Nicola had been chatting to a man on the site for about a week when he signed off one evening with: “Night night, Nicola. Hope the audit goes well tomorrow.”
She had never told him her surname. She had never told him her job. She certainly hadn’t mentioned the audit. It turned out he had done nothing more sinister than drop her profile picture into a reverse image search, which took him straight to her LinkedIn page, complete with full name, employer and a post from the day before about quarter-end.
He meant it as a joke. He was, by her own account, perfectly nice. But Nicola, 47, from Guildford, sat on the edge of the bath with her heart going like the clappers, because if a perfectly nice stranger could find her in thirty seconds, so could anyone.
She hid her profile that night, and then did what we wish more people did before joining rather than after: she started again properly. This guide is everything she, and thousands of members like her, have learned about staying anonymous on a married dating site without coming across as cold, cagey or impossible to get to know.
What anonymous really means here
A married dating profile can’t be invisible. The whole point is that somebody finds you. What you’re aiming for is control: nobody should be able to work out who you are until you have decided to tell them, and even then, only as much as you choose.
That’s a different thing from secrecy for its own sake. The best profiles on any anonymous dating site are warm, specific and full of personality. They just don’t contain a single detail that leads back to a real name, a real address or a real employer. Personality is safe to share. Coordinates are not.
Most identity leaks come from five places: your email address, your username, your photos, the words in your profile, and the moment you move off the site onto your phone. There’s a sixth, the bank statement, which catches out the people who have been careful about everything else. We’ll take them in the order you’ll meet them.
Start with a clean email address
Before you do anything else, set up a new email address used for nothing but this. Not your work address, obviously, but not your everyday personal one either, and not the one that’s tied to the family Amazon account or the shared iPad.
Keep your name out of it. Keep your birth year, your town and your children’s names out of it too. “Jane.Smith74” gives away three facts before anybody has read a word of your profile. Something bland and unrelated works best. And check which recovery phone number and backup email it asks for, because a recovery code arriving on the family computer is an entirely avoidable way to get found out.
A username that leads nowhere
People put a surprising amount of themselves into usernames. The football club and your old shirt number. The name of your first dog. The gamer tag you have used since 2009 on every forum you have ever joined.
That last one is the real danger. If your username exists anywhere else online, a search engine will connect the two in seconds, and whatever you have posted under it elsewhere, including the review of the Cornish holiday cottage with your husband’s name in it, becomes part of your dating profile by extension.
The test is simple. Type your proposed username into Google in quotation marks. If anything comes back, pick another. A good username hints at personality (a sense of humour, a love of the sea, a fondness for a long lunch) without pointing at a place, a date or a person.
Photos: where most people give themselves away
If there’s one section of this guide to read twice, it’s this one.
Reverse image search is free, instant and built into most phones now. Point it at a photo and it will find every other place that photo, or one very like it, appears online. That means your main photo must never be a picture that exists anywhere else: not a cropped LinkedIn headshot, not your WhatsApp profile picture, not a shot from a wedding that’s sitting on your cousin’s Facebook. Take a new one. It takes five minutes and it’s the single most effective thing you can do.
Then look at the background as carefully as you look at your face. We have seen profiles where the photo showed a readable car number plate, a school logo on a child’s bag at the edge of the frame, a view from a front window that anybody local would recognise, and in one memorable case a framed wedding photograph on the mantelpiece behind a man describing himself as “discreet”. Plain walls, neutral outdoor shots and places you don’t visit regularly are your friends.
Photos taken on a phone can also carry hidden location data, known as metadata, that records where they were taken. Many sites strip this out on upload, but it’s far better not to rely on it. Turn off location tagging in your camera settings before taking dating photos, or screenshot the image and upload the screenshot, which usually leaves the original data behind.
Finally, use private photos. On IllicitEncounters you can password-protect your pictures so only the members you choose can see them, which means your public profile can show something tasteful and face-free (a silhouette on a beach, your hands round a coffee cup, the back of your head on a hillside) while the photos that show who you are go only to people you have been talking to and trust. Sue, 55, from Bath, has never had a face photo on her public profile in four years. “If they won’t chat to me without seeing my face,” she says, “they were never going to be worth the risk.”
Your profile text: blur by one degree
This is the subtle one. No single detail in your profile identifies you. The combination does.
“Paediatric nurse in Kendal who plays in a brass band” is one person, and everybody in Kendal knows who. “Work in healthcare in the North West, and I’ve been known to play an instrument” is several thousand people, and it still tells a potential match a great deal about you.
The rule our longer-standing members follow is to blur every factual detail by one degree. Your town becomes your county or nearest city. Your job becomes your industry. Your very specific hobby becomes its broader category. Your age can stay honest, because age isn’t identifying on its own. Your personality, your sense of humour and what you’re hoping to find can be as vivid as you like. That’s the bit that gets you messages anyway.
What if someone you know is on there?
It happens. On a site with over a million UK members, the odds of spotting a familiar face over time aren’t small, particularly if you live somewhere with one of everything.
Here’s the thing people forget in the panic, though: they’re on there too. Anybody who recognises you on a married dating site has exactly as much to lose as you do, which is why these moments almost always end in mutual, silent discretion. The etiquette our members have settled on is to say nothing, block if it makes you more comfortable, and never, ever mention it in the real world. Not a wink across the school playground, not a joke at the office party. Nothing.
Keeping your face off your public profile, as above, removes most of this risk before it starts.
The bank statement nobody thinks about
Plenty of people who have been meticulous about photos and usernames come unstuck over something far more boring: a line on a joint bank statement or a shared credit card bill.
Before you pay for anything, find out how the charge will appear. Most established sites use a discreet billing name rather than their brand, and will tell you what it is in their help pages, but check rather than assume. Then think about which card you’re using. A card only you see the statements for, whether a personal current account, a separate credit card with paperless statements or a prepaid card, makes the whole question go away.
And switch off auto-renew unless you actively want it. A renewal charge landing in a month when you’d forgotten all about the site is a very avoidable conversation.
The phone number handover
This is the single biggest moment of risk to your anonymity, and it tends to arrive at the point where you feel most relaxed. You have been chatting for a fortnight, it’s going brilliantly, and swapping numbers feels like a natural next step.
It is. But a mobile number is a key to a surprising number of doors. Put it into WhatsApp and it shows your profile photo, your name and your “about” line. Plenty of people have a family photo as their WhatsApp picture without thinking twice. Put it into a caller-ID app and it may bring up your full name. Save somebody’s number in your contacts, and some social media apps will cheerfully start suggesting them as a friend, or you to them.
So before you hand your number over, open your messaging apps and look at yourself the way a stranger would. Change the profile photo to something neutral, set your name to a first name only, and tighten who can see your photo and status. Better still, hold off on sharing a number until after you have met once in person, and keep chatting on the site until then. Its messaging exists precisely so you don’t have to hand over anything permanent to somebody you haven’t met.
When you do move off-site, save their number under an unremarkable name and turn off message previews. We have covered phone privacy at length elsewhere, but the short version is that the handover is where anonymity stops being about the site and starts being about your own habits.
How much to reveal, and when
None of this means being a closed book. People who give nothing away get very few replies, and the ones they do get tend not to last. The trick is pacing.
In the first week of chatting, share feelings, opinions, humour and a broad sense of your life: that you’re married, roughly how long, what’s missing. Keep names, workplaces and locations vague. After a couple of weeks of good conversation, private photos and a rough area are reasonable. First names, if you weren’t already using yours, often come around the first meeting. Surnames, exact workplaces and home towns tend to come much later, if at all, and many long-running affairs never exchange them.
A decent match will understand this completely, because they are almost certainly doing the same. Anyone who pushes hard for identifying details early, or gets irritable when you won’t give them, is telling you something useful about themselves.
A word about intimate photos
Most people on a married dating site are exactly who they say they are. A small minority aren’t, and the one thing that gives a bad actor real leverage over a married person is an intimate image with a recognisable face in it.
The simple rule our members swear by: never send anything intimate that shows your face, a tattoo, a distinctive piece of jewellery or a room anyone would recognise. And never send anything at all to somebody you haven’t met in person. If anyone pressures you, or suddenly shifts from flirtation to asking for money, stop replying and report the profile straight away.
When you want to step away
Anonymity isn’t just for joining. When you take a break or leave altogether, hide or delete your profile rather than just letting it sit there, remove your photos, and clear out the dedicated email address or at least the notifications from it. A dormant profile with a face on it is a small risk that grows every month you forget about it.
Questions we get asked about staying anonymous
“Is it rude not to have a face photo on my public profile?” Not on a married dating site. It’s entirely normal, and most members expect it. A warm, well-written profile with a tasteful face-free image and private photos available on request gets plenty of attention. What puts people off is a profile with no photo and no personality.
“Can someone find me on a dating site by searching my name?” Not if you have followed the steps above. Profiles on established married dating sites aren’t indexed by search engines under members’ real names, and if your username, email and photos don’t exist anywhere else online, there’s nothing to connect a search to.
“Should I use my real first name?” Many people do, and a common first name reveals very little on its own. If yours is unusual, or you would simply feel more comfortable, use a different one on your profile and share the real one when you have met and feel ready. Nobody worth meeting will be offended.
“What if the person I’m talking to asks where I work?” Answer the spirit of the question rather than the letter. “I’m in finance, mostly spreadsheets and meetings, and I’ll tell you all about it over a coffee” is friendly, honest and gives nothing away. Most people are really asking what your days are like, not for your employer’s postcode.
“Is my profile visible to people who aren’t members?” On a reputable married dating site, full profiles and private photos are visible only to logged-in members, and password-protected photos only to the people you have unlocked them for. It’s worth checking the privacy settings on any site you join before you upload anything at all.
Anonymous doesn’t mean invisible
Nicola rebuilt her profile over a weekend. New email, new username, a photo of her in a hat on a windy beach in Norfolk that’s never appeared anywhere else, a job described as “numbers, mostly” and a location widened to Surrey. She got more messages the second time around than the first, which surprised her. “I think I was more relaxed,” she says. “I stopped worrying about who might be reading, so I wrote like myself.”
That’s the quiet benefit of doing this properly. Once you trust your anonymity, you can afford to be open about everything that matters: who you are, what’s missing, and what you’d love to find. And when you’re ready to start, carefully and on your own terms, you already know where to find us.
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