Greg from Bristol used to be the funny one. At university he’d been the bloke doing impressions in the kitchen at two in the morning, the one his mates wanted at every dinner party because he could turn a flat evening around in about ninety seconds. He told stories. Long, daft, winding ones with a payoff you never saw coming. People leaned in when he spoke.
He couldn’t tell you the exact year he stopped.
There was no row about it, no evening where he decided to go quiet. It happened the way these things tend to — gradually, then all at once. The kids came. The promotions came with longer hours. Dinner turned into a logistics meeting: who’s collecting Maisie, did you ring the dentist, the boiler’s making that noise again. His wife wasn’t cruel about it. She just stopped laughing at his jokes, somewhere around the time he stopped making them. They were partners now. A well-run operation. And there’s nothing wrong with a well-run operation. But Greg, at fifty-one, had started to feel like a man being slowly laminated — sealed in, smoothed over, a little less real every year.
He joined Illicit Encounters on a Tuesday night, half expecting to feel ridiculous. He told himself he was only looking. He wasn’t sure looking for what.
Her name — the one she used, anyway — was Cath. Forty-six, from just outside Bath, and her first message poked fun at something he’d written in his profile. He’d made a self-deprecating joke about being “fluent in spreadsheets and very little else.” She wrote back: “Bold of you to lead with your weakest material.”
And Greg laughed. Out loud, alone, at his phone, in the spare room. He couldn’t remember the last time a text had done that.
What followed wasn’t dramatic. They messaged for a fortnight before either of them mentioned meeting. But something in him had switched back on. He found himself collecting things to tell her during the day — a ridiculous exchange he’d overheard on the train, a memory from his twenties he hadn’t dusted off in years. He was telling stories again. And better than that, someone was asking to hear them.
That was the part that surprised him most. It wasn’t the flirtation, though there was plenty of that. It was being interesting to someone again. Being asked a question and watching the other person actually wait for the answer. Cath would send a voice note at lunchtime saying, “Right, you can’t just say that and leave it — finish the story,” and he’d grin like an idiot for the rest of the afternoon.
They met eventually, at a pub halfway between them on a wet Thursday. He got there early, which he never did. And for two hours he was the man from the university kitchen again — quick, warm, properly present. At one point Cath laughed so hard at something he said that she had to put her glass down. He watched her do it and felt something he hadn’t felt in a very long while. Not desire, exactly, though that was there too. More like recognition. Oh, he thought. There he is. I’d wondered where he’d got to.
He went home that night and his wife was already asleep. He stood in the dark kitchen for a while. He didn’t feel guilty, not in the way he’d braced for. He felt awake. And he felt sad, too, because he could see clearly now how long he’d been switched off, and how little anyone in his own house had seemed to notice.
People assume affairs are about sex, or about something gone missing in the bedroom. Sometimes they are. But sit with enough of our members and you’ll hear a quieter version far more often. They didn’t go looking to be touched. They went looking to be heard. To be funny again. To be the version of themselves that someone, somewhere, still found worth leaning in for.
Greg isn’t sure where it goes from here. He’s careful — he’d tell you that himself. But he’s stopped pretending the laminated man was the real one. Cath cracked the seal, and he’s in no hurry to climb back in.
Plenty of people recognise themselves somewhere in a story like Greg’s — that slow fade from interesting to invisible in their own marriage. If it’s landed a little too close to home, you already know where we are.
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