Rachel is forty-one, works in commercial property in Bristol, and has been seeing a married man for fourteen months. She does not call herself the other woman. Nobody does, out loud. The phrase belongs to soap operas and Sunday supplements, and it never quite fits the actual experience, which is mostly ordinary — a coffee on a Wednesday, a long phone call in a car park, a hotel in Cheltenham twice a month, and a great deal of thinking about somebody in the gaps between.
“I’d have been horrified if you’d described me that way five years ago,” she said. “Now I just think it’s a stupid phrase. There’s no ‘other’. There’s him, there’s her, there’s me. We’re all just people getting through it.”
Search interest in being the other woman is enormous, and it is overwhelmingly women typing it at eleven at night wanting to know two things. Am I mad, and is this going to end badly? What they usually find instead is a lecture. So here is the version without one — what it is actually like, the parts people find hardest, and the things worth knowing before you are in too deep to think clearly.
Almost nobody decides to do this
There is a persistent idea that the other woman is a type. Predatory, glamorous, probably younger, definitely calculating. Twenty years of running a married dating site has given us an unusually large sample, and the type does not exist.
What exists is a much duller pattern. Somebody friendly at work who starts sitting next to you in meetings. A man from the gym who is easy to talk to. A conversation that becomes daily, then becomes the best part of the day, then becomes the thing you check your phone for at traffic lights. He mentions his marriage early and honestly, or he mentions it late and badly, and by the time you have properly registered the shape of what you are in, you are already in it.
Helen, a former member in her fifties, put it with some exasperation. “Everyone talks about it like there was a moment I chose. There wasn’t a moment. There were about four hundred small moments and each one was fine.”
If you are looking for the point at which you should have known better, you will usually find it is nowhere near where you thought it was — and dwelling on it is not much use once you are here.
The arithmetic of time, which is the part that actually hurts
Ask women in this position what the hardest part is and very few say guilt. Fewer still say the sex, or the secrecy, or even the risk of discovery. What they say, almost universally, is the time.
Not the amount of it. The shape of it.
You get the daytime. You get midweek. You get the ninety minutes between a client meeting and school pick-up. What you do not get is a Saturday, a bank holiday, a birthday, a long dull Sunday with nothing to do, Christmas Eve, or the flu. And it is not the romantic occasions you end up minding most — it is the boring ones. Nobody warns you that the thing you will resent is not missing a candlelit dinner but never having somebody there when the boiler packs in.
Rachel again: “I’ve never once been jealous of her on Valentine’s Day. I was absolutely floored the day I had a scan result and had to wait eleven hours to tell him.”
There is a version of this that works perfectly well, and we will come to it. But it works when you go in clear-eyed about the arithmetic. The single most common mistake is assuming the time will expand. It generally does not. It changes shape — an affair that starts with snatched lunch hours may well become regular afternoons and the occasional overnight when work travel allows. What it very rarely becomes is evenings and weekends, because those belong to a life that has not moved.
The wife is never the woman you have built in your head
Every affair contains an invented character. She is constructed from fragments — a story about a row, a comment about the bedroom, a photograph glimpsed once — and she is almost always wrong.
Sometimes she is invented as a villain, which makes the situation easier to live with. Sometimes she is invented as a saint, which makes it harder. Occasionally she is invented as an idiot who notices nothing, and that one is genuinely dangerous, because women notice a great deal and simply choose their moment.
Two things are usually true at once. His marriage is probably genuinely unhappy in the ways he has described, and he is probably far more attached to it than his description suggests. Men in long marriages are frequently terrible narrators of their own households. Not liars, exactly. Just extremely selective.
What helps is to stop assessing her and start assessing him. What he does is data. What he says about her is a story, and you were not there.
What he says at three months and what he means
There is a set of sentences that turns up so reliably it might as well be printed on a card.
“I haven’t felt like this in twenty years.” That one is usually sincere. It is also not a plan.
“We’re basically flatmates.” Often true. Also entirely compatible with staying married for another fifteen years.
“I just need to get through the exams, the wedding, my mother’s operation, the house sale.” Also frequently true. The trouble is that a family life generates these in a continuous stream, and there is no year in which nothing is happening.
None of this means he is playing you. Most married men saying these things believe every word at the moment they say it. But there is a difference between a man describing his feelings and a man describing his intentions, and the two get blurred at two in the morning by both parties. If you find yourself building a future on the first while assuming you have heard the second, that is worth noticing early, not at month twenty.
When it genuinely works — and it often does
We are not in the business of pretending this always ends in tears, because it plainly does not. A significant proportion of the affairs we see run for years and are, by any sensible measure, a positive in both lives.
They tend to share a few features.
Both people are married, or otherwise anchored, which sounds cynical and is actually the single biggest predictor of an affair that stays stable and kind. Symmetry removes the hunger. When one person has a full life to return to, nobody is sitting alone on a Saturday doing sums.
The terms were said out loud, early, in daylight, by two sober adults. Not romantically. Almost administratively. What this is, what it is not, what happens if somebody wants out.
Neither person is using it as a waiting room. The people who suffer are overwhelmingly those treating an affair as a trial period for a relationship that has not been offered.
And there is some genuine friendship in it. The long-running ones nearly always look, from a distance, like two people who would like each other anyway.
Sarah, a member in Leeds, has been seeing the same man for six years. “People assume I’m waiting for something. I’m not waiting for anything. I have a husband I’m fond of, a job I like, and a man I see on Thursdays who makes me feel twenty-nine. Where exactly is the tragedy?”
Protecting yourself, practically
Being the other woman carries a specific and unequal exposure. If it comes apart, the married man loses a marriage. Depending on your circumstances, you may lose a job, a friendship group, a reputation in a small town, or a marriage of your own. It is worth being deliberate about a few things.
Keep your own communications clean. Not because you expect to be caught, but because the person most likely to expose the affair is not you and not him — it is a phone belonging to somebody careless. Assume anything you send may one day be read by a stranger, and write accordingly.
Do not become the secret-keeper for his household. Some women end up holding an extraordinary amount of information about a family they have never met, and it is a heavy and thankless position.
Keep your own life fully inhabited. The women who come out of long affairs well are the ones who never cancelled the running club, never let the friendships thin out, never rearranged a life around somebody else’s availability. The ones who struggle are those who slowly cleared the diary in case he was free.
And give yourself a review date. Not an ultimatum — those tend to produce a promise rather than a change. Just a private arrangement with yourself to sit down, alone, twice a year and ask honestly whether this is still adding to your life or quietly subtracting from it. Most people never ask, which is precisely how five years passes.
If you are married yourself
A great many women searching for this are not single at all. They are married, in a marriage that is functional and flat, seeing a married man who is in much the same position. This is the most common version of the arrangement in the UK, and it is by some distance the most sustainable.
It also changes the questions. The worry stops being “will he leave her” and becomes something more practical — how to hold two relationships without either one damaging the other, how to keep the affair from leaking into a marriage you have every intention of keeping, and how to manage the odd, unsettling discovery that being happier on a Thursday sometimes makes you kinder at home on a Friday.
That last one confuses people. It should not. Feeling wanted has a way of softening everything else.
When to walk
There is no universal rule, but there are some reliable signals.
If you have stopped enjoying the time you do get because you are spending all of it negotiating for more, the arrangement has stopped working for you. If you are rearranging your entire week around a maybe. If you have started disliking yourself, rather than simply disliking the situation. If you are lying to friends who would not judge you. Or if you have made the same private promise to yourself three New Years running.
Ending it is genuinely hard, and it is worth knowing that the grief afterwards is often disproportionate to the time involved — partly because you cannot be publicly sad about a private relationship. Whatever else you do, tell one person. The women who manage it best almost always had somebody who knew.
Frequently asked questions
Do married men ever actually leave their wives?
Some do. The proportion is lower than most people hope and higher than the internet claims. What is far more predictive than any statistic is behaviour rather than intention — whether he has ever taken a concrete, verifiable step, as opposed to describing one. A man who has seen a solicitor is in a different position from a man who has mentioned a solicitor.
Is it normal to feel jealous of his wife?
Completely, and it usually surprises people, because it is rarely jealousy about sex. It tends to be about the ordinary things — the shared shopping list, the being-known. Feeling it does not mean you want his life. It usually means you want somebody to be there on a wet Sunday, which is a reasonable thing to want.
Should I ask him to leave her?
Asking will almost always produce a reassurance rather than a decision, and reassurance is what keeps people in place for years. If your honest answer is that you cannot continue as things are, that is information worth acting on yourself rather than a request to put to him.
How do I stop falling further in love with him?
Reduce the intensity rather than the frequency. What deepens attachment is not the hotel afternoons — it is the constant contact in between, the messaging from morning until night that turns somebody into your internal companion. Turn that down and everything else steadies.
Is it easier when both of you are married?
Considerably, in our experience. The expectations are matched, the time constraints are mutual, and nobody is sitting at home wondering why they are alone at Christmas. It is the main reason so many people looking for an affair actively prefer to meet somebody in the same position.
One last thing
Nobody needs telling that this is complicated. What most women in this position actually need is somewhere to be honest about it, and people who are in the same boat rather than watching from the shore.
That is broadly what we have been doing since 2004. If you are already somewhere in the middle of all this, or thinking about the beginning of it, you know where we are at illicitencounters.com.
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