Rosalind can tell you the exact moment she realised nobody had said her name in a very long time. It was a Wednesday in March, she was sitting in the car outside a Tesco Extra on the edge of Harrogate, and a man she had never met had just typed a question into a chat window on her phone.
“Sorry, I’ve only got your username. What do people actually call you?”
She looked at it for a full minute. It wasn’t a difficult question. It was the kind of thing anyone asks in the first five messages. But she found she didn’t have a ready answer, and that bothered her more than she expected.
At home she was Mum. She had been Mum for twenty-two years, to two sons who were now tall enough to duck under the kitchen door frame and still shouted “Mum!” from upstairs when they couldn’t find a charger. Her husband, Martin, had started calling her Mum too at some point, the way a lot of husbands do. “Ask your mum.” “Mum’s doing the roast.” It had begun as a joke when the boys were small and had simply never stopped. When he wasn’t calling her Mum, he called her love. Not in a romantic way. In the way you’d say it to the woman on the till.
At work, at a solicitor’s office where she’d managed the diary and the post and everyone’s nerves for eleven years, she was Mrs Hale. Clients called her Mrs Hale. The partners called her Mrs Hale when they wanted something, which was always.
Rosalind. Nobody said Rosalind. Nobody had said Ros in years either, which was what her friends used to call her at college, back when she wore a leather jacket and could name every track on every album she owned.
So she sat in the Tesco car park with a bag of shopping on the passenger seat, and she typed it out. The full thing. Rosalind.
He wrote back almost immediately. “That’s a proper name. Like Shakespeare. Rosalind it is, then.”
And that was it. That was the whole exchange that started it. She has since told us, laughing a little at herself, that she drove home with the radio off and said it out loud once at the traffic lights on Skipton Road, just to hear what it sounded like in her own voice.
The man was called Peter. He was fifty-four, lived about forty minutes away near Wetherby, and had been married for twenty-six years to a woman he described, without any bitterness, as “more of a business partner than a wife these days.” They messaged for three weeks before they met, which Rosalind now thinks was about right. Long enough to feel she knew him. Not so long that it became a pen-pal arrangement neither of them had the nerve to end.
Their first coffee was at a garden centre café outside Knaresborough, because it was the least romantic place either of them could think of and therefore the safest. She remembers being annoyed at herself for changing her top twice. She remembers that he stood up when she walked in, which nobody had done for her in a very long time. And she remembers that about ten minutes in, he said, “So, Rosalind, what did you want to be before all of this?” And she felt something go in her chest, like a knot being pulled loose.
It wasn’t the question. It was her name in it.
We hear versions of this all the time. People join a site like ours expecting to be looking for excitement, or sex, or someone to flirt with on a slow Thursday afternoon, and some of them are. But a surprising number find that what gets them first is something much smaller. Being asked a question that’s about them. Being noticed as a person rather than a role. Being called by their actual name, by someone who’s chosen to use it.
Rosalind and Peter have been seeing each other for about six months now. Every other Wednesday, mostly daytime, mostly lunches that run long. She’s clear that she isn’t leaving Martin, and that Martin isn’t a bad man. He’s a decent, tired, distracted man who stopped seeing her so gradually that neither of them noticed it happening. She doesn’t hate her life. She just realised, sitting in that car park, that she had disappeared from it a bit.
Some things have changed at home, and not in the way she worried they might. She’s started asking the boys to call her by her name when they’re being cheeky, which they find hilarious. She took up Pilates at a studio in town under the name Ros, because it felt like reclaiming something. She bought herself a necklace with a small silver R on it, and when Martin asked about it she said she’d always liked it, which was true.
And on alternate Wednesdays, somewhere between Harrogate and Wetherby, there’s a man who says her name as though it’s worth saying.
“I don’t think I was lonely, exactly,” she told us. “I think I was just unnamed. Does that make sense? I was everyone’s something. I wasn’t anyone’s Rosalind.”
It makes perfect sense. And if you’ve read this far and you’re trying to remember the last time someone said your name and meant it, well, you already know where to find illicitencounters.com.
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