Externally my life is going great. The problem is all my own doing. How do I stop thinking about my first love?

The marriage of my husband and I was terrible for the first half of it. We had different notions of what traditional male/female roles meant. He was irresponsible with money, flirted with other girls, even tried to cheat on me. He believed women were just supposed to stay at home to rear children, keep house, and deal with it, while men go out on the town doing whatever they want. We worked through those issues. We have a good marriage now. We have been together for a decade and it's been good times between us for a hearty four years. My husband is solid, is a great provider, an amazing father, I am glad to be married to him. I forgive him of the past, I have no desires to get back at him for past hurts, I attribute his past mistakes to simple immaturity and having his own past traumas and bad male role models growing up himself.

For a long stretch of time, though, when I was miserable in our marriage, I coped by thinking back to my first love. My first lover and I had a deeply fulfilling but inappropriate relationship. Inappropriate because he was my cousin.

Now this habit of thinking about him won't go away even though my marriage is good now, and I feel guilty about it. He is my cousin. I am married. I shouldn't be thinking about him romantically. I should give it up, it's wrong, I CAN'T STOP. I will give more details below. My apologies in advance if it's a long read. Feel free to stop here.

I'll refer to my cousin as N. N and I were raised together from childhood in a unique situation, we came from a family with wealth and properties but the industry our living was made in crashed when we were kids. Our parents went away for education and career while we were brought up by our grandparents. I don't want to dox myself by being too specific, but the place where are from is a folksy, old fashioned, somewhat archaic culture and very unique. There are not many outside of this island who could relate to me or understand me or how I grew up. N might be just about the only other person who could understand and relate to my upbringing of this strange mixture of poverty and wealth, with our family having houses, lands, properties, stables, horses, boats, etc. but not the money to support it, and everybody working hard trying to keep it all in the family for the sake of honour and heritage. The hard work, the anxiety, the freedom, the lack of adult supervision, the clinging to our culture and our folk traditions, the idolization of the older generation - all these things that shaped who I am - he experienced it alongside me - he's the only person who gets me - he's the only person who understands me - he was always there for me. So we grew up together in this very romantic, very idyllic setting of forests seashores, meadows, rugged cliffs with crashing waves, very romantic, very free, very little adult supervision. As children we were the best of friends roaming around together in the wilderness and when we became teenagers it turned romantic and sexual. I don't know why I lacked this instinct that prevents most people from being attracted to family members. But I fell for him so hard and intensely and he felt the same way about me. When he was 16 years old he was already 6 feet tall, and he was a competitive rower so he had these massive arms, and a huge barrel chest, he was bigger already than a lot of adult men. And he had this sharp square masculine jaw, and blond hair, and blue eyes, the sweetest boyish smile with dimples, he just completely stole my heart, I was smitten. We had our first kiss together and lost our virginity together. May God forgive me for what I did with my cousin. He was gorgeous.

This went on throughout our teens until we were caught and then sent to live in America with our parents. Different parts of America, we could not see each other. When we got older we came back together and remained an item for about a year, I had an accidental pregnancy and miscarried, we decided to end things for good believing the miscarriage was due to the consanguinity and that it was wrong for us to be together - that we'd be destined to have a child with birth defects or a handicap.

We had never had any problems in our relationship - not a single fight or argument. Not even one. We always got along. We had amazing chemistry. We felt so selflessly towards each other - would never have done anything to hurt or offend the other. We were so close to one another that we could read each other's emotions on each other's faces - we could tell what the other was thinking, how they were feeling, by looking in each other's eyes. I could anticipate his every need. He always said and did the right things. He was perfect. If he had any flaws I was blind to them. We felt like we were one soul in two bodies, we were so alike we were basically the same person. We had all the same friends, the same favourite foods, the same favourite old folk songs, the same interests, the same emotions - everything. We loved each other. We were passionate about each other. Our sexual relationship was on a different level than just base lust to "get off" - it was just completely based on desire for each other, to be together and bond with each other on a physical level. We would often just stare into each others eyes and kiss and caress each other for hours. He would bring me wildflowers and sing old folk songs of our culture to me. I'm adding all these details because I just want to make it clear that it wasn't some perverted base sexual thing and that we really loved one another. We pair bonded during our formative years in an extreme way.

We separated and I dealt with a lot of shame and self loathing for a long time. I thought of myself as being some disgusting incestual freak. I had very low self esteem. Men I met seemed to want me for self interested reasons. When I first moved to America I was bullied for the dialect I spoke and now being older it seemed like men viewed me as a sexual novelty because of it. Nobody seemed to have my best interest at heart like N did. Nobody understood me.

When I met my now husband it was when I was in this state of shame and low self esteem. I went into my marriage 100% and was NOT actively longing for or thinking about N. I was disgusted at myself for my previous actions and had suppressed all the memories we had together. I loved my husband and we shared some similar interests. Though his background is American and mine British we got along fine at first. I felt that we loved each other, not the same intense love as with N, but I figured that was a pathological thing I had with N and not normal. I also believed that no man would ever love me or desire me as much as N had, so there was no use to ever expect that. The man to be my husband wanted to have a traditional family like I did, so rare to find in modern times, and so we got married.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my post the first half of our marriage was terrible. We had a lot of problems and cultural incompatibility. I was committed not to leave as I do not believe in divorcing once children are involved unless there is real abuse going on. I was determined to apply the stuff I read in this Fascinating Womanhood book (which is how I found RP). I also believed that I deserved this sort of bad treatment because I was a bad person, and that I did not deserve love, thinking of myself as being this disgusting pervert who committed incest.

Then when my self esteem was at its lowest I learned about how love between cousins is not taboo in all cultures. Nor was it taboo historically. The Queen is married to her third cousin, and Queen Victoria married her first cousin. That, scientifically, children born of cousin marriages are not much more likely to have handicapped children than unrelated couples. Not to say that it's good to marry your cousin - just that this information helped to release me from a long built up sense of shame I had hanging over me. I started to think that maybe I am not so bad after all.

When I felt that my husband did not really love me but was just using me I began to build myself up again by thinking about how there was once a man who really loved me, in fact, the person who knows me better than any other person does believed that I was worthy of love. I started thinking about how a better man, a more noble man, a more principled man with more integrity once loved me - passionately adored me - and saw something in me. I don't know if I could have pulled myself out of the pit of negative thinking without these thoughts.

It took years for my marriage with my husband to heal, and it did heal, but I was all the while continually reminiscing about the love I first shared with N. And now that my marriage is good, my husband is an exemplary man, who has matured past his previously errant ways, who values me and has shown so much repentance for his previous mistreatment of me, I just still can't stop thinking about N. I do NOT intend to do anything about these thoughts, I do NOT intend to cheat on my husband with N, I do NOT intend to run off from my husband and children to be with my cousin. They are just thoughts, they have always been just thoughts, I have never acted on them, I never intend to act on them. But I CAN'T STOP thinking them.

I try to stop through sheer will - it doesn't work. I try to make myself feel as passionately about my husband as I felt about N - it doesn't work. While I forgive him for his past errant ways, it did somewhat kill my ability to romanticize about my marriage - I can't say that he's my true love or anything like that, if he was passionate about me, if he TRULY loved me, he wouldn't have done it in the first place. So I can be content, I can be happy, but I can't feel really truly passionate. And to be honest there is a blockage of true understanding and closeness with him not having a similar background to me. We are the same race but very different cultures. And I cannot stop these thoughts no matter how hard I try, things like - N used to want to make love to me twice every day and my husband only wants to do it once or twice a week - he is not as passionate about me, he does not desire me as much as N did. It is absolutely crazy for me to be thinking these thoughts because it was SO LONG AGO that I was with N. BTW my husband does know the truth about what I did with my cousin, although I think he perhaps doesn't comprehend the intensity of it. He has made a few light hearted quips about me being a backwoods cousin kisser but not in bad faith to hurt me, he doesn't condemn me for it and he accepts me.

I try to look to my husband's good traits and focus on those, and it works to rid myself of thoughts of N - temporarily. I focus on my duties, and the work I have to do and it works to rid myself of the thoughts - temporarily. The only lasting ability I had to get rid of these thoughts was when I told myself a year ago that N doesn't care about me anymore and is certainly completely over it. I went a measly three months without any thoughts of him when my great uncle called me and told me out of the blue that N, despite being committed to his own wife and family, said that he thought of me often and that I am the only woman that he has ever loved. Then this gave me fresh romanticized thoughts and try as I might to tell myself that he must have been drinking when he said that and didn't really mean it, that didn't work.

These thoughts aren't anything like I want to leave my husband for N or cheat on my husband with N but are reminisces of the past - "sigh, what a merry lass I was in the old days, how gorgeous was my jolly lad, how happy we were together - I remember that day when we walked through the blooming fields to take the shortcut to the beach, how lovely it was, how handsome he looked, the sun shining on the sparkling sea as he held me in his strong arms, etc" and I just totally lose track of everything to daydream in nostalgia of the past.

So sorry for writing a full novel about it. I have always wanted to unload all this to a group of supportive girlfriends. This isn't the sort of thing I can just bring up in casual conversation. Thank you for giving me an ear! What do I do? How do I stop?