It happened to her in a Pret in Reading station, of all places.
Anna was forty-seven, married for nineteen years to a man she still — by every reasonable measure — loved. Two children, both at university now. A semi-detached on a leafy street in Berkshire, a labrador called Bertie, the usual quiet rhythm of a life that had worked. She was queuing for a flat white when she noticed the couple in front of her. Mid-fifties, both of them. He was holding her hand while they pondered whether to share a brownie. Just casually. Thumb stroking the back of her wrist. Both of them looking at the cabinet, neither aware they were doing it.
And Anna stood there and tried, genuinely, to remember the last time her husband had held her hand on purpose. Not at a wedding. Not at a funeral. Not because they were crossing a road. Just because.
She couldn’t.
The touches that disappear without anyone noticing
There’s a particular kind of intimacy that tends to be the first to go in a long marriage, and it’s not the obvious one. Sex gets all the attention, and rightly so — its absence is loud and hard to miss. People notice when it stops. But the other kind of touch — the unconscious, ambient, accidental kind — disappears so quietly that most couples don’t realise it’s gone until something pulls their attention to it.
The hand on the small of her back as he passed behind her in the kitchen. The brush of fingers across his shoulder as she walked past the sofa. The unthinking palm on the knee at the cinema. The way one of you would, without thinking, lean a little against the other while standing at a bus stop.
These don’t end with a row. They aren’t decided. They just thin out, year by year, until one day you’re standing in a queue in Reading station watching strangers do the things you used to do without noticing.
The marriage was, in every other way, fine
This was what made it hardest for Anna, who decided to join Illicit Encounters. Her husband wasn’t cold. He didn’t ignore her. He still made her a cup of tea every morning, still kissed her goodnight, still asked about her day and listened to the answer. By the metrics most people use to assess a marriage, theirs was a good one. Their friends still pointed at them at dinner parties as the steady ones.
But she’d started to feel something she couldn’t quite put a name to. A low-grade hollowness. Not unhappiness, exactly — more like the sense that she was living inside something she’d stopped being entirely sure was a marriage. Or whether it had quietly become something else. A really friendly cohabitation. A logistics partnership with a shared mortgage and a fridge calendar.
She told a friend, eventually, over a second glass of wine in Pizza Express. The friend didn’t flinch. She just nodded slowly and said, “Yeah. Mark hasn’t touched me by accident in about six years.”
When loss of touch becomes loss of self
Here’s what nobody warns you about. The slow disappearance of casual touch doesn’t just affect the marriage. It affects how the person inside it sees themselves. Anna had started to feel, somewhere around her late forties, like she’d become slightly invisible — even in her own home. Not unloved. Just uninhabited. There’s a particular quality to being touched casually by someone who likes you that confirms, somewhere primal, that you’re real. That you exist as a body in the world, not just as a function.
When that goes, something else starts to wobble. Confidence, maybe. Aliveness. The small, almost-unconscious sense that you’re still a desirable creature rather than just a competent household manager. And honestly, who could blame anyone for wanting it back?
A lot of women — and quite a few men — find their way to a married dating site at exactly this point. Not because they don’t love their spouse, but because they’ve forgotten what it feels like to be touched on purpose by someone who’s actually looking at them. To have a hand placed at the small of their back as they walk into a restaurant. To be taken in, head to toe, by a person who hasn’t seen them every day for two decades.
That’s not betrayal in the cinematic sense. It’s a much quieter, sadder, more human thing.
What Anna did next
Anna didn’t blow up her life. Most don’t. She didn’t sit her husband down and demand a conversation, partly because she didn’t yet have the words for the conversation she wanted to have. What she did do was admit something to herself she’d been ignoring for years — that the absence of casual touch had become deafening, and she missed being seen.
Sarah from Leeds messaged us a few months back saying something almost identical. She’d been describing her marriage to a friend and realised, mid-sentence, that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been touched without intention. Not in a sexual way. Just touched. The realisation, she said, was the loudest thing that had happened to her all year.
What both of them did next is theirs to know. But neither was the same person who first noticed the silence.
If any of this is starting to sound a little too familiar — the small thinning out, the way the days stack up without anyone reaching for anyone — you already know where to find us.
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