She came face to face with her lover in the supermarket — husband in tow. What to do in the moment, and the ‘stranger protocol’ every affair quietly needs.
Dear Mia, I’ve been seeing someone from the site for four months. On Saturday I was doing the weekly shop with my husband — he was pushing the trolley, sulking about the price of butter — and there he was. My lover. By the bakery. With his wife. We looked at each other for what felt like ten minutes and then we both just… kept walking. I spent the rest of the shop with my heart going like a washing machine. I haven’t messaged him and he hasn’t messaged me. Did we do the right thing? Should we have a plan for this? And is it madness to keep seeing a man who apparently shops in my Sainsbury’s? — Name withheld, Cheshire
First things first: nobody saw what you think they saw
Take a breath. That look you shared — the one that felt like ten minutes — lasted perhaps half a second. You know this, somewhere underneath the panic. And here’s the thing about half a second of eye contact in a supermarket: it is the single most ordinary event in British retail. People glance at strangers by the bakery all day long. Your husband wasn’t studying your face for micro-expressions. He was sulking about butter.
Spouses, as a rule, are not on high alert in the big shop. They’re on autopilot. Unless one of you gasped, dropped a baguette, or said his name out loud, the moment existed for exactly two people in that building. It already belongs to you both. Let it stay there.
The danger was never the moment. It’s the hour afterwards
Here’s what catches people in near-misses like yours — and at Illicit Encounters we’ve heard about plenty, from National Trust car parks to the queue for the Severn Bridge. It’s almost never the encounter itself. It’s the behaviour that follows it. Going quiet for the rest of the afternoon. Checking your phone at the traffic lights, twice, then once more on the drive. Suddenly asking your husband whether he fancies shopping in the other Sainsbury’s from now on, apropos of absolutely nothing.
A spouse who noticed nothing in aisle seven can still notice that you came home strange. So the rule after a near-miss is gloriously simple: carry on. Finish the shop. Have the same conversation about dinner you’d have had anyway. You did this, by instinct, and so did he. Honestly? You both performed beautifully.
Now make it official: agree a stranger protocol
What you improvised on Saturday, the experienced ones agree in advance. Call it the stranger protocol, and it has three parts. One: in public, unplanned, you are complete strangers — no held glance, no smile, no tiny nod that feels harmless and isn’t. Two: no messaging for a few hours afterwards. A flurry of texts at 11.40 on a Saturday morning, right after you both went pale by the bakery, is the kind of coincidence that phone bills remember. Three: you never reference the moment anywhere your real names live. It gets talked about — laughed about, eventually — at your next coffee, and nowhere else.
Rachel, a member from York, told us she and the man she sees passed within feet of each other at a garden centre last spring, each with their respective families. “We’d agreed the rules months before. He looked straight through me like I was a display of bedding plants. I’ve never fancied him more.”
And about your Sainsbury’s
Is it madness to keep seeing a man who shops in your supermarket? No — but it’s a useful prompt. The sensible habit is to put the distance into your dates, not your groceries: meet a couple of towns over, somewhere neither of you has a school run, a sister-in-law, or a five-a-side team. Your ordinary lives may well overlap. That’s precisely why your private one shouldn’t overlap with either of them.
But don’t let Saturday rattle you into ending something that’s working. A near-miss isn’t a warning from the universe. It’s a reminder that discretion is a craft — and on the evidence, you’re rather good at it. You kept walking. He kept walking. The butter got bought.
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