A secret love makes me feel alive

THIS story contains the stuff of tragedy, but also of one the greatest joys humans can experience. The potential for pain and sorrow is always present within what I must call forbidden love and people who lurch into love affairs usually forget the terrible risks.

Yet there are also many times when things do work out, and the secret love becomes a source of lasting happiness — yes, even when it has caused great pain along the way.

Since the earliest times, the greatest literature in many languages has told tales of forbidden and unrequited love: passion, pain, ecstasy, destruction.

No wonder you are ‘afraid of all the turmoil it would cause’.

But what do we do about the longing for love? For all I know, you might be exaggerating what’s wrong with your marriage (honestly, people always do when in love with somebody else) but in any case, many relationships run out of steam after many years.

It’s quite normal — and many couples just decide to make the best of it and carry on.

But then one of them meets a stranger who sets the heart racing — and suddenly

the longing for love crashes like a huge wave over the most ordinary (and older) men and women.

What is to be done? First, I would leave things alone for a while, since you have only met your new man ‘recently’ and he lost his wife just two years ago.

I think it is just too soon to be thinking of ending your marriage, although it might come to that. You need to be sure about this relationship first.

Then you need to talk to your husband about the future and find out what he wants. Perhaps he would like to live alone? It sounds like it.

View this relationship in terms of stages, without getting carried away . . . because when you are surer about it, you can then talk to your son. After all, he is now 25 and has survived his own problems.

You have to ask yourself whether it is right to turn your back on happiness for the sake of a grown man (your son) who will hopefully find his own one day soon, and not need you so much as perhaps in the past.

Tread gently, tip-toe into these new waters, use kindness to all three men as your chief motivation, but allow yourself these feelings of delight and ‘awakening’, too.

I just wish the best for you all.