Forget the hotel-bar cliches. Three Illicit Encounters members tell us what their stolen afternoons together actually look like – and why it works so well.
Ask someone who’s never done it to picture an affair, and they’ll reach for the same furniture every time. A hotel bar. A whispered phone call in a stairwell. Something expensive, frantic and vaguely cinematic. The films have a lot to answer for.
So we put a much plainer question to three of our members: what do you actually do together? Not the headline moments – the ordinary Tuesday ones. Their answers had almost nothing in common with the cliches. They had a surprising amount in common with each other.
Claire, 47, Berkshire: “We walk. That’s the whole scandal.”
Claire has been seeing the same man for a little over a year. They meet every other week or so, and what they mostly do is walk. A stretch of the Ridgeway. A reservoir loop she couldn’t find again if you paid her, because she wasn’t watching the path. Two flasks of coffee, one pair of boots she keeps in a gym bag, and three hours of talking.
“My husband would tell you I hate walking,” she says. “I don’t. I hate walking in silence next to someone who’s somewhere else entirely. Stephen asks me a question and then – this is the bit I still can’t get over – he waits for the answer. The first time it happened I nearly fell in the reservoir.”
She laughs telling us this, but she’s not really joking. Of everything she could have bought with the risk she’s taken, what she chose was conversation. On a footpath. In sensible boots.
David, 52, Manchester: “Lunch. A long, unhurried, frankly ridiculous lunch.”
David’s afternoons happen at a tapas place two towns over, where the waiters now know better than to rush them. Two hours, sometimes nearer three. He books the table the way other men book a tee time.
“Somewhere in twenty years of family life, eating became refuelling,” he says. “You eat standing up, or in front of something, or while someone tells you what’s gone wrong with the boiler. Anna reads the menu out loud like it’s a story. We order too much. Nobody checks their watch, because for once nobody has to be anywhere until three.”
Food comes up constantly when members describe what they’d been missing, and it’s never really about the food. It’s about being sat opposite someone whose attention doesn’t wander off mid-sentence to a phone, a child, or a boiler.
Priya, 44, Surrey: “The cinema on a Wednesday. We’ve had whole screens to ourselves.”
Priya discovered early on that a 1pm showing of almost anything, a couple of towns from home, is the emptiest room in Britain. She and the man she sees have spent a year and a half of Wednesdays in the dark, sharing armrests through films neither of them could summarise under oath.
“We’ve held hands through some absolutely terrible films,” she says. “A sequel to something neither of us saw the first one of. I couldn’t tell you a single plot. That’s not what the ticket’s for. The ticket is for two hours where I’m just a woman in the dark with someone who wanted to be there with me.”
The thing all three said, without quite saying it
Notice what’s missing from these answers. Nobody mentioned champagne. Nobody mentioned silk sheets, or jewellery, or anywhere with a concierge. The most scandalous purchase across the three of them was patatas bravas.
What they described, each in their own way, was attention. Daylight. Being asked a question by someone who waits for the answer. The affair of the popular imagination happens at midnight in a city-centre hotel; the real ones, it turns out, mostly happen between eleven and three, somewhere with decent parking.
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