People sign up to Illicit Encounters expecting to be surprised by the other person. The good ones, the disappointing ones, the ones who turn out to be exactly who they said they’d be. What most don’t expect is to be surprised by their own marriage instead.
A few months in, something unusual happens. The lover stops being the point. The lover becomes a kind of contrast — a small, lit window through which the rest of life suddenly looks different. Quieter. Stranger. Easier to see.
Here are six things our members say they only really notice once they’ve spent a bit of time with someone else.
1. How much smaller your conversations had become
It’s the first thing nearly everyone mentions. Not the sex, not the flirtation — the talking. A coffee that runs into a second hour. A drive somewhere with a conversation that doesn’t loop back to logistics, schools, or the boiler.
Karen, a member from Cheshire, put it like this: “I hadn’t realised I’d been having the same eight conversations with my husband for about four years. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t mine. But I’d forgotten what it felt like to be asked a question I hadn’t already answered.”
2. That you’d stopped being curious about each other
You can still love someone without being curious about them. Curiosity is a separate thing entirely. It’s the impulse to ask a follow-up question, the small pull to find out what they thought of that book, that headline, that argument with their sister.
Members often describe sitting opposite a new person and being startled to find themselves leaning forward. Not because the new person is more interesting — but because curiosity, once it switches back on, is a slightly disorientating feeling.
3. That you’d been withdrawing too — not just them
This one tends to land hardest. The story most people arrive with is that their spouse stopped reaching, stopped noticing, stopped trying. And often that’s true. But once you’ve spent a few evenings being properly present with someone new, it’s hard to ignore how much of your own warmth you’d quietly packed away.
Mike, married twenty-one years and signed up to IE just before Christmas, put it bluntly. “I’d been telling myself my wife had gone cold. Then a stranger laughed at something I said, and I realised I hadn’t actually tried to be funny at home in years.”
4. How much energy you’d been spending on not feeling things
Marriages that have gone flat aren’t usually loveless. They’re often careful. Carefully polite, carefully agreeable, carefully not bringing up the thing that bothered you back in May.
That carefulness costs more than people realise. Members frequently describe coming home from a date and feeling tired in a completely different way — not bad tired, just heavier. The kind of tired that comes from noticing you’d been holding something in for years without knowing.
5. That being wanted again is more shocking than the sex
There’s a moment many members describe — quite specifically — where a new partner looks at them properly. Not at the to-do list, not at the school WhatsApp, not at the back of their head while the news is on. Just at them.
Sarah from Bristol told us she nearly cried in a hotel lift the first time it happened. “Not because of anything he’d done. Because I’d forgotten that someone could look at me like I was a person, not a piece of household infrastructure.”
6. That the affair didn’t fix the marriage — it just put a lamp in the room
Perhaps the most unexpected realisation of all. People often arrive imagining an affair will either ruin the marriage or rescue it. In practice, neither tends to happen straight away.
What happens, more often, is illumination. You suddenly see the marriage in a slightly different light — sometimes more fondly, sometimes more honestly, sometimes both at once. Some couples eventually drift apart from there. Others quietly come back to each other. Some hold both lives in parallel for years. The light just stays on.
So what do you actually do with all of this
None of these realisations are tidy. They’re not the sort of thing you bring up at dinner. But they’re the reason many of our members say, even years later, that the experience changed something they didn’t know was changeable. Sometimes it changes the marriage. Sometimes it changes them. Sometimes it just changes how honestly they can describe their own life.
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