Helen found it by accident, which is how most of these things start.
She was after one photograph. Her son in his first school uniform, jumper sleeves down past his knuckles, September 2013, because he’d just started sixth form and she wanted the two pictures side by side for the family WhatsApp. So she scrolled. Eleven years of Christmases, a run of caravan holidays in Abersoch, her daughter’s Year 6 leavers’ disco, an enormous number of photographs of a dog who has been dead since 2021.
Somewhere around 2019 she stopped scrolling and started counting.
She was in four of them. Four, in eleven years. In two of those she was half out of frame, holding a paper plate.
“I’d always assumed I just don’t photograph well,” she told us. “It took about ten minutes sitting there to work out that wasn’t it at all. Nobody had pointed a camera at me since roughly 2015.”
The woman behind the camera
There’s nothing sinister in this, and Helen would be the first to say so. She organised the days out, so she held the phone. She knew where everyone’s coat was. She remembered the sun cream, the spare socks, the birthday card for the teacher. The photographs are simply a record of who was doing the looking, and in that house it was always her.
But there’s a gap between not being in the pictures and not being looked at, and by the time she noticed the first thing she’d been quietly living with the second for years. Her husband Paul isn’t a bad man. He’s a quiet one. He works long hours for a building firm in Ellesmere Port, he does the bins without being asked, and he had stopped noticing when she had her hair cut somewhere around her fortieth birthday. Not out of cruelty. Out of the same slow drift that settles over thousands of perfectly decent marriages while everyone’s busy being competent.
Helen didn’t do anything about it that week. Or that year, as it happens. She mentioned it to a friend over a coffee in Hoole, they both laughed about mums being invisible, and then she went home and made a chilli.
What actually tipped it
It wasn’t a row. It almost never is, in our experience. It was a winter in which absolutely nothing happened.
Paul was fine. The kids were fine. Nobody shouted. She had a perfectly pleasant February, and by the middle of it she realised she couldn’t remember a single day of it. That frightened her more than an argument would have. She joined IllicitEncounters in the March, on a Tuesday evening, in the bath, with the door locked, feeling — her words — “like a complete fraud and also weirdly like myself.”
She chatted to a handful of people. Most of it went nowhere, which is usually the way for the first few weeks. One was a surveyor from Nantwich, divorced eight years, a man who apparently cannot walk past a canal without telling you something about it. They talked for a month before anyone suggested meeting.
“Send me one where you’re just doing something”
Then one evening he asked her for a photograph.
Not a provocative one. He was oddly specific about it. Nothing staged — send me one where you’re just doing something, he said. So she sent a genuinely terrible picture of herself in the car park at Delamere Forest, wind doing something appalling to her fringe, half a sentence into a laugh.
He replied within about a minute and told her, in detail, what he liked about it. And Helen sat in the driver’s seat of a Nissan Qashqai and cried, which she had not remotely planned to do.
“It wasn’t even flattery,” she said. “He just described me. Like I was a thing worth describing.”
What changed, and what didn’t
Helen is still married. Still in Chester, still doing the sixth-form lift on a Wednesday, still the one who knows where the coats are. She’s not building towards some dramatic announcement, and gets faintly irritated when people assume she must be. She and the surveyor meet roughly every three weeks, usually a Thursday.
The change that really stuck was smaller than anyone would expect. She’s in photographs now. She takes them of herself sometimes, which felt excruciating for about a fortnight and now doesn’t register at all. More tellingly, she hands her phone to somebody else at family things and stands in the middle of the group instead of drifting to the edge. This summer there’s a picture of her on the beach at Abersoch, laughing at something off to the left, that her daughter has set as her lock screen.
Paul took that one. He’d asked her to move into the light.
She nearly cried again and didn’t, because there’s only so much of that a person can do on a beach. And because what she’d been missing wasn’t really Paul’s to hand back by then. It was the habit of being seen at all — and she’d gone and found that somewhere else, then brought a bit of it home with her.
Most of the women who tell us a version of this story didn’t arrive looking for romance. They arrived because they’d become the person behind the camera and couldn’t work out how to get back in front of it. If you’ve read this far and quietly counted your own photographs, you probably already know whether that’s you. IllicitEncounters.com is where a good few of them started.
Leave a Reply