My husband of 25 years wants us to get involved in a threesome with another woman or a foursome with another couple. I am completely uncomfortable with bringing another person or persons into our sexual relationship.

He has informed me that I should be grateful that he wants to include me in this instead of having an affair behind my back, which he has threatened to do. I still want no part of this situation. Am I being unreasonable?

If you had written your husband of 25 months instead of years said this to you, I would have suggested that you give serious thought to leaving him for being so insulting. But since you’ve invested 25 years in this marriage, I suppose you shouldn’t be too hasty.

What may be happening here is that he has reached an age where he can no longer get a psychogenic erection. That’s an erection that comes on spontaneously because of some erotic thought or image and doesn’t need any physical contact. At a certain age, men lose the ability to get psychogenic erections and require their penis be touched in order to become erect. If he doesn’t know this, and if he has stopped becoming aroused just by looking at your naked body, for example, he may feel that he has lost his desire for you and so he feels the added stimulus of a third person would do the trick, especially if she was younger and prettier, as he might imagine when fantasizing about such a situation. Now some added erotic content might help him temporarily, but eventually he would still lose his ability to have psychogenic erections.

If this assumption of mine is true, what might fix this for you would be for you to be a bit more aggressive when it comes to sex. Instead of passively waiting for him to approach you, which he might not do since he doesn’t have an erection, you should reach out and touch his penis, even through his clothes. Hopefully your ministrations will give him an erection and give a boost to your sex life. Then, hopefully, he may put aside these thoughts of third parties or affairs. I realize that this might be a little hard on you, given that he’s threatened you this way, but if you can bring yourself to swallow the pain and follow this suggestion, maybe you can get your marriage through this particular thicket. I recognize the difficulty, and while I don’t know your husband and right now don’t hold a very high opinion of him, perhaps after all the two of you have been through together, it would be worth the effort to keep him.