Dear Mia,
We’re on day ten of a fortnight in a rented cottage outside Tenby. The kids are happy, the weather’s been far kinder than we deserved, and my husband has said perhaps forty words to me that weren’t about parking, the barbecue, or whether I’ve seen the phone charger.
Last night both children went up early. We sat out in the garden with the last of a bottle of wine and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. Not one thing. We managed about fifteen minutes and then he went in to watch the cricket highlights, and I sat there listening to somebody else’s dog barking.
The worst part is that he hasn’t done anything wrong. He carried every bag. He drove the whole way down. He’s a decent man. So why do I feel like I’m on holiday with a colleague I get along with perfectly well?
Ruth, 51, Leicestershire
Ruth, nothing is the matter with you. What’s happened is that you’ve been taken out of the machinery that usually keeps this from surfacing, and now you can hear the silence properly.
A marriage sounds different without the school run
At home there’s a structure holding everything up. Work, the commute, the food shop, someone’s dentist appointment, the boiler man coming Thursday between eight and one. All of it generates conversation. Not intimacy – conversation. There’s a difference, and plenty of couples go years without noticing which one they’ve been running on.
Take a family away to a cottage in Pembrokeshire and the scaffolding comes down overnight. No meetings, no admin, nowhere either of you has to be. What’s left is two people with a great many unstructured hours and, as it turns out, not much to say. That isn’t a new problem revealing itself. It’s an old one that finally has nothing to hide behind.
Which is why August is quietly one of our busiest months. Not because holidays cause unhappiness. Because they stop concealing it.
Silence at home is efficient. Silence in a garden in Tenby is loud.
At home, quiet reads as comfortable. You’re both tired, the telly’s on, nobody expects a conversation on a wet Tuesday in February. But sitting outside on a warm evening with a glass of wine and a whole empty hour is a different proposition. That setting comes with an implied promise – this is the bit where you enjoy each other – and when the promise isn’t met, you feel it somewhere near your ribs.
Denise, a member from Sheffield, described almost exactly the same thing after a week in Cornwall. “We had the sea, we had good food, the kids were off doing their own thing. Perfect conditions. And we still had nothing. That was when I stopped being able to blame it on stress.”
He’s decent. That’s precisely what makes this so hard.
Here’s the part that’s making you feel awful. If he were unkind, or absent, or drinking, you’d have a story – something you could explain to your sister in one sentence. But a man who carries every bag and drives the whole way down gives you nothing to point at, and so the loneliness starts to feel like your own fault.
It isn’t. Decency and connection are two separate things, and plenty of good marriages have one without the other. A man can be entirely honourable and still not have asked you a real question since roughly 2019. He isn’t withholding it out of spite. He simply stopped, the way people stop, and neither of you clocked the moment it happened.
Wanting more than logistics and companionable quiet doesn’t make you ungrateful. It makes you fifty-one and still fully awake, which is not a character flaw whatever the guilt is telling you.
What to do with the four days you’ve got left
Don’t have the big conversation in the cottage. You’re trapped together, the children are in the next room, and anything said badly has nowhere to go for the rest of the week.
What you can do is run a small experiment. Ask him one thing that isn’t domestic. Not “what shall we do tomorrow”, but something like what he’d do with a free year, or the last time he felt properly pleased with himself. Then see what comes back. If he takes it and runs, there’s something worth digging into when you’re home. If it dies in three sentences and he reaches for the remote, you’ve learned something as well. Not a verdict on the marriage. Just information you didn’t have on day one.
And when you’re back in Leicestershire and the routine closes over all of this again – because it will, by about the second week of September – hold on to what you felt in that garden. Feelings that specific are usually accurate, and worth more than a filing away until next August.
Plenty of the people who eventually find their way to us describe one moment almost identical to yours. A garden, a silence, the last of a bottle of wine, and the slow realisation that the life they’re living isn’t quite the one they thought they’d agreed to. Nobody here will tell you what to do with that. But you should know you’re not the only woman in a lovely cottage in Wales this fortnight, feeling entirely on her own.
And if you’re home in October and that feeling hasn’t shifted, illicitencounters.com will still be here.
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