There’s a version of this conversation that happens every time an affair becomes public knowledge. Someone famous, someone ordinary, someone your friend knows. And within minutes, the explanation gets flattened down to one of two things: they were selfish, or they were sex-mad. Case closed. Moral verdict delivered.
But that’s not actually what’s happening. Not for the overwhelming majority of people who find themselves, often to their own surprise, outside the boundaries of their marriage. The real picture is messier, more human, and — if you’ve ever felt the pull yourself — far more recognisable than anyone admits.
We’ve spoken to hundreds of members over the years. People who joined Illicit Encounters from Bradford and Bath, from Edinburgh and Exeter, from perfectly ordinary houses on perfectly ordinary streets. And when you actually listen — when you stop looking for the villain and start listening for the person — the same themes come up again and again. Not excuses. Explanations. There’s a difference.
The loneliness that lives inside a marriage
This is the one that surprises people who haven’t experienced it. The idea that you can be profoundly, achingly lonely while sharing a bed with someone every night. That you can eat dinner across from another person, raise children together, watch television side by side — and still feel completely unseen.
Rachel, 47, from just outside Manchester, described it like this: “I wasn’t unhappy exactly. We weren’t arguing. We weren’t miserable. We’d just become… two people managing a household together. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d asked me how I was and actually waited for the answer.”
That experience — of being functionally married but emotionally alone — is one of the most common reasons people start looking elsewhere. Not because they want to blow their life up. Not because they don’t love their spouse in some foundational way. But because the particular hunger of wanting to be known by someone, to have someone be genuinely curious about who you are, becomes unbearable after long enough.
Psychologists sometimes call this “emotional starvation.” It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It creeps in over years, as conversation narrows to logistics, as physical affection becomes perfunctory, as both people quietly stop trying in small ways until the small ways have added up to something large.
The person they used to be
Ask someone in the middle of an affair what it feels like, and a surprising number of them will say some version of the same thing: “I feel like myself again.”
Not like a different person. Like the person they were before marriage, before children, before the mortgage and the routine and the accumulating weight of a life that was built sensibly but not always joyfully.
This is something that rarely gets discussed honestly. Affairs aren’t always about escaping to something new. Sometimes they’re about returning to something old — a version of yourself that got quietly shelved somewhere around the third year of marriage. The one who was funny, or spontaneous, or had opinions about things. The one who felt desired. Who felt interesting.
Paul, a 52-year-old civil engineer from Leeds, put it plainly: “With Karen, I was the man I was at thirty-two. She didn’t know about the business that nearly went under, or the years I gained weight, or any of it. She just knew me as I presented myself. And I remembered that I liked that person.”
There’s nothing shallow about that. It’s a deeply human need — to be seen as capable, attractive, alive — and marriages, through no particular fault, can gradually stop providing it.
Sex, yes — but not in the way you’d think
Of course sex is part of it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is being dishonest. But even the sexual dimension of affairs is more complicated than it’s given credit for.
For most people, it’s not simply about wanting more sex or different sex. It’s about what sex represents. It’s about feeling wanted. About the particular electricity of someone choosing you — not because you share a mortgage or because you’re the default option, but because they actively, deliberately want to be with you.
Long-term relationships, even happy ones, can see desire settle into something comfortable and predictable. That’s not a failure. It’s a natural evolution of intimacy. But for some people, the loss of that charge — that sense of being genuinely desired — creates a gap that becomes harder and harder to ignore.
Claire from Guildford messaged us about this a few months ago. She’d been with her husband for nineteen years. “We still have sex,” she said. “But I can tell he’s going through the motions. I want someone to want me. Not just to go along with me.” That distinction — between being wanted and being tolerated — is one that resonates with an enormous number of people who’d never dream of themselves as “the type” to have an affair.
Midlife, identity, and the clock
There’s a reason affairs cluster heavily in the 40s and 50s. This isn’t just a cliché. There are real psychological and circumstantial forces at work.
Midlife has a habit of forcing a reckoning. Children leave home. Careers plateau or pivot. Parents age and die. The future suddenly has a visible horizon in a way it didn’t before. And for many people, that reckoning includes the question: is this it?
Not dramatically. Not with a crisis exactly. Just a quiet, persistent question about whether the life they built is the life they actually wanted — and whether there’s still time to experience something different.
For some, that manifests as a new hobby or a career change. For others, it manifests as a desire for intimacy that their marriage stopped providing years ago. Neither is more rational than the other. Both are responses to the same underlying human need: to feel that life still holds possibility.
This is why affairs in midlife are so rarely about chaos or recklessness. Most people doing this are thoughtful, careful, often wracked with conflicting feelings. They’re not trying to destroy anything. They’re trying to quietly add something.
When the marriage works, except for the part that matters to you
This is perhaps the category that gets the least sympathy from the outside world, because it’s the hardest to explain without sounding ungrateful.
Everything is fine. Your partner is decent. Your life, on paper, is exactly what you planned. But something — and you can name it, or you can’t — is missing. Connection. Passion. The sense that your inner life matters to another person. Physical intimacy that went away years ago and never came back.
People in this situation are often the most conflicted of all, because they know they “shouldn’t” want more. They feel guilty for wanting anything when they already have so much. And yet the want doesn’t go away just because it’s inconvenient.
Tom, 44, from Cheltenham, told us: “My wife is a good person. A good mother. We have a nice life. But we haven’t had any real intimacy in four years. I don’t want to leave. I love my family. But I’m forty-four and I don’t think I should be done.”
That’s not selfishness. That’s a person trying to find a way to remain functional, present, and decent in a life that has a specific gap in it. The decision about how to handle that gap is, of course, a personal one. But the existence of the gap isn’t a moral failing.
The emotional affair that crept in quietly
Not every affair begins with physical intention. A significant number start as friendships — with a colleague, an old acquaintance, someone met through a hobby or an online community — that gradually, almost imperceptibly, shade into something more.
The emotional affair is, in some ways, the most seductive and the most destabilising kind, because it develops precisely where the marriage has failed. Someone listens. Someone asks questions. Someone seems to find you endlessly interesting. The conversations get longer, more honest, more intimate. At some point, you realise you’re telling this person things you haven’t told your spouse in years.
By the time a physical dimension enters the picture — if it ever does — the emotional attachment is already deep. And for many people, that depth is both the thing they were most hungry for and the thing they find most difficult to walk back from.
The ones who tried everything else first
It’s worth saying clearly: for a significant proportion of the people on a site like ours, an affair isn’t the first response to an unhappy marriage. It’s closer to the last one.
They tried counselling, or suggested it and were refused. They had the conversations — the difficult ones, at strange hours, that went badly or were simply never reciprocated. They waited, hoping things would change, for months and then years. They quietly shelved their own needs until the shelf collapsed.
Affairs, for these people, aren’t an act of carelessness. They’re an act of self-preservation. A decision — sometimes fully conscious, sometimes less so — that their own needs are real and worth something, even if nobody in their immediate life is acknowledging that.
What actually changes when someone has an affair
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get written about much: for a lot of people, the affair itself isn’t the transformative part. What changes is something internal.
The moment of deciding to act — of deciding that your own desire, your own loneliness, your own need for connection is legitimate enough to pursue — is often the real shift. People report feeling more present at home, oddly enough. More patient. Less resentful. Because they’ve stopped silently punishing their spouse for a situation neither of them entirely created, and found a way to meet their own needs that doesn’t require dismantling everything else.
That’s not a universal experience, and it’s not without complexity. But it’s a real one. And it’s one of the reasons that the simple morality tale — affairs are bad, affairs damage everything, affairs are always the product of selfishness — doesn’t hold up against the actual lived experience of the people having them.
The question of honesty
One thing almost everyone in this situation grapples with, at some point, is the question of dishonesty. The secrecy. The logistics of keeping two lives separate. For people who think of themselves as fundamentally honest — and most do — this can be the hardest part.
But it’s worth holding alongside it: many of these same people have been dishonest with themselves for years. About how unhappy they are. About what they need. About whether their marriage, as it currently exists, is meeting them as full human beings.
The external dishonesty of an affair often comes after a long period of internal dishonesty that the person has been expected to maintain for the sake of social form. That’s not a get-out clause. But it is a context. And context matters.
Affairs happen for real, complicated, deeply human reasons. People who have them are not a different species. They’re not broken or immoral by definition. They’re people — often thoughtful, often conflicted, often kind — who found themselves with a need that wasn’t being met and made a choice about what to do with that.
If you’re reading this and recognising yourself somewhere in these pages, you’re not alone. Not even slightly. There are over a million and a half people in the UK who have at some point used Illicit Encounters — and what brought most of them here wasn’t recklessness. It was precisely this: a quiet, persistent sense that they deserved a little more than the life they were living.
That’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s something to be honest about.
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