It’s one of the most common questions asked about married daters, and one of the most misunderstood. If you’re unhappy, why don’t you just leave? It sounds so simple. A neat moral equation. And yet anyone who’s actually lived inside a long marriage knows the honest answer is almost never simple.
So rather than guess, Mia put the question to members of Illicit Encounters directly. Four people answered, anonymously, over the course of a single rainy week in early April. Their ages range from 38 to 61. They live in Sheffield, Guildford, Belfast and the outskirts of Cardiff. They have almost nothing in common on paper. But the themes that emerged were strikingly similar.
“Because the good days still outnumber the bad. Just.”
Hannah is 42, a teaching assistant in Sheffield, married for fourteen years. She put it like this: there are still mornings when her husband makes her laugh over the cereal, still evenings when they fall into the easy rhythm of a box set and a shared bottle of Pinot. And then there are the weeks when they barely speak beyond logistics. School runs, bin day, who’s collecting the dog from the groomers.
“If I tallied up the hours,” she said, “I’d probably still come out on the happy side. Just. But it’s getting closer every year.” She joined IE eighteen months ago and now sees someone twice a month. She isn’t planning to leave. She describes her marriage as “the comfortable chair you don’t want to throw out even though the springs have gone.”
“Children. That’s the whole answer, really.”
Mark is 47 and lives near Guildford. His youngest is nine. His eldest, thirteen. He was almost embarrassed to say it because he knows how it sounds, but he said it anyway: his children are the reason, and everything else is footnotes.
“Everyone says kids are resilient. Maybe. But mine are happy. They’ve got two parents under one roof who love them, even if the love between us is mostly admin these days. I’m not prepared to be the one who blows that up. Not until they’re older.”
He’s been seeing the same woman through IE for nearly three years. She’s in a similar situation. They meet on Wednesdays when their schedules align. And for the rest of the week he’s a present, engaged father who coaches under-11s football. Both things are true at once. That’s the part people on the outside rarely understand.
“Money. I wish it weren’t, but it is.”
Siobhan is 54, in Belfast, married for twenty-six years. She was the most direct of the four. Divorce, she said, would halve her standard of living overnight. She’d lose the house she’s lived in since her eldest was a baby. She’d lose the garden she spent a decade planting. And at her age, she has no appetite for starting over financially, legally, emotionally.
“I love him, in the way you love a brother you’ve known forever,” she said. “I just don’t want to sleep with him anymore, and he knows it, and we’ve stopped pretending otherwise.” She and her husband haven’t been physically intimate in over four years. He doesn’t ask where she goes on her Saturday afternoons. She doesn’t ask where he goes on his Tuesday evenings. It is, she says, a kind of civilised peace. Not the marriage she once imagined. But not nothing either.
“Because we built a whole life together. You don’t rip that up lightly.”
Daniel, 61, lives just outside Cardiff. He’s been married thirty-four years. His wife is, by his own description, “a wonderful woman who simply isn’t in love with me anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time.” They run a small business together. They holiday in the same Cornwall cottage every August. Their three grown children, two grandchildren and one very elderly Labrador all orbit the same family home.
“To leave now would be to blow up a life that has, overall, been a good one,” he said. “I just need something of my own. Something that’s mine. Something that reminds me I’m still a man, not just a husband and a grandfather.” He started using IE two years ago. He describes the woman he sees as “the person who listens to me properly for the first time since 1997.”
What it all comes down to
Nobody interviewed here was looking for permission. They weren’t asking Mia to validate their choices, and she wasn’t about to. But what came through, in every conversation, was how much quieter and more rational the real reasons are than the ones you read about in Sunday supplements.
People stay because lives are tangled. Because children are small. Because mortgages are long. Because the person you shared your twenties with becomes, over time, a kind of family. Because leaving costs more than staying. Because the alternative, realistically assessed, looks worse than the compromise.
And increasingly, because there are options that don’t require burning the house down.
If you’ve ever asked yourself the same question, and come up with an answer that sounds a lot like these, you’re in good company. More of it than you’d think.
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