Bismillah Assalam-Alaikum Brother Mirza1: Brother, I have read your entire post, and I understand and sympathize with your frustrations and your struggle to find a halal alternative for your situation. Brother, you are married, and that is a fact neither you nor I can refute by Islamic law or even national law. You are understandably having trouble consummating your relationship with your wife when your feelings are not involved, and I respect your perspective and sensitivities that preclude you from taking your relationship with your wife to a physical level at this stage in your emotional crunch. However, the fact is that your previous ladylove is a wife of another man. She is not part of your life, and whether you understand this or not, she made a conscious choice to seek marriage with another man. If she is having "buyer's remorse" so-to-speak with regards to her own marriage and life choices, that does not mean that you should drop your own marriage to solve her problems or invite her back into your life with a place available as your second wife. Yes, I understand that you are upset that you did not avail yourself of the opportunity to marry her earlier due to family pressure. But the fact is that you did marry someone else and so did she. So, even if you are from your mouth giving her good advice to keep her marriage (as you said), your heart is not in the right place and I believe her woman's intuition can ferret out that you are still desirous of having her as part of your life. Why do I say this? As your ex, believe me, Brother, that she had to be sure on some level that you would want to have her back in your life or she would not have taken such a bold and irrevocable step of contacting you after her own marriage. Also, Brother, I have to wonder at the character of a woman who goes to her ex for her resource when she could have gone to her girlfriends about the problems in her marriage. Brother, I believe a god-fearing woman does not go to her ex, expecting him to bail her out of her own marriage by contracting a second marriage to her. Brother, do yourself a favor and delete her email and cut off all contacts with her as Brother FususAlHikam has suggested. If you keep contact with her, she will keep involving you in her life, telling you most probably how much of a villain her husband is (even if therein is true villainy to her husband's nature). And to be honest, do you not think you deserve better than to be kept dangling in hope and despair of whether she will divorce or not, whether you can marry her or not after that, how you can keep her a secret or not, etc.? Brother, also think of your own wife. She is a person with thoughts, feelings, and sensitivities of her own. No woman marries wanting to take a second place in her husband's heart. Please give her the chance to earn your affections. Maye you think that a calamity of some proportion has befallen you on account of not being able to have married your original choice, but Brother...perhaps if you gave your current wife a choice in loving you and being loved and a great chance, you might just find out that you were looking unnecessarily to other avenues for fulfillment of your heart's desire when your heart's desire (in another form as a gift from Allah) was beneath your nose. Brother, I am advising you sincerely in your situation to please give your wife and yourself emotionally time to adjust. While yes, your wife deserves to have her rights fulfilled, I suggest that you take your time to get to know her, find out her dreams, her loves, her fears, and her hopes. Maybe in getting to know her, you will be able to see yourself sharing her dreams, her loves, her fears and hopes and not feel lonely and unhappy about not being able to have what you originally wanted. You know, Brother, I have to tell you the things that most made me unhappy in life were not things that I got which I did not want but the things which I got which I thought I wanted but in the end wished I had not wanted it in the first place once I had them. Brother, once the pieces of your married life start to fall in place emotionally and also on a mental and spiritual level, I am confident that your inhibitions regarding taking so final a step in your marriage regarding physical fulfillment will not matter because you will start to desire that of your own volition. Brother, let Allah and your heart be your guide, not your blameworthy nafs. Brother, you are a grown and able young man, well able to make choices and decisions in your life. However, you have asked us as concerned Muslims to advise you on a matter that is of importance to you and also a sensitive issue and so we have advised you on that account. So, please think about what we have said. You might be glad in the end that you did. Thanks for trusting us with your family matter, and I hope we have helped in some small way. Alhamdullilah. Anything that I have that is good and acceptable is from Allah, and anything other than that is my own mistake.