Paul hadn’t planned to join a married dating site on a Tuesday evening in February. He’d planned to watch the end of a football match, drink one beer too many, and go to bed at ten. That was a Tuesday in the Whitmore household. That was how things went.
His wife Karen was in the other room with something on the television — one of those renovation programmes, rooms being knocked through, couples arguing about kitchen islands. He could hear the muffled enthusiasm of presenters. Paul sat at the kitchen table with his laptop open and a browser tab he didn’t entirely remember opening. IllicitEncounters.com. He’d heard the name somewhere. A podcast, maybe. A lad at work.
He didn’t feel desperate. That’s the thing people get wrong about men like Paul. He wasn’t sitting there plotting something. He was just… tired. Not tired in the way that a good night’s sleep would fix. Tired in the way that comes from seventeen years of being perfectly fine, of nothing being wrong exactly, of wanting something and not being able to name it.
He made a profile. Used a photo from three years ago, one where he was squinting into the sun on a canal boat in Worcestershire. Wrote something brief. Thought: probably nothing will happen. Closed the laptop and went to bed.
A few weeks later, a message from a woman called Rachel. She was forty-three, she lived near Coventry, she’d been married eleven years. Her message was two lines. He liked that. He was tired of effort masquerading as casualness.
They talked for three weeks before meeting. Not obsessively — a few messages a day, sometimes less. She picked things up. He’d mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d been listening to an old Teenage Fanclub album on the drive home and it had hit him differently than it used to. She brought it up four days later, completely unprompted. “Did you work out why it hit you differently?” He genuinely hadn’t expected her to remember. “Of course I remembered,” she said. “You were being interesting.”
That word stayed with him. Interesting. He’d stopped thinking of himself that way. Not overnight — gradually, the way a photograph fades if you leave it somewhere bright. He’d been interesting once. He used to have opinions people actually wanted to hear. He used to make people laugh without really trying. Somewhere along the way, without noticing, he’d stopped.
They met on a Thursday afternoon in Warwick. A café near the market square. He arrived eight minutes early and ordered a coffee he didn’t need and sat by the window feeling like he was about nineteen years old. Not bad-nineteen. The good kind. The kind where everything still feels possible.
Rachel was easy to talk to in the way that only certain people are — not because she made effort look effortless, but because she was genuinely paying attention. He said something off the top of his head about the way old town centres always feel like a half-finished argument about what the eighties were supposed to look like, and she laughed, properly laughed, and said “God, yes, exactly that.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said something and had someone immediately understand it.
They talked for two hours. He made her laugh three more times that he counted, and probably others he didn’t. He asked her questions and actually listened to the answers rather than formulating his next sentence while she was still speaking. He was, somewhere in the middle of that Thursday afternoon, himself. The version of himself he’d nearly forgotten existed.
He drove back towards Leicester with the radio off. Not sad, not guilty, not euphoric either. Just awake. Aware of things again. The feeling of wanting something and knowing it, clearly, without the fog. There was a word for it that he’d stopped using years ago. Alive.
That version of you — the one who is still curious, still funny, still capable of wanting something for yourself — hasn’t gone anywhere. IllicitEncounters.com has been helping people find it again since 2004. Over 1.5 million UK members, most of them people very much like Paul.
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