There’s a question we’ve started asking long-standing members of Illicit Encounters when they renew, almost as a quiet exit interview in reverse. What is it, really, that brought you here? Not the moment you signed up, not the row with your husband or the silent Sunday with your wife. The thing underneath it. The ache.
We expected most people to say sex. They didn’t. Or rather, they did, but only after they’d said something else first.
What kept coming up, again and again, in the words of women in their forties and fifties and men well into their sixties, was something quieter. Something a touch harder to admit to in everyday conversation. They missed being wanted.
Not desired. Wanted.
There’s a difference, and our members made it carefully. Desire is a flicker. Wanting is the steady, mundane, unmistakable signal that another person is paying attention to you. Specifically you. Not the version of you who pays the mortgage or remembers the kids’ inhalers, but the actual, unrepeated person sitting at the kitchen table.
Helen, a 47-year-old GP from Bristol who’s been on the site for just over a year, put it like this. “It wasn’t that he stopped fancying me. I think he still does, in a vague way. It was that he stopped noticing me. He’d walk past me in the hallway like I was a coat stand. And I started to feel like one.”
Nobody on the site, in any of the conversations we had this month, used the word “invisible” without a slight pause first. It’s a word that sits heavy in the mouth. But almost everyone used it eventually.
“He used to look at me when I was talking.”
That sentence, or some version of it, came up four times in one afternoon. James from Manchester said it about his wife. Priya from Reading said it about her husband. A retired teacher in Norwich said it twice, once gently and once with a small, dry laugh.
And the thing is, none of them had been ignored in any cinematic, dramatic way. There were no slammed doors, no running off with a colleague, no headline-worthy betrayals. Just a slow domestic dimming. Conversations that became logistics. Eye contact that drifted toward the television. A goodnight that became a grunt, then a sigh, then nothing at all.
What our members miss isn’t the heady early years of their marriages. Most of them are honest about that — they know infatuation has a shelf life. What they miss is the small, daily evidence that they were still being chosen. A text in the middle of the day. A hand on the small of the back when the kettle boiled. The sense that someone, anyone, was glad they were in the room.
The men said something different. But not as different as you’d think.
There’s a tired script that says women miss emotional connection and men miss sex, and our inboxes don’t really agree with it. Men told us they missed sex, yes, but more often they missed the feeling that came before sex — the sense of being approached. Being reached for. Being chosen first, rather than slotted in after the laundry.
Tom, a 54-year-old joiner from Hull, said something that stuck with us. “I could go without it. Honestly. What I couldn’t go without was her wanting me to come to bed.” He paused for a long time after that. “I don’t even know when she stopped doing that. I just know she did.”
Several women said almost the exact same thing back the other way. Sarah, 41, from Leeds, told us she’d cried in the car after a member sent her a single line that read, “Drive safe — let me know when you’re home.” Her husband had stopped doing that years ago. “I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for somebody to say it,” she wrote. “And then somebody did.”
Why this site, and not couples counselling?
It’s a fair question, and one we put back to them. The answers tend to land in similar places. Counselling, several members said, asks you to dig up a marriage and replant it. That can be the right thing. But it’s slow, it’s exposing, and for plenty of people it arrives years after the deficit started. By the time you’re sitting on a beige sofa explaining to a stranger why you flinched when your wife touched your shoulder, the part of you that needed to feel wanted has already gone looking elsewhere — even if only in your head.
What members find here is something gentler and, in its way, more honest. Someone telling them they look lovely in the photograph. Someone asking what they did today and waiting for the answer. Someone, often a stranger at first, treating them like the person they used to be before the marriage went quietly flat.
Whether that turns into a coffee, a long-running affair, or just a confidence-restoring conversation that never leaves the inbox is up to them. We don’t prescribe. We just provide the room.
If any of this sounds familiar
You’re not unusual. You’re not even particularly unhappy, by most external measures. You might have a marriage that looks fine from the outside and feels, from the inside, like a long, polite silence.
What our members keep telling us is that the thing they were missing wasn’t a person. It was a feeling. The small, specific, daily feeling of being wanted by someone, on purpose, in the middle of an ordinary Wednesday.
If that’s the gap you’ve been trying not to name, you already know where to find us.
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