Years ago I was married to a man who didn't want to make love to me. We were together for around 18 months before we married and in the beginning we had a regular, and what seemed satisfactory, sex life.

The sex we had was almost formal though, he was that way in public and maybe I gave the impression of needing to be treated that way in bed so it tended toward pedestrian in terms of imagination. I didn't know better and he didn't want to explore. It satisfied and if you don't know anything else that can seem enough. But I was in for a big shock the day we got married.

From that point on he no-longer wanted to touch me. It was the most painful punch in the face and yet I still thought it was better to stay and endure and live unhappily on his terms. By an amazing fluke we produced a child but our sex life throughout the marriage was at its best reduced to maybe 5 times in a year and for the last 5 years there was no physical contact at all. I was very unhappy and sexually tormented.

Once, in an effort to create some passion, I dressed in a wraparound skirt and underneath wore stockings and a basque. We were taking a black cab across London when I reached across, took his hand, and placed it on my inner thigh. He recoiled in horror and said I looked cheap. And so I withdrew.

But during those dreadful parched and virtually sexless years I began to seek out erotic fiction. It was a medium I could relate to and which gave me a chance to get secretly turned-on and to satisfy all my latent sexual hunger.

I soon discovered Anais Nin and her collections of short stories 'Delta of Venus' and 'Little Birds'. I would lie in bed, or in the bath and devour them. They showed me, at last, the sort of sexy world that I wanted to play in. The writing was fun and a little dangerous and reading them made me deeply horny.

One story was about a girl sitting in a tree, I think, wearing no underwear and with her legs open. A couple of men are standing underneath and staring up at her pussy and discussing her. The girl hasn't seen them, or pretends not to notice. The thought of sitting in a tree and exposing my pussy got me really hot and I immersed myself in erotic literature and masturbated secretly.

It was actually quite funny that my ex always said that masturbation was a rather dirty and unevolved pastime - while I was often in a room next to him secretly in a frenzy with my pussy and high on my own sexy thoughts.

Another story I remember was about a woman sitting in the cinema, in the back row, in the dark, and then feeling a hand from the stranger next to her, a gentleman, slipping over her thigh and under her skirts to her pussy. I could easily imagine myself as that woman in the cinema, a strangers hand crawling under my skirt and up my thigh and gently slipping his finger into my moist pussy. Something about enjoying something one shouldn't...or maybe it's the fact that in both those stories the woman is either unaware that she is being watched or at the mercy of an unknown man in a darkened room and thereby a little vulnerable makes it deeply sexy to me.

I have probably embellished these stories over the years to capture my own taste. What I do know is that they gave me a pointer to what was going on in other peoples worlds. And an outlet for my own very powerful sexual needs. I still had to wait a long time before I had the courage to take control of those sexy realms of fantasy and satisfaction myself. And that happened when someone who truly loved me took me by the hand and led me there.