Dear GB

I've been living with my main boyfriend since 1989 and I absolutely adore him, however my relationship with him is not monogamous. I started playing around in the mid 1990's and I made sure he didn't find out about it because I knew it would upset him. But ten years later when our relationship was going through a rocky patch in spring 2005, I actually ended up going away on holiday with someone else, and I now regard that guy as a second boyfriend. I admitted everything to my main boyfriend when I got back from that holiday. After a lot of talking, including extensive relationship counselling, our lives seemed to settle down. The fact that the second boyfriend lives in a different country did ease some of my main boyfriend's concerns. With my main boyfriend's knowledge, I've carried on seeing my second boyfriend every now and then.

It now turns out that my main boyfriend had successfully managed to keep his personal crisis about the situation to himself. The relationship counselling which we had together stopped over a year ago, but three months ago he told me that he subsequently found a counsellor just for himself and that he's been seeing him ever since. The settled lives that I thought we had were an illusion, because he told me that every day he was waking up thinking about the same question, namely whether he should leave me or not. This became the only thing he could think about, so it got to the point where his mental health was deteriorating badly.

I have no idea what to do, although I do know that I have to help my main boyfriend recover somehow. My best idea for that is to buy him a place to live near me, so that we no longer have to share the same house, but none the less we can perhaps still stay boyfriends. I think that will help him past the question that's been haunting him, as well as giving him the financial security that he lacks. But in fact, after that, perhaps it's better for both of us to stop being boyfriends and try to be close friends instead? And should I try and make a new life with my second boyfriend, if it turns out that he's interested in a deeper relationship than the one we currently have? The problem with that is that he lives in a different country, although I can envisage circumstances which might allow me to move to be with him or vice-versa. There are other guys in my life too, but the only really significant ones are boyfriend number 1 and boyfriend number 2.

I feel that the only certainty in my life is that the future will be very different to the life that I've had in recent years. But trying to work out what that life should be, I feel lost. Any advice you have would be much appreciated.