Lisa from Sheffield was forty-seven the first time she noticed that nobody had asked about her day in roughly a decade.
It wasn’t a single event. There was no dramatic turning point. It was a Tuesday in February, and she’d come home from a particularly difficult day at the school where she worked as a deputy head — a tense parents’ meeting, a child taken into care, the kind of day that sits heavy on the chest. She’d hung up her coat. She’d walked into the kitchen. Her husband had been at the table doing something on his iPad. He looked up. Said hi. Asked what was for dinner.
That was it.
She made him a stir-fry. Sat down. Watched him eat it. Watched him go back to his iPad. And somewhere between the second and third forkful, she had a thought she’d been carefully not having for several years: he didn’t know what kind of day she’d had. He hadn’t asked. He never asked. And what was worse — she couldn’t remember the last time he had.
She wasn’t sure if she even had answers anymore, if anyone bothered to ask. The day’s events lived in her body — the tense shoulders, the slight headache behind her left eye — but they had no language. No one to tell. Nowhere to go.
She joined Illicit Encounters about a month later. Not, she’ll tell you firmly, looking for sex. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for. Maybe just a person. Maybe just the experience of being one to somebody.
His name was Mark. Forty-nine. Owned a small architectural practice in Manchester. Wife of twenty-two years. Two grown children. A long, easy face that creased when he smiled, which he did often — she’d later learn — but which had become rare at home for reasons she didn’t yet entirely understand.
They messaged for three weeks before they met. And what she remembered most about those messages, even later, when other things had happened, was this: he asked her things.
What had her week been like. Was the school still chaotic. How had the parents’ evening gone. What did she think of the headteacher’s new policy. Did she sleep well. What did she watch on Sunday night. Did she like it.
It was almost embarrassing, how thirsty she was for it. How she found herself composing answers in her head whilst doing the washing up. How she’d come home from work mentally listing things she might tell him. The funny thing the year four boy had said. The argument she’d overheard between two teachers. The way the rain had hit the staffroom window during her lunch break and made her feel briefly, inexplicably sad.
These were not interesting things. She knew this. They were the small, soft, threadbare textures of an ordinary day. But he wanted to hear them. And she found, as she gave them to him, that she was — gently, unmistakably — coming back to life.
They met for the first time at a hotel bar in Leeds. She’d planned to leave after one drink. She stayed for three. He didn’t try to take her upstairs. He asked her, instead, about her parents. About what she’d wanted to be when she was twenty. About the moment she’d known she wanted to teach.
She cried in the car park afterwards. Not from sadness. From something closer to surprise. The shock of being seen.
That was eight months ago now. They meet roughly twice a month, sometimes for an afternoon, occasionally for a night when their lives allow it. The relationship has become physical, of course it has, but she’ll tell you — quietly, almost guiltily — that’s not what she goes for. What she goes for is the questions. The ten thousand small, ordinary questions she stopped expecting anyone to ask her years ago.
She has not left her husband. She has not raised any of this with him. He still asks her, when she walks in from work, what’s for dinner. She still makes him a stir-fry. She still watches him eat it. The marriage continues in roughly the shape it has held for the last decade, and she has no immediate plans to change it.
But on Wednesday afternoons, in a hotel in Leeds, she is asked about her day. She tells someone. Someone listens. And for a few hours she is, again, a person — not a function, not a fixture, not a quietly dimming presence in someone else’s life.
She’d describe it, if pushed, as something between an affair and a kind of resuscitation.
Plenty of women on IllicitEncounters say something similar. They didn’t come looking for a great love. They came looking for a question they hadn’t been asked in years. And once asked, you remember rather quickly who you used to be.
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