Most assume affairs start with looks. Our members tell a different story — one about being noticed, remembered, and properly listened to for once.
Ask anyone why people have affairs and you’ll usually get the same answer: attraction. As if straying is simply a case of someone fitter, funnier or better-looking coming along and turning a good person’s head. It’s a tidy little theory. It also happens to be, according to almost every member we’ve spoken to at IllicitEncounters, not really how it works.
Because here’s the thing nobody quite says out loud: most people who start an affair aren’t looking for someone more attractive than their spouse. They’re looking for someone who notices them. And those turn out to be very different things.
The six-pack theory doesn’t hold up
Take Claire, 44, from Bristol. Married nineteen years, two teenagers, a husband she describes as “a good, solid man — genuinely.” When she started talking to Rob on the site last year, she wasn’t chasing chemistry. She was chasing the feeling of someone actually listening to the answer when they asked how her day was.
“Rob isn’t better looking than my husband,” she told us, quite matter-of-factly. “He’s not funnier, either, not really. He just remembers things. I mentioned once that I hated my job’s new open-plan office, and three weeks later he asked how the noise was going. My husband couldn’t tell you where I work half the time.”
That’s not attraction in the way the word usually gets used. That’s attention — sustained, specific, and increasingly rare between people who’ve been married a long time. And it turns out attention does something to a person that a nice jawline simply can’t.
Why attention outperforms attraction every time
Psychologists have a name for this — the “mere noticing” effect, if you like — but you don’t need a psychology degree to understand it. Being physically attracted to someone is fairly passive. It happens to you. Being genuinely paid attention to, though, requires the other person to do something: to ask, to remember, to follow up. It’s active. It says you matter enough for me to keep track of your life. And after years of marriage, when a couple can go entire evenings without really looking at each other, that’s a far more intoxicating offer than a handsome face across a bar.
Mike, 51, a member from Sheffield, put it more bluntly. “My wife is still an attractive woman. That was never the issue. The issue was I could tell her I’d had a rubbish day and get a ‘right, dinner’s nearly ready’ back. Someone else asking ‘what happened?’ and actually waiting for the answer — that’s what did it. Not her legs. Her questions.”
So why does the “attraction” myth persist?
Partly because it’s simpler, and partly because it’s kinder to the person left behind. It’s easier to tell yourself your husband strayed because someone younger caught his eye than to sit with the idea that he strayed because you’d both quietly stopped asking each other anything real. Attraction as an explanation lets everyone off the hook. Attention as an explanation doesn’t — it points, uncomfortably, at the small daily failures of noticing each other that happen in almost every long marriage, not just unhappy ones.
And that’s really the point. You don’t need a bad marriage for this to happen. You just need two people who’ve become expert at coexisting and rusty at paying attention. Fill in the gap with someone who asks a second question, who remembers the name of your sister’s dog, who notices when you’ve had your hair cut — and suddenly you’re dealing with something that feels a lot more serious than a passing fancy, regardless of what either person looks like.
What this actually means if you’re the one feeling unnoticed
If you recognise yourself in any of this — if you’ve caught yourself lighting up at a message from someone who simply asked a proper question — it’s worth knowing you’re not shallow, and you’re not broken. You’re responding to something very human. Wanting to be noticed isn’t a character flaw. It’s one of the most ordinary needs there is, and one of the easiest to go without for years without ever naming it.
Sarah, one of our longer-standing members from Leeds, summed it up rather well: “I didn’t go looking for someone more attractive than my husband. I went looking for someone who’d finish a sentence I started.”
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