Dear Betty Herbert,

So, Betty, I've been finding the format of this blog a little constrictive. I'm happy to be a Mama, and I want to be a Mama again, but I am also the wife of the incorrigible Papa, whom I adore to distraction. My life with him should not be discussed in all its multicolour detail with any of our children, even unborn ones. But it is still highly relevant to family life as I experience it, and especially to baby making. So, in this instance, I am changing the order of things.

I received your book, The 52 Seductions, with great excitement, not least because it touches on a sore spot in my relationship with Papa (I hope you will forgive the twee pseudonyms, but they seemed at once affectionate and anonymous at the inception of this blog.) We have been together for eleven years. In some ways this feels like no time at all, but in others we have settled into a comfortable rut. Especially sexually.

I should say, to start with, that we always prided ourselves on being sexually adventurous. If it was to be tried, we tried it, with the exception of a few mutually agreed rules. And we enjoyed it enormously. But after a while it kind of merged into a sameness, even though it might not be the sort of "vanilla" sex that other people had. Surprise, surprise, even porn sex gets dull.

I suspect, for my husband, that his main stimuli is visual, and context does not matter. For me it's about communication; I even like my porn to be communicative. Not necessarily to have a story, as Papa interprets this, or to be less explicit, as is often assumed about women. I need to like and/or appreciate the characters involved. How I like my porn is also how I like my sex. It may also be why I am so crap at one night stands.

The 52 Seductions wasn't porn-y in the slightest, but the same principles applied. Betty, I found the unburdening of your soul as thought provoking, intimate and warming as the sex. There was something about the dual storyline of your sexual discovery and your gynaecological issues that was very humbling. You can across as vulnerable. What a refreshing bloody change. I could completely relate to you.

At times I found myself feeling sad that my relationship was not like yours. For a while it felt as though I was doing it wrong. After much thought, I realised that this was because if my relationship WAS like yours, then all the answers to my problems would be there for me to passively ingest. And that's really, incredibly lazy of me, isn't it? It may possibly be a reason that my relationship has settled into this gentle tide, compared to the brooding storminess of its early days.

My relationship with Papa has, like your relationship with Herbert, always been based on equality. Papa is a fair, yet lustful, modern man. We have danced around each others views and put barriers in the way of our desires because we were afraid of one another's political views. Like you, I consider myself feminist and studied feminist writing at university. For a long time I carried guilt at being a complicated sexual being and felt as though this was at odds with my internal beliefs. Papa has always respected this, and has never asked me to do anything that I have felt compromised me. I wonder how much these barriers have got in the way of our lust? I have read Nancy Friday backwards, forwards and every which way and am highly accomplished at my feminist, solo sex life. But how do I reconcile this guiltless sexual freedom with my husbands, which is different from my own? His animal lust has not read the feminist textbooks. In the safeness and security of our marriage, should this matter?

For a long while, I carried a silent badge of pride about our sex life. Whilst others would lament how irregular theirs had become, Papa and I quietly maintained a twice-a-week average of satisfying shags. We connected emotionally, and sex became about communicating, soothing one another and emotional connection, as well as the obvious physical satisfaction. We could only wait for ten days after the birth of David before our hands were all over each other again - it was our way of congratulating ourselves, dealing with change, reconnecting, growing, even commiserating. In sex we had each other, liberated by the absence of words.

I - somewhat smugly - thought this would always be the case. The last couple of years have really tested this. I have been ill - housebound at times - and up to my eyeballs on differing drugs of varying strengths. My body let me down, and became medicalised and faulty, rather than sexual. I put on weight and stopped bothering with my appearance. And so, our sex life dwindled. We gazed at one another over this no man's land of health issues, pain and excessive weight. No matter how much I tried, I could not motivate myself to make love just to please my husband, and when I did it was not enough. He seemed to want swinging-from-the-chandeliers best sex every time, and this completely alienated me. Could he not see the sacrifice I was making in order to keep him happy?

Thankfully things are starting to change. My health has been steadily improving since winter. Instead of making love in our usual venue (downstairs, on the bed settee, with porn in glorious 48") we've retreated back to the bedroom. We've ditched the accoutrements that Papa was so fond of, temporarily at least, and gone back to simple sex and really connecting with one another. And guess what? We're having some of the best sex that I remember, and we're physically and emotionally closer than we have been in months.

The 52 Seductions, then, is rather timely for us. Papa does not read much, but I suspect he may read this. I am heartily sure that he will declare that you and Herbert are "sweet," as he responds to people on a genuinely emotional level that always surprises me. I am also sure that he'll mull over your seductions and think about how they apply to our lives.

What I expected was a tick list of every increasingly daring sexual acts (anal sex? tick! S&M? Golden showers? Threesomes?) What I got was an entirely more feminine, intelligent response to sex. I absolutely agree with you that good sex is about good communication. I hope that we can grow into ourselves and our relationship and at last properly believe that our sexual relationship is far more important than the sum total of its parts, and it's far more than a checklist of things that FHM or Cosmopolitan suggest we might do. The 52 Seductions was really, genuinely grown up, in a way that's made me buzzy and sympathetic and motivated and full of love and lust for my own husband, who is just down the road doing the job he's always done. I was looking for more things we could do, when actually what I think we need is to do things better. We need to be more vulnerable together.

Our challenges are different to yours. We have a young child who's up early, and a teenager who's up late and no family support. Finding special time alone is not as easy as it might be, and we are somewhat limited as to our location as a consequence. But the things that made our relationship dizzyingly exciting in the early days were not a bag with a multitude of sex toys in and a copy of the Karma Sutra. It was the ebb and flow and emotional anxiety and heady reassurance that love is returned. I'm really hoping that we can make this happen again.

Thanks - genuinely thanks - for being brave enough to share.

Mama x