People assume the same thing about married daters. They picture someone smug, restless, hungry — somebody who’s already got everything and wants more anyway. The greedy spouse. The one who couldn’t be content if their life depended on it.
It’s a clean little story. It gets shared in newspaper comment sections and around dinner tables, and it’s one of the most stubborn myths about extramarital relationships in this country.
After two decades of running the UK’s largest married dating site, Illicit Encounters — and reading more messages, profiles and emails from members than any of us care to count — the honest picture looks nothing like that.
The selfish-cheater stereotype assumes one thing above all: that the people using sites like ours are getting plenty of what they need at home and just want extra on the side. That’s the part that doesn’t match the data, the conversations, or the long late-night emails members sometimes send us when they finally feel safe enough to say what’s actually going on.
What we actually hear
Sarah from Sheffield wrote to us not long ago. Married for 19 years. Two teenagers. A husband she still loves, in a way — “in a deeply familiar, slightly distant way,” as she put it. She hadn’t been touched, properly touched, in nearly four years. She wasn’t messaging anyone yet. She was working up to it. What she wanted to know, more than anything, was whether she was a bad person for even considering it.
That email is not unusual. It’s the email. We get versions of it every week, from women and men, from people in their thirties through to their sixties, from London accountants and Dorset farmers and Belfast nurses.
Selfish people, in our experience, do not write to a dating site asking permission. They do not agonise. They do not list, with painful clarity, all the reasons their spouse is “actually a good person.” They do not say “I never expected to be the kind of person who would even be on a site like this.”
What we see, far more often, is the opposite — people who have done the maths on their own happiness for years, quietly come up short, and tried everything else first.
The ‘everything else first’ part
That part rarely makes the headlines. But it’s where most of our members live for a long time before they ever sign up.
They’ve raised the conversation with their partner, sometimes more than once. They’ve suggested counselling. They’ve bought the books. They’ve waited out small children, bereavements, redundancies, the renovation that took two years longer than it should have. They’ve blamed themselves for losing interest. They’ve tried to want their own marriage again.
Mike, a member in his early fifties, told us he’d waited until both his daughters left for university before he ever opened the site. “I didn’t want to be the kind of dad who broke up the home,” he said. “But I couldn’t be the kind of person who’d never been touched again either.”
That is not the language of someone hoarding pleasure. That is someone working through a real and unromantic adult problem.
Why the myth survives
Partly because affairs make people uncomfortable, and “selfish” is a tidier explanation than “unhappy in a long marriage.” Partly because the people most willing to talk publicly about infidelity tend to be the ones it has hurt — which is a perspective worth taking seriously, but isn’t the whole picture.
And partly because as a culture we still find it easier to imagine a villain than to imagine an ordinary person making a quietly difficult choice.
But quiet difficulty is overwhelmingly what we see.
What 20 years actually shows
Members who treat one another well. Members who ask for honesty about expectations on the very first message. Members who end things with care when one party catches feelings the other can’t return. Members who go years between affair partners because they’re not, actually, looking for chaos — they’re looking for one specific kind of warmth that’s gone missing somewhere they can no longer find it.
Are some members selfish? Of course. There are selfish people on every dating site, single or otherwise. There are selfish people in marriages, in book clubs, in churches, in PTAs. We’re not in the business of pretending otherwise.
But the broad picture, after 20 years and more than 1.5 million UK members? Something far more human than the stereotype allows.
People doing their best inside an arrangement that’s stopped working, and trying to find a small amount of life again — without burning the rest of it down in the process.
That isn’t selfish. That’s survival, dressed in slightly nicer clothes.
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