David is 53, lives near Reading, and runs a small logistics business with thirty-two employees. He’s been married twenty-six years to a woman he describes, without irony, as “genuinely my best friend.” She knows about his stress and his back pain and his complicated relationship with his late father. She makes him tea the way he likes it without asking. She’s the first person he wants to tell when something funny happens. She is, in every conventional measure, a good wife.
David has also been having an affair, on and off, for the past three years.
He told us this without drama, sitting at a kitchen table in a café where he had no chance of being seen. “I’m not unhappy in my marriage,” he said. “That’s the thing nobody believes. I love my wife. But there’s something else, and I can’t pretend there isn’t.”
David’s story isn’t unusual. After twenty-one years of running Britain’s largest married dating site, we’ve heard versions of it thousands of times. And the reasons men give for affairs are rarely the headline reasons people imagine. They’re not, in most cases, what tabloids or therapy books or angry friends-of-the-betrayed will tell you they are.
Here’s what married men actually say — when they trust the conversation enough to be honest.
Not the reasons you’d expect
Ask the average person why married men have affairs and they’ll say sex. They’ll say midlife crisis. They’ll say men can’t keep it in their trousers and that’s the end of the analysis. None of which is entirely wrong. But none of which is mostly right either.
When you talk to thousands of married men over decades, certain themes come up again and again — and they’re more emotional, more quietly desperate, and more recognisably human than the lazy explanations suggest. What follows is what the data, the conversations, and the inboxes tell us. None of these are excuses. They are explanations. There is a difference.
1. The slow erosion of feeling wanted
If you ask married men who have affairs to name the moment something went wrong in their marriage, most can’t. There isn’t one. What there is, instead, is a slow erosion — months or years where they stopped feeling wanted by their wife in any active sense.
This isn’t the same as not being loved. Most of these men feel deeply loved. They are co-parented with, planned with, included in the family text chain, told to put their coat on. What they stop feeling is desired — not just sexually, though that often becomes the obvious symptom, but as a person someone is glad to be near.
“My wife loves me,” one member, Tom, 47, told us. “She just doesn’t seem to fancy me anymore. And I don’t know how to bring that up without sounding like a sulky teenager.”
That gap between being loved and being wanted is where, in our experience, the largest number of affairs quietly germinate.
2. Loneliness inside the marriage
Married loneliness is its own phenomenon, and it’s far more common than people realise. A man can live with someone for twenty years, share a bed, share a bank account, raise children together, and still feel desperately alone with the small private weather of his own life.
This often gets dismissed as men “not communicating.” But men who have affairs are frequently very good communicators with their affair partner. The issue isn’t a fundamental inability to speak. It’s that, somewhere along the way, the marriage stopped being a place where small daily emotional things had a willing audience.
“I’d come home and tell her something from work and she’d say ‘mhm’ and keep scrolling,” one member said. “It wasn’t malicious. She was tired. But after a few hundred of those, you just stop telling her anything.”
The affair, in that case, isn’t replacing sex. It’s replacing the small daily ‘mhm’ that used to be ‘oh, really, what happened?’
3. The need to be seen as a person, not a role
Long marriages have a way of collapsing two complicated people into a handful of household functions. Dad. Husband. Driver. Earner. Person who fixes the wifi. Person who knows where the dog’s lead is.
Men, in our experience, feel this acutely in their forties and fifties. Their identity inside the home has narrowed. Their wife knows them well — but knows them as a role, often, more than as a man. An affair partner, by contrast, doesn’t know about the wifi or the dog’s lead. She knows only the man currently sitting across from her, who is — for an hour — entirely free of his function in someone else’s logistics.
This is part of what affair partners offer that domestic life rarely can: the experience of being seen newly, without the years of accumulated practical context.
4. Sexual disconnection (but not what you think)
Yes, sex matters. We aren’t pretending otherwise. But when married men describe the sexual side of their marriages, what they describe is rarely a frequency problem. It’s a contact problem.
What’s gone, in many long marriages, is not sex per se but everything that surrounds it — the touching when passing each other in the kitchen, the held glance, the small flirtations, the quiet sense of being physical beings together rather than logistical partners. Where this has gone, the bedroom often follows. And once the bedroom has gone, many men assume the marriage has decided something about them that it never actually decided.
“It’s not that we don’t have sex,” one member told us. “It’s that there’s nothing pointing towards sex. There’s no current.”
The affair restores the current.
5. Boredom — yes, but not the kind people mean
Boredom in affairs isn’t usually about wanting more excitement in some shallow way. It’s about the absence of newness in a life that has become — through no fault of anyone in it — extremely predictable.
By the time a man is in his late forties, he knows what his Tuesday is going to look like. He knows what his wife will say when he asks what’s for dinner. He knows the route to work, the route home, the order in which the children will phone with problems. None of which is bad. But for some men, the predictability becomes a quiet weight, and they don’t realise they’re carrying it until something — usually a conversation with a woman who doesn’t already know how the story ends — feels astonishingly light.
That lightness is often misread as falling in love. Frequently, it’s just the experience of being temporarily unburdened by the known shape of one’s life.
6. The midlife reckoning
Midlife crises are mocked for good reason — most of the cultural shorthand is silly. But beneath the convertible jokes is something real. Men in their late forties and fifties begin to count time differently. They calculate how many summers they’ve got left with knees that work. They notice their fathers in the mirror. They wonder, often privately, what their life would have looked like if they’d made one or two different choices.
This isn’t always pathological. Sometimes it produces a renewed commitment to the marriage. But for men who already feel something is missing, the midlife reckoning can become the catalyst that turns long-suppressed dissatisfaction into action.
David, the man from Reading, put it plainly: “I’m fifty-three. I don’t have endless summers. I love my wife and I’m not leaving her. But I also don’t want to die having spent the last decade of my life only ever feeling functional.”
7. Resentment that’s been quietly building for years
Most men don’t describe their affairs as revenge. But sit with them long enough and a small thread of resentment often surfaces — a sense that, somewhere along the way, their needs stopped being a serious agenda item in the household. Maybe their wife dismissed their attempts at intimacy too many times. Maybe she put the children first to the point of forgetting there was a marriage underneath. Maybe she made a sarcastic comment about their body that lodged and never came out.
These aren’t headline grievances. They aren’t divorce-court material. But they accumulate, often invisibly, over a decade or more. And by the time the affair happens, the man has — without ever quite admitting it — concluded that fairness has long since left the building.
8. The fantasy of feeling young again
This is the one men are most embarrassed to admit. They feel old. They feel like the world has been gently moving past them. Their hair is going. Their colleagues are younger. Their wife sees them at their most tired. And then someone, in a coffee shop or a hotel bar or a discreet message, looks at them as though they are interesting, attractive, alive — and twenty years drops away.
It’s not a profound reason. It is, however, an absolutely real one. And it’s one we hear, in slightly different words, every single week.
9. Wanting to be chosen
Underneath almost every reason on this list is something simpler, and harder for men to articulate. They want to be chosen. Not by accident of marriage or by force of habit or by twenty years of shared mortgages. Actively chosen, by someone with options, who could pick anyone, and who picks them.
A long marriage rarely offers that feeling in its later years — not through anyone’s fault. The choice was made decades ago. It would be strange to make it again every Wednesday morning. But the absence of being chosen, in the active present-tense sense, is something many married men feel acutely without ever having a name for it.
An affair, for all its risks and complications, offers that feeling back. Briefly, imperfectly, but unmistakably.
What this means if you recognise yourself
If you’re a married man reading this and finding too much of yourself in it, you’re not unusual. You’re not a monster. You’re not, despite what guilt may be telling you, a different species from the men around you who seem to be coping. Many of them aren’t. Many of them are simply quieter about it.
What we’d suggest — gently — is this. Be honest with yourself about what’s actually missing. Not what the books say should be missing, but what is, in your specific life. Some men, having identified it, take that information back to their marriage and find a way to repair what they can. Others don’t, or can’t, and look for something outside it that lets them keep functioning inside it. We don’t moralise about either choice. We exist for the people who’ve made the second one, and we exist to make it as safe and discreet as possible.
FAQs about married men and affairs
Do most married men who cheat want to leave their wives?
No. In our experience, the overwhelming majority of married men having affairs have no intention of leaving their marriages. They love their wives, they love their families, and they are looking for something that lets them stay rather than something that lets them go.
Why don’t married men just talk to their wives about what’s missing?
Many try. The reasons it tends not to work are well-rehearsed — the conversation feels accusatory, the wife feels blamed, the man feels misunderstood, both sides retreat. After a few failed attempts, most men go quiet and look elsewhere rather than continue what feels like a losing battle.
Are affairs more common in men over fifty?
There’s a notable bump in our membership in men aged 48–58, which corresponds with what’s often called the midlife reckoning. But affairs happen at every age. The reasons may differ, but the pattern is rarely about age alone.
Do married men feel guilty about their affairs?
Some do, deeply. Others, often to their own surprise, don’t. Guilt seems to correlate less with the affair itself and more with whether the man feels his marriage is still receiving the love and attention it deserves. Many men compartmentalise far more effectively than the films suggest.
Is there a ‘profile’ of the married man most likely to have an affair?
There isn’t, really. Our members range across every profession, every region of the UK, every income bracket, and every type of marriage — including marriages people would publicly describe as happy. What unites them is a private sense that something specific is missing, and a willingness to look for it.
A final word
None of the reasons in this piece are presented as a defence. Affairs carry real risk. The point of writing honestly about them is not to encourage them — it’s to make sure that men reading this don’t feel like aliens, and that women reading this understand a little more about what their husbands may, or may not, be quietly thinking about. The more honest the conversation, the better the choices people can make about their own lives.
If any of this resonates — and we suspect, for many readers, it will — Illicit Encounters has been the UK’s most established and discreet meeting place for married people for more than twenty years. We aren’t here to judge you. We’re here for the conversation you can’t have anywhere else.
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