other people emotionally or sexually, relationship agreements should understandably change how you act on desire. But acting and thinking are not the same. Every internal sexual response you have to someone else doesn’t need to be erased to make good on a relationship commitment.
Early love can make desire feel exclusive
At the beginning of a relationship, mutual desire can mean you both feel chosen by each other, which may change how you feel about yourself.
Sex may feel connected to being picked by this particular person, at this particular time, in this particular way.
Hazan and Shaver (1987) help to explain why early sexual attraction can feel emotionally significant because romantic love can work as an attachment process. Which means you may feel reassured when the person you want gives you their attention, signalling to you they want you in return. So when your partner feels like the focus of your desire, it’s easy to assume you won’t want anyone else in the same way again.
Falling in love involves feeling and fantasy working together. Fantasy fills in the gaps at the beginning, which is partly why early love feels so intoxicating. However the beginning shouldn’t set the bar for every sexual thought or feeling that follows.
Real life changes the intensity of desire
Over time, your partner may not remain the only person you desire.
As they become part of your everyday emotional life, their moods can affect your day and their disappointments can become tied to yours. Sexual desire then has to work with this familiarity, which isn’t always very sexy. While it may deepen attachment, it may simultaneously change the sexual intensity between you.
Mitchell (2002) writes about the tension between security and desire in long-term love. As a partner becomes someone you depend on, sex may get tangled up with the needs and hurts already present in your relationship. Therefore someone else, someone outside your relationship, may feel sexually arousing precisely because they’re not part of your shared history.
Attraction to another person can feel threatening because it may raise an unnerving question: has something between us gone unspoken for too long? Sometimes the question does need addressing. It can shed light on sexual unhappiness, avoidance or draw needed attention to a familiar conflict. Although many attractions are less dramatic than that. They show that being in a relationship hasn’t eradicated your capacity to feel desire for other people.
No partner can be expected to hold every part of another person’s sexual desire throughout a lifetime. Long-term intimacy eventually reveals the difference between loving someone deeply and expecting them to feed every sexual thought, fantasy or response.
Private fantasy is part of adult life
A committed relationship doesn’t give either person automatic access to every private thought. This is especially important when the thought is sexual because attraction to someone else can easily be mistaken as a sign that something in the relationship has gone wrong.
A fantasy about someone else doesn’t necessarily mean it will be acted on. It may involve someone you would never approach. It also doesn’t always tell you something about your own desire, especially if you’ve started to feel sexually stunted. It may also be something quite ordinary and fleeting, with no deeper hidden message at all.
Person (1988) has written about fantasy as part of psychic life, rather than it being an escape from reality. Perel (2006) also writes about separateness inside erotic intimacy. These ideas help make sense of why private fantasy doesn’t have to threaten a relationship. Private erotic thoughts don’t always need to be shared. Requiring every attraction to be confessed and examined just creates more anxiety instead of more honesty.
Privacy and deception are different
It seems important here to establish the difference between privacy and deception. Privacy means keeping an internal life. Deception means hiding behaviour that would change your partner’s choices if they knew about it.
A private attraction kept inside the mind doesn’t materially change the relationship. A sexual exchange, emotional affair, secret dating profile or repeated private contact with someone you are pursuing changes that, if your partner hasn’t agreed to it.
Once attraction starts moving into choices that compromise relationship agreements, consent becomes an issue. Consent it an essential distinction between consensual non-monogamy and infidelity, according to Hangen et al. (2020). Beyond CNM, this distinction keeps the attention on what gets enacted rather than what is thought about.
For monogamous couples, the agreement may exclude sexual or romantic involvement with others. For consensually non-monogamous people, other connections may be part of the relationship agreement. Either way, the ethical question and the distinction remains: what has been agreed, what has been thought, and what has been done?
Disclosure needs a purpose
Telling your partner about a desire for someone else isn’t automatically the responsible choice. Before saying anything, it’s worth asking yourself why you want to have what the conversation. What’s its purpose.
Some couples are able to talk about the attraction the feel for other people without it threatening their relationship. The conversation may help them address sexual boredom, jealousy or a change in their own desire. For others, the same information may cause unnecessary hurt.
Sometimes a person can feel anxious about their own fantasy and try to solve it by telling their partner. The disclosure may be framed as honesty, but the emotional aim may actually be relief, which leaves the other person now carrying the distress. The timing and purpose of the disclosure needs to be handled with clear purpose and care.
Disclosure may indeed be necessary if behaviour breaches an agreed arrangement, or if the attraction has started to affect sexual health, consent or a partner’s understanding of the relationship. Privacy can’t be used to hide conduct that affects someone else’s right to choose or changes their reality.
Your partner can’t carry all your desire
One person can’t be made responsible for all your sexual vitality. When a partner is expected to generate all your erotic feelings, every dip in desire can feel like their failure. The expectation makes the partner responsible for a task no one person can sustain.
Your sexuality is also yours to nurture. It is affected by your history, mood, stress, confidence, body and whether you feel desirable or not. A partner can help awaken desire, but they can’t be made responsible for keeping it alive on their own. You have to be in on that, which is where private sexual thoughts may come in.
A private attraction may be useful if it acts as a reminder to you that your desire still exists. Perhaps because you miss being looked at differently, or because you miss a version of yourself that you no longer encounter as frequently. Sometimes the thought is enough. Action may add unnecessary harm without additional benefit.
Fancying someone else shouldn’t be pathologised just because it feels uncomfortable or because your partner might find it painful to know about. However, to caution, if the attraction becomes obsessive, starts to dominate daily life or pushes you toward risky behaviour, it needs more careful attention than can be offered here.
After the honeymoon
After the honeymoon, as a relationship settles into the groove of every day life, you may still love and want your partner while feeling sexually drawn to other people. This can feel confronting if you expected to only have eyes for your partner, and them for you in return.
Committed people can still have sexual responses to others that don’t have to threaten your relationship. What protects the relationship is knowing and respecting the difference between fantasy, disclosure and behaviour.
You don’t need to punish yourself for every private attraction. It’s also not fair to use “desire is natural” as an excuse to cross agreed lines. Both truths are necessary if this topic is to be approached with care.
You will fancy other people.
Your partner probably will too.
Pretending otherwise protects very little. Consent, care and a realistic view of the erotic mind protects far more.
References
Hangen, F., Crasta, D., & Rogge, R. D. (2020). Delineating the boundaries between nonmonogamy and infidelity: Bringing consent back into definitions of consensual nonmonogamy with latent profile analysis. The Journal of Sex Research, 57(4), 438-457.
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.
Mitchell, S. A. (2002). Can love last? The fate of romance over time. W. W. Norton & Company.
Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. HarperCollins.
Person, E. S. (1988). Dreams of love and fateful encounters: The power of romantic passion. W. W. Norton.