Helen from Hertfordshire didn’t sleep the night she and James fell out. They’d been seeing each other for nearly six months — coffees, lunches, the odd hotel afternoon. It had felt easy. Then one Thursday he messaged saying he didn’t want to be the one always rearranging his diary, she replied something sharp, and he didn’t reply at all. Suddenly she was lying awake next to her husband at 2am with her chest tight and nobody she could phone.
“I couldn’t ring my sister. I couldn’t ring my best mate. I couldn’t even cry properly in case my husband heard me,” she told us. “I just lay there, working it out on my own.”
If you’ve been on a married dating site any length of time, this will feel painfully familiar. One of the stranger things about being involved with someone outside your marriage is this: when something goes wrong, you genuinely cannot talk to anyone about it.
We spent the last few weeks asking our members what actually happens in those moments. The answers were honest, occasionally funny, and quietly relatable.
Why nobody warns you about the rows
Affairs are sold as escape — coffees in unfamiliar cafés, hotel afternoons, texts that make your phone feel hot. What nobody explains is that any relationship in which two real people invest real emotion eventually has friction. An affair is no different.
Andrew from Birmingham, married 18 years, put it like this: “I’d somehow assumed the whole thing would be uncomplicated. That was the point of it. So when we had our first proper disagreement — over something tiny, a missed phone call — I genuinely didn’t know what to do with the feeling. There was no one to ask.”
That’s the part you don’t get prepared for. You can’t text your best mate, can’t moan into a wine glass with your sister, can’t even necessarily message the person you’re rowing with — the timing has to be careful and the message has to be deniable. The argument is yours alone.
Why the urge to escalate is bigger than you’d think
A row in a normal relationship can sit and breathe. You can sulk on a Sunday afternoon and pick it up after dinner. In an affair, time works differently. Most members we spoke to said the silence felt unbearable — partly because they didn’t know when they’d next be able to talk freely.
Sarah from Leeds told us she’d nearly written what she described as “an absolute essay — three pages of feelings I’d never have sent to anyone else in my life.” She didn’t send it. “I was just trying to fill the silence,” she said. “If I’d sent it, I’d have made it ten times worse.”
The urge to over-text, to over-explain, to drag the row into a long unwinnable conversation, is one of the most consistent things members mention. The advice is almost universally the same. Wait. Sleep on it. The version of you that wants to fire off a 2am paragraph is never the version with the best judgement.
The temptation to “punish” the other person
Several members admitted their first instinct after a row was to go very quiet. Not respond. Take a day. Make the other person worry. This works disastrously badly in an affair.
The other person is also married. They’re already carrying low-level anxiety about whether this is going to end. If you ghost for 24 hours, what you’re communicating isn’t “I’m cross” — it’s “this might be over.” Plenty of affairs that didn’t need to end have ended in exactly this way.
Cooling off without disappearing
Members who’d handled it best had a shared instinct. A short, calm message — something like “I want to talk about this properly but not by text. Let’s speak Friday.” — buys enough time to think without sending the other person spiralling. It treats them as an adult, and it stops you typing the dreaded essay.
If Friday won’t work, name a different window. Clarity matters more than warmth.
Why these rows aren’t always a bad sign
One thing surprised us in these conversations: members who’d been through a proper row and come out the other side described their connection afterwards as deeper, not weaker. The argument forced them to be more honest — to stop performing the easy-fling version of each other and actually talk like people.
“It was the first time we weren’t just being lovely to each other,” Helen said. “It was also the first time I felt like he was real to me.”
What helps most
There isn’t a clean answer. But the members we spoke to had a few quiet rules. Don’t text in the middle of the night. Don’t vanish for days. Don’t make ultimatums you can’t keep. And accept that the loneliness — having no one to talk to about it — is, oddly, part of why these connections grow up fast.
If any of this sounds like the conversation you’re not having with anyone, you’re not alone — quite a lot of our members have been there. And Illicit Encounters is, more often than people realise, somewhere you can find someone who actually understands what you’re going through.
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