Most affairs don’t end the way people think they will.
The fantasy, when you’re considering it, is that you’ll have one final clean conversation, both of you a little tearful but ultimately mature about it, and then you’ll go back to your real life feeling somehow lighter. Resolved. Healed.
The reality is messier. Affairs end in fits and starts. They end and then unend. Sometimes one person tries to end it five times before it actually sticks. Sometimes the ending leaks — through guilt, through a careless WhatsApp, through a missed shift in routine that the spouse picks up on. Sometimes one person walks away cleanly and the other does not, and the clean one spends six months managing the fallout from the one who couldn’t let go.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably somewhere in that mess already. You’ve decided, or you’re close to deciding, that the affair has to end. You don’t want to hurt anyone — not your affair partner, not your spouse, not yourself. You want to know how to do this in a way that minimises damage.
Here’s what twenty years of running the UK’s largest married dating site has taught us about ending an affair properly. None of it is romantic. All of it is honest.
Be sure it’s actually over before you say it
This sounds painfully obvious, and yet it’s the single biggest mistake people make. They have a wobble — a guilt-soaked Sunday, a near-miss with a text message — and they immediately tell their affair partner it has to end. Then they regret it three days later. Then they crawl back. Then they end it again two weeks afterwards.
This pattern is corrosive. Each cycle damages the affair partner more than the previous one. It teaches them that your endings don’t really mean anything. And eventually, when you do mean it, they’ll either refuse to believe you or feel justifiably furious about being yo-yoed.
Sit with the decision for at least two weeks before you act on it. Notice whether it survives a quiet weekend, a Friday night, a glass of wine. If it doesn’t, you’re not ready. If it does — if the certainty is still there after a fortnight of normal life — then you can move.
Choose your channel deliberately
There’s a strong cultural script that says serious conversations happen face to face. For affairs, this script is wrong more often than it’s right.
Meeting up to end an affair is risky for two reasons. First, the chemistry that built the affair in the first place doesn’t politely vacate the room because you’ve decided to be sensible. Plenty of last-time meetings end in another last time, and another after that. Second, it puts you somewhere together — a hotel, a car park, a quiet pub — where photographs, sightings and lingering goodbyes can complicate everything.
For most affairs, a phone call is the right channel. Long enough to be human. Direct enough to be unmistakable. Hard to stretch beyond what it needs to be. Texts are too cold for relationships that mattered, and emails read as oddly formal. A call sits in the right register.
The exception is a very long affair — multi-year, deeply enmeshed — where one in-person conversation may genuinely be the right call. If that’s you, choose neutral ground. Daylight. No alcohol. And no hotel rooms.
Say it once, say it clearly, and don’t keep explaining
When people end affairs, they tend to over-explain. They want the other person to understand. They want them to agree. They want to leave the conversation with the affair partner saying, “Yes, you’re right, this needs to end, I respect your decision.”
That doesn’t happen. Not in the first conversation, anyway. The other person is processing a loss. They’re not in a state to ratify your reasoning.
So your job isn’t to convince them. Your job is to be unambiguous. Something like: “I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I have to stop. This isn’t a wobble. I’m not coming back.”
Then stop talking. Do not, under any circumstances, soften it with “but I’ll always think of you” or “in another life, things would be different.” These phrases feel kind in the moment and read, in the cold light of next week, as an open door. Affair partners cling to those sentences for months. Don’t leave any.
Expect them to push back — and don’t argue
A request to end an affair is rarely accepted on the first attempt by both parties. The other person will likely push back. They may be angry. They may be tearful. They may try to negotiate — what if you just had less contact, what if you waited until after the summer, what about one last time.
You don’t need to argue with any of these. You don’t need to explain why none of them will work. You only need to say, calmly, that the answer is no.
Negotiation prolongs the conversation. It also signals — even if you don’t mean it to — that the door isn’t fully closed. If they sense any softness, they will reasonably try to find more of it. Don’t make them work harder than they have to. Be kind, be firm, be brief, get off the phone.
Cut contact, properly, and stop checking
This is the part most people fail at.
After the conversation, you need to cut contact completely. Block their number, delete the messaging app, remove them from any social media you’ve connected on. Do not leave the door open in case they need to contact you about something. There’s nothing they need to contact you about.
The temptation, in the days after ending an affair, is enormous. You’ll want to know how they’re doing. You’ll worry. You’ll feel guilty. You’ll wonder if they’re alright. You may even tell yourself it’s compassionate to send one final “I hope you’re okay” message.
It isn’t. It’s the cruellest thing you can do. Every contact resets their grief clock. Every check-in extends the period before they can move on. If you actually want to be kind to them, the kind thing is silence.
This is also where most affairs that supposedly ended come back to life. One drunk Wednesday text, one thinking-of-you reply, and three weeks later you’re meeting again. Cut the cord properly the first time and the second time doesn’t happen.
Manage your own grief in private
A lot of people are surprised by how hard ending an affair hits them. They assumed, because they were the one ending it, that they’d be fine. They aren’t.
Affairs aren’t just relationships. They’re also containers — for parts of yourself you didn’t have anywhere else to put. The version of you that flirted, that laughed, that felt wanted. When the affair ends, that version of you doesn’t immediately have a new home. There’s a real grief in that, even though you’re not supposed to feel it.
You will not, generally, be able to grieve openly. Your spouse can’t comfort you. Your friends mostly don’t know. The person who could best understand what you’re going through is precisely the one you’ve just cut off.
Find somewhere private to put it. A journal you keep secure. A long walk twice a week. A therapist who isn’t connected to anyone else in your life. A sympathetic friend, if you’re lucky enough to have one who can hold a confidence. The grief needs a destination. If it doesn’t get one, it leaks — into your marriage, into your work, into late-night messages you’ll regret sending.
Don’t tell your spouse just to feel better
Confession is, surprisingly often, an act of selfishness dressed up as honesty. People who’ve ended an affair sometimes feel an enormous urge to tell their spouse, framing it to themselves as owning the truth or starting fresh.
Often what they’re actually doing is offloading their guilt onto someone who didn’t ask to carry it. The spouse, who was perfectly content yesterday, now has a life-altering piece of information they have to process — and the affair is already over. There is nothing to fix. There is only damage to receive.
There are circumstances where confession is right — particularly if there’s a significant ongoing risk to the spouse’s sexual health, finances, or imminent exposure from elsewhere. But feeling better isn’t a reason. If you’ve genuinely ended it, the most honourable thing you can usually do is carry the weight of it yourself, work on whatever drove you to the affair, and try to be a better partner from this day forward.
Rebuild — slowly — what was missing
Ending an affair without addressing why it happened is a recipe for the next one. Most affairs aren’t really about sex. They’re about being seen, being wanted, being a person rather than a function. If your marriage isn’t giving you any of those things, the absence won’t quietly disappear because you’ve ended your outlet for it.
This is the hard, slow part of the work. Either the marriage gets honest — about loneliness, about desire, about boredom — or you sit with the fact that you’re staying for reasons other than connection (children, finances, fear) and accept that consciously. Both can be liveable. The thing that isn’t liveable is going back to pretending the gap doesn’t exist, because you already know how that ends.
When the affair partner won’t accept it
Sometimes, despite doing everything correctly, the other person doesn’t accept it. They keep messaging. They turn up unexpectedly. In rare cases, they threaten to expose the affair to your spouse.
If this happens, the rules change quickly. Don’t engage in argument. Don’t apologise repeatedly. Don’t beg. State your position once in writing — something like “I’m not going to communicate with you any further. Please do not contact me.” — and then go silent. If contact persists in a way that feels threatening, or if exposure is being threatened, consider speaking to a solicitor about your options. This is rarer than people fear, but it does happen, and clarity matters.
It’s also worth saying: if you are the one who has been left, and you find yourself doing any of these things, you almost certainly know in your heart that you are. Step away. Reach out to someone who isn’t them. The pain is real. Adding to it through unwanted contact won’t ease it.
Frequently asked questions
Is it possible to end an affair and stay friends?
Almost never. Not for at least a year, probably longer. The chemistry doesn’t switch off because you’ve redefined the relationship, and most attempts at “just friends” become a slower, more confusing version of the affair. Most people who end an affair properly never speak to their affair partner again — and most of them, in time, come to see that as the right thing.
Should I tell my affair partner I still love them when I end it?
No. Whatever you feel, the kindest thing is a clean ending. Telling them you love them gives them a reason to keep hoping, which extends their pain. If you genuinely love them, the way to honour that is to let them go without leaving a door open.
How long does it take to get over an affair you’ve ended?
Most people we’ve spoken to describe a real adjustment of three to six months, with longer affairs taking up to a year before the missing-them stops being daily. The timeline isn’t linear. It comes in waves, often triggered by specific places, songs, or anniversaries. This is normal.
Can my affair partner expose me even after it ends?
Technically yes, although it’s rarer than the worst-case fantasy suggests. Most people who’ve been in affairs themselves have too much to lose to retaliate that way. Where it does happen, it’s usually after a particularly cruel or repeated ending — which is one more reason to do it properly the first time.
Is it ever the right call to end an affair and then try again later?
In our experience, very rarely. Affairs that take a break almost never come back stronger. They come back as the same affair with a more anxious, more guilty version of both people in it. If you’re not sure you want to end it, you’re not ready to end it. Wait.
If you’re working through any of this, you’re not the first to do it and you won’t be the last. There are quietly thousands of people across the UK doing the same maths every day. Whether you stay or whether you go, the most important thing is that you make the decision honestly — not on a guilty Sunday, not in the middle of a row, but in the calm, clear part of yourself that knows what your real life requires.
And if you’ve ended one chapter and find yourself, in time, ready for a different kind of one — quietly, carefully, on your own terms — Illicit Encounters has been the place people go for that for the last twenty years.
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