Most people picture an affair the same way: dim restaurant, late-night taxi, a hotel bar after work. It’s the cinematic version. Candlelight, lipstick, secrets whispered over a second glass of wine.
But the cinematic version isn’t the one most married daters actually live.
The members on Illicit Encounters tend to fall into two distinct camps. There are the daytime daters, who slip out between meetings, take long lunches, book a hotel before the school run. And there are the evening daters, who carve out a Thursday with the right cover story and stretch it for as long as the night allows.
Both work. But they work in completely different ways. And the one that fits your life better will almost certainly be the one you’ll actually keep up.
So which is which? Mia took a closer look at how each plays out in practice.
The daytime affair: quieter than you’d think
The common assumption is that daytime affairs feel rushed. A snatched hour, awkward and unsatisfying, the clock ticking from the moment the kettle goes on.
Most members report something rather different. Daytime tends to be calmer. The hotel lobby’s quiet. The bar’s almost empty. There’s no real risk of running into a colleague at 2pm in a Premier Inn off the M40 — the people who could spot you are at their own desks.
Helen, a 47-year-old solicitor from Reading, switched to daytime affairs after a near-miss two years ago. “I used to do evenings,” she told us. “One night my husband rang four times in an hour because the babysitter had cancelled. Now I see him on a Tuesday lunchtime and I’m home by four. No-one’s looking for me. Nobody’s wondering where I am.”
There’s another quiet advantage. Daytime means you arrive sober, leave sober, drive sober. You’re not stitching together a story about why you smell of red wine. You’re not deleting an Uber receipt at midnight in the bathroom. The whole thing has a cleaner footprint.
The downside? You’re working around real jobs. Most daytime affairs survive on lunch hours, half-days, and the elastic geometry of “I had a long client meeting.” If your work doesn’t bend, daytime doesn’t either.
The evening affair: more romance, more risk
Evenings give you what daytime can’t — a proper meal, a slow conversation, the feeling of being on something resembling a real date. For members who say what they miss most isn’t sex but the simple feeling of being chosen, the evening affair is hard to beat.
Mike from Surrey put it neatly when he wrote in: “Daytime feels like a transaction. Evenings feel like a life I used to have.”
But evenings cost more. Not just in money — in cover. You need somewhere to be. A work dinner. A boys’ night. An evening class. A “late one at the office.” Married daters who pull this off usually have a small but reliable rotation of credible reasons, and they don’t push them too often. Two or three evenings a month is the ceiling for most. Push past it and the questions start.
And there’s the alcohol problem. Two glasses in, people send texts they wouldn’t send sober. They linger longer than they meant to. They leave the hotel bar through the front entrance instead of the side, because they’ve forgotten to think about it.
Evening affairs are usually more romantic. They are almost always more risky.
Which one actually fits you?
The honest answer is: whichever one slides into your existing life without making a scene.
If your job has predictable hours and an unpredictable evening — kids, dinners with the in-laws, a partner who likes you home — daytime is the right answer. Members who try to force evenings around school pickups and weekend commitments tend to burn out within a few months.
If your job already runs into the evenings — a city commute, late client work, a regular gym night, professional dinners — evenings will feel natural because they already are. Slotting a Tuesday or Thursday into an already-late life raises no eyebrows.
A surprising number of members do both. They start with evenings because they’re craving the romance, then quietly migrate to daytime once the relationship’s stable enough that they don’t need wine to fill the silences. The conversation’s already there. They just need somewhere private to have it.
The bit nobody warns you about
Whichever you pick, the killer isn’t the time of day. It’s frequency. Married daters who try to see someone three times a week — daytime, evening, weekend stolen moments — almost always come unstuck. Not because of one slip-up, but because the maths stops working. The cover stories overlap. The car parks recur. The bank statements rhyme.
The members who last go slower. Once a week, sometimes once a fortnight. They protect what they have by not asking it to be more than it can be.
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