What should Carmen do? What would any of us do if faced with a similar choice? It's so easy to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude and insist that if we were in the same situation we would be faithful to our marital vows. You never know until you're confronted with the same challenge that Carmen is faced with.

Be honest! Would you say, "No!" if every fiber in your body and mind was screaming, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"?

Carmen is a lonely woman. Her marriage to Dan is the antithesis of what she is experiencing with Eric. It lacks deep connection, excitement and friendship. Little comes easy for them anymore.

Many of us have been there. Every conversation is an effort. There is so much resentment, confusion and hurt lying beneath the surface that even the simplest interaction is fraught with levels of meaning that defy understanding. You don't know where to begin. So you play it safe and don't begin at all.

So many times in the past you've said to yourself, "I know I love my partner. I just have to try harder. I'm not going to lose it. I'm going to show him how much I want this to work."

You take a deep breath, you tell yourself you can do it, and lo and behold, without even knowing how or why, you're once again in a place of misunderstanding, hurt and anger. What you want is to be heard and what you get are the reasons why it's your fault. The response is to defend and to attack.

Let's assume that's Carmen's situation. She's convinced that she's tried to make her marriage work and nothing has helped. So here she is, feeling like a woman for the first time in years, and she's supposed to find the strength to walk away from it? How do you walk away from a powerful emotional attraction, a desire that is so hypnotically pleasurable that it makes the voice of morality sound like the helpless plea of a desperate parent? We can almost hear Carmen defiantly saying, "Anything that feels this right must be okay."

So who do we root for - the Carmen who says, "No!" or the Carmen who says, "Yes!"? The Carmen who walks away from Eric and towards her marriage says, "No!" to passion, romance and love.

For what? A risky proposition with Dan? The possibility of a flat, loveless marriage?

Yes, there are marital vows and kids to consider, but what about responsibility to oneself? What about taking the risk to get the most you can out of life and relationships? Is fidelity to an unresponsive partner a higher value than a commitment to living a life filled with connection and vitality?

It may be too late for these questions. In fact, like many who enter into an affair, Carmen may have made her decision far before she consciously acknowledged it. Perhaps, it was after her last frustrating sexual encounter with Dan. It might have met some physiological need of his but it left her feeling cold and empty. There was no romance, no foreplay to speak of, just the perfunctory sexual release - another lonely night in bed. Or, perhaps it followed a moment when she needed a word or a touch from Dan but was too down to ask, and once again he was too far inside himself to notice.

Does she shrug her shoulders and say to herself, "Well that's the way it is with marriage. Everyone knows that sexual fireworks don't last and too much expectation leads to resentment." Isn't that the mature attitude?

Perhaps you can convince your mind but you can't lie to your heart.

There are an infinite number of possible scenarios that can chip away at the moral underpinnings of a marriage. Every slight rejection, insult and inconsiderate act weakens the framework of a relationship and every rebuked attempt to repair that relationship severs the trust and loyalty that are the building blocks of a strong marriage.

At some point something breaks for one of the partners, and it's at that moment that an affair becomes a possibility.

In essence, for Carmen and for any of us who have sought a romantic attachment outside of marriage, a period of depression and helplessness precedes the relationship. Something - let's call it the "Moral Center"- collapses. In a state of emotional deprivation, principles and values become so weak as to be no more than an imperceptible memory of what one should do. At that point monogamy can appear like a prison sentence rather than the natural expression of a committed and loving relationship. The affair then becomes the "sweet" antidote to the unmet needs and depression that result from an unhappy marriage.

I understand Carmen's pain. I don't condone or support what she may do, but I have compassion for her suffering, confusion and sense of desperation.

An affair, such as the one that Carmen may choose to enter, does not occur in a vacuum. It's neither a momentary moral slip that anyone of us can fall prey to, nor a basically irrelevant statement about marriage. A romantic affair can only occur in a marriage that is lacking exactly those ingredients that make a marriage succeed: friendship, trust, love and commitment.