20- to 30-minute snoozing, therapy with a whip, a traveling morgue, and a gazillion-calorie dinner..

Dear Prudence,

My husband has some kinky sexual desires that I don't want to deal with—they just aren't my thing. He's proposed that he visit a dominatrix, and I'm half-inclined to consent.

He insists that they wouldn't be having sex, not even in the Bill Clinton sense, and that whatever happens, there would be no threat to our relationship. I suspect that both of those things are true, but I still wonder whether we should go down this road. Obviously, I don't love the idea of my husband being involved in any kind of intimate acts with another woman, but I might prefer this to dominating him myself. He's gone to therapy—it made no difference. Any thoughts?

—Conflicted Wife

Dear Conflicted,

Having just read this interview with a former dominatrix, I can understand that even for the sake of marital harmony you'd rather not hog-tie your husband, put him in a cage with a bowl of dog food, or dress up as a cheerleader and kick schoolbooks out of his hands. I got in big trouble with the sexual fetish community a while back for suggesting that a teenage boy with an obsessive latex glove fetish get counseling to help keep the fetish from taking over his life—and I still think that having rubber gloves on your hands and on your mind during all your waking hours is a terrible way to live.

I understand, however, as your husband has found out, that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish a fetish. Your letter also points out that even if you love someone with a fetish, that doesn't mean you can happily participate in it. It sounds as if your husband's desire for domination doesn't dominate his life—it's just an aspect of his sexuality he can't squelch and that you don't want to incorporate into your conjugal bag of tricks. It's natural that you don't love the idea of your husband finding a release for his desire to be tied up, or whatever, with another woman. But the dominatrix literature makes clear that while they deal with an aspect of their clients' sexuality, it's is not about sexual intercourse.

Letting him go might make your marriage happier because he won't be asking you to tell him how naughty he's been. If you can trust that his visits are limited to playing out scenarios that make you gag, then just think of it as therapy with a whip.

—Prudie