Nobody plans an affair around British Summer Time. But ask anybody who has been seeing someone for longer than a year and they’ll tell you the last Sunday in October changes a great deal more than the clock on the oven.
Janine, 51, from Harrogate, put it neatly when she messaged us last autumn. “From April to October we had the whole of North Yorkshire,” she wrote. “Then the clocks went back and we had a Costa and a lay-by.”
This year the clocks go back on 25 October, which gives you roughly a month to get ahead of it. Here’s what tends to change, and how the people who’ve done a few winters handle it.
1. The evening walk stops being believable
All summer, “I’m just going to get some steps in” covered a surprising amount of ground. It was light until nine, everyone was out, and a man in trainers heading for the canal towpath at half seven raised precisely no eyebrows.
In November, the same man heading out into the pitch dark and the drizzle is a talking point. Nobody at home will say anything the first time. By the third, somebody will wonder aloud what’s so fascinating about the towpath in the rain. The experienced ones retire the summer excuses before they’re asked to, and swap them for something that suits the season: the gym class, the late shift, the Thursday five-a-side that really does exist.
2. The beer garden closes and everybody moves indoors
Outdoor meetings are wonderfully anonymous. People walk past a bench; they don’t study it. Indoors is a different matter. A table for two in the window of a warm café is about as visible as it gets, and you are sitting still for an hour in precisely the kind of place your sister-in-law pops into on a wet Saturday.
This is the month to rethink your venues. Big, busy and slightly impersonal beats small and cosy. A hotel lounge in a city neither of you lives in beats the lovely little independent place round the corner that everyone recommends.
3. Lunchtime becomes the whole affair
Once it’s dark by half four, the evening loses most of its cover and the middle of the day becomes prime time. Plenty of couples who spent summer meeting after work quietly shift to long lunches, late mornings and the odd half-day, and discover they rather prefer it. Daylight is simply easier to account for. “I was in town” works at one o’clock in a way it never quite does at seven.
Mike, who has been seeing the same woman in Reading for three years, calls November to February “the lunch season”. He books the time in his work calendar as something dull and recurring. Nobody has ever asked what “Q4 review” involves.
4. Wool remembers everything
This is the one almost nobody thinks about until it’s too late. A cotton T-shirt goes in the wash the same evening. A winter coat doesn’t. Nor does a scarf, and a good scarf will hold onto somebody else’s perfume or aftershave for days, sometimes weeks.
Claire from Cheltenham found this out when her husband borrowed her scarf to walk the dog and came back asking when she’d changed her perfume. She hadn’t. The regulars keep a separate scarf in the car, or simply ask their lover to go easy on the fragrance from October to March. It’s a slightly unromantic request. It is far less unromantic than the alternative.
5. Everybody is at home more
Summer scatters a household. Kids are out, partners have barbecues and golf and sitting in the garden until late. Winter pulls everyone back into the same three rooms, sitting on the same sofa, a few feet from your phone.
Which means the message you could easily read in July now arrives while your husband is next to you watching Strictly. Quiet notifications, previews switched off and a clear agreement about when you’re reachable matter far more in December than they ever did in August. So does agreeing with your lover, in advance, that silence on a Sunday evening isn’t a problem to be fixed.
6. The loneliness goes up, and so does the temptation to overdo it
Dark evenings make everyone a bit more reflective, and a marriage that felt merely flat in the sunshine can feel a great deal emptier in January. That’s often when affairs become most intense, because the contrast is so stark. One warm hour is suddenly doing the job of an entire week.
And intensity is when people get careless. They send the extra message. They stay the extra hour. They start inventing reasons to meet twice a week rather than once. The members who get through winter comfortably are the ones who notice the pull and don’t let it rewrite the rules they agreed back in the spring.
The good news? Winter also brings the Christmas party season, and a December calendar crowded enough that one more evening out barely registers. Used sparingly, it’s the most forgiving stretch of the whole year.
A darker season, not a worse one
Plenty of our members say winter is their favourite time with a lover. Fewer places to go, yes. But the ones you do find feel like a secret, and a warm room on a cold afternoon has a way of making an hour feel like a whole day.
Plan for the dark and it looks after you rather well. And if you’re heading into winter on your own, wishing you had somebody to plan it with, you already know where to find illicitencounters.com.
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