Ask somebody who has been on this site a while what they actually remember, and the answer is almost never the thing you would expect. Not the hotel. Not the first time. What comes back, again and again, is a sentence. Usually a short one. Usually said in passing by somebody who had forgotten saying it by the following Tuesday.
We asked three members to tell us about the compliment they have never quite managed to shake. Not one of the three mentioned their looks.
“You’ve got a good laugh. Proper.” — Rachel, 49, Stockport
Rachel had been married nineteen years when she joined. She and Mark met in a beer garden in Didsbury on a Wednesday afternoon in May, because a beer garden on a Wednesday afternoon in May is about as invisible as Britain gets. She told a story about her sister’s hen weekend going catastrophically wrong in Whitby, and she laughed at her own story before she got to the punchline, which is a thing she does.
And he said: “You’ve got a good laugh, you know. Proper.”
She got to the car park afterwards and sat in the driver’s seat for ten minutes without starting the engine. Because years earlier, at a colleague’s wedding, her husband had leaned over and said, not unkindly, that she might want to keep it down a bit. She had never argued about it. She had never even really thought about it. She had simply, over about a decade, turned the volume down on herself until there was nothing left to complain about.
“It wasn’t even a compliment, really,” she says. “He was just describing me. That was the strange part. Somebody described me and it was something good.”
“You’d be brilliant at that.” — Dev, 56, Leicester
Dev had mentioned, somewhere in the middle of a long lunch, that he had once wanted to run a small cookery school. Nothing grand. Six people round a hob on a Saturday morning, learning to do a proper dal. He had said it out loud at home once, about eleven years before, and had been met with a run of entirely sensible questions about the mortgage, the pension and what exactly he thought would happen to his salary.
The questions were fair. He has never claimed otherwise. But sensible has a way of landing like a no.
What he got across the table instead was four words: “You’d be brilliant at that.” No caveats, no follow-up about the money, no practical objection. She just believed it, and then asked what he’d cook first.
He did not open a cookery school. He is a realist and his youngest is at university. But he did start running a Thursday evening class at the community centre on Narborough Road, and there are nine people on the waiting list, and he still thinks about those four words more than he thinks about most of what has happened to him since.
“I’ve been looking forward to this all week.” — Claire, 44, Bristol
This one is barely a compliment at all, which is precisely why it hit the way it did.
Claire had arranged to meet him at a café near Temple Meads, mostly because it was near the station and she could plausibly be anywhere. He sat down, put his coat on the back of the chair and said it like it was nothing: “I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”
She had to study the menu for slightly longer than the menu warranted.
Because here is the thing about being forty-four with three teenagers, a demanding job and a husband who is, by any reasonable measure, a decent man: you become something people rely on. The person who knows where the passports are. The one who remembers the dentist. And being relied upon is not nothing — but it is a very long way from being looked forward to. She could not remember the last time she had been the good part of somebody’s week.
“I’d have been happy if he’d said nothing else for the whole hour,” she says. “That one sentence did the job.”
What all three have in common
Three people, three cities, three completely different situations. And not a single word between them about a face, a figure or an outfit.
What they were all describing, in their own way, was evidence. Evidence that somebody had been paying attention. A compliment about how you look can be produced by anybody with functioning eyes and thirty seconds. A compliment about your laugh, or your half-abandoned ambition, or the fact that you are the highlight of somebody’s week, requires that a person actually noticed you and then bothered to say so out loud.
That is the bit that goes missing in long marriages, and it goes missing so gradually that nobody can date it. It is rarely replaced by cruelty. It is replaced by logistics — by bins and boilers and whose turn it is to do the school run — until two people who love each other perfectly well have not said anything to each other that wasn’t admin since roughly 2019.
Which is why the sentences that land hardest tend to be the smallest ones. Nobody in our inbox has ever written in to say they have never forgotten being told they looked nice. They write in about the four words that made them feel like a person again.
If you have been going a while without hearing anything like it, you are in considerably better company than you think. And you already know where to find illicitencounters.com.
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