9. My husband was sexually intimate with other women before we married. I feel inadequate and inferior to these other women. How can I not allow this to affect our sex life?

Your concerns are common these days as individuals have often accumulated many memories of different partners before they settle down to marital commitment. Our society has told us that being sexually experienced will enhance marriage. Your question highlights one of the reasons that notion doesn't hold water.

Nevertheless, there you are along with many others stuck with the doubts and haunted by the ghosts of your mate's former sexual partners. So let's turn on some lights and try to dispel the goblins.

Here are two facts you need to know. First, you have no way of controlling your mate's thought life. Second, this isn't a competition in which you're living.

We assume that he's tried to reassure you about his former girl friends. What may enter his mind from time to time is something only he can control—and that with God's help. All of life's experiences become encoded into our memory banks and may at times be triggered into consciousness. That's when we have a choice to replay the old tapes or to let them go. It's just as important for you to erase your tapes about his former life as it is for him to do so. So when those doubts or images, whether real or imagined, slip into your thinking, take them captive and toss them out. Only you can control your doubts and fears.

Second, you're not in competition with anyone, especially not from his past. It seems that everything in our country becomes endowed with elements of winning. Who's fastest, smartest, richest, thinnest, most popular, prettiest, strongest, funniest, best dressed, and—especially—sexiest. We're afraid you've been caught in that trap. Your value as a person, as a wife, and as a lover isn't something dependent on any comparisons. You're it—the only wife your husband has! There's no reason for you to feel inferior or inadequate to anyone. You and your husband can exorcise the ghosts and get on with enjoying sexual intimacy that's unique and exclusively yours.

Still looking for more answers? Click here for our Real Sex site.

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