Every week, a handful of members close their accounts. Some have met someone and don’t need us anymore. A few have been caught. But there’s a third group, and they’re the ones nobody writes about: the people who delete because they’ve decided to give the marriage one more proper go.
And then, sometimes months later, a chunk of them come back.
We asked three returning members what happened in between. Not to prove a point — we were curious. Because “I’m going to try harder at home” is where the story is supposed to end, and it so rarely does.
“I gave it eighteen months. He gave it a fortnight.”
Fiona is 51 and lives just outside Stirling. She joined after what she describes as two years of asking — asking to be touched, asking to be talked to, asking whether they might book something, anything, that wasn’t a trip to his mother’s.
She deleted her profile the week after a counselling session in which her husband cried. Nineteen years, and she’d never seen it. “I thought crying meant something had shifted,” she says. “What it actually meant was he’d had a rough day and I’d caught him on it.”
What followed was six genuinely good weeks. A weekend in Pitlochry. He cooked twice. He asked about her sister’s operation without being reminded. Then the calendar went quiet again, and by October they were back to two people orbiting the same kitchen.
She rejoined in March. The odd thing, she says, is that she doesn’t regret the eighteen months away at all. “The horrible bit isn’t that it failed. It’s that I’ve got proof now. I can never again tell myself I didn’t try. That’s grim, but it’s also — I don’t know. It’s quiet in my head in a way it wasn’t before.”
“I thought the guilt was about the affair”
Nathan, 47, from Peterborough, didn’t delete out of hope. He deleted out of guilt, three days after his daughter’s eleventh birthday, having spent most of the party checking his phone in the garden.
He went properly cold turkey for nine months. Took over the school run. Redid the kitchen himself, badly, over four weekends. “I was trying to be useful enough that it cancelled out,” he says, which is a sentence a lot of men will recognise even if they’d never say it out loud.
What broke it wasn’t temptation. It was a Tuesday in February when his wife thanked him for sorting the boiler and he realised that was the entire conversation. “I thought the guilt was about the affair. Turned out the guilt was about the pretending. And I was still pretending — just about something else.”
He came back in November. He’s more careful now, and considerably more honest with himself about what he’s doing and why.
“Nothing went wrong. That was the problem.”
Priya is 43, lives in Watford, and is at pains to say her husband is a kind man. No drinking, no shouting, no other women. He remembers her coffee order. He is, by every measure she can name, fine.
She deleted her account on New Year’s Day, told nobody, and got on with it. “It felt very virtuous for about three weeks,” she says.
She lasted until the end of March. And it wasn’t a row that sent her back — it was a Sunday afternoon when he asked her three separate questions and every one of them was about the bins. “That was it. That was the whole betrayal. Bins.”
She laughs when she tells it. Then she doesn’t. “I kept waiting for something to go wrong so I’d be allowed to feel like this. Nothing ever did. I had to accept that a good marriage and a lonely one can be the same marriage.”
The bit they all agreed on
Three very different people, three very different reasons, and one thing in common: not one of them wishes they’d skipped the break.
That surprised us slightly. You’d expect a returning member to describe the months away as wasted time. They don’t. They describe it as the only way they were ever going to find out. Fiona needed the eighteen months to stop wondering. Nathan needed nine months to work out that being helpful isn’t the same as being present. Priya needed a season of trying to accept that nothing was going to arrive and rescue her from the decision.
There’s a version of this article that treats deleting your profile as a failure of nerve, and coming back as the inevitable relapse. But that’s not what any of them described. They described it more like taking the lid off a pan to check. Sometimes you look, and it’s fine, and you close the account for good — plenty do, and we never hear from them again, which is exactly as it should be. Sometimes you look and it’s the same as it was.
If you’re sitting on that decision at the moment, weighing up whether to close things down and give it one more honest attempt, there’s nothing here to argue you out of it. Go and check. Most people who come back say the checking was the useful part.
And if you already have, and you already know — the door isn’t locked behind you. It never was. You’ll find us where you left us, at illicitencounters.com.
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