Category: Broad relationship and intimacy topics

• Essay: When an Affair Ends: The Grief Nobody Lets You Have

  Helen took a week off work in February and told everybody she had put her back out. She had not put her back out. She had spent four days barely leaving the house because a man she had been seeing for two and a half years had sent a message on a Sunday evening saying…

• 6 Things That Make Someone Magnetic at 50 — and Not One of Them Is Looks

  There’s a particular kind of dread that shows up before a first coffee in your fifties, and it’s almost never about conversation. It’s about the photograph. The one taken in a decent light, four years ago, before the hair did what hair does. People stare at it and think: this is the thing that has…

• Essay: Being the Other Woman: What It’s Actually Like, What Nobody Warns You About, and How to Protect Yourself

  Rachel is forty-one, works in commercial property in Bristol, and has been seeing a married man for fourteen months. She does not call herself the other woman. Nobody does, out loud. The phrase belongs to soap operas and Sunday supplements, and it never quite fits the actual experience, which is mostly ordinary — a coffee…

• I’m Jealous of My Lover’s Wife — and I’m Married Myself. What on Earth Is Wrong With Me?

  “I’ve been seeing someone for eight months. He’s married. I’m married. Neither of us has ever pretended otherwise — that was rather the point. Then last month he mentioned, completely in passing, that he and his wife were off to Whitstable for a long weekend. And I couldn’t breathe. I’ve spent three weeks picturing the…

• The Seven-Year Itch Is Real — It Just Can’t Read a Calendar

  Marilyn Monroe has a lot to answer for. The Seven Year Itch gave the feeling its name in 1955, and seven decades later it remains the one piece of marriage folklore everyone can recite without thinking. Somewhere around the seventh anniversary, so the story goes, the shine wears off, the eye starts wandering, and a…

• Essay: Affair Guilt: Why It Turns Up When It Does, Why Some People Feel None at All, and What Married People Really Do With It

  Claire from Harrogate can tell you the precise moment it landed, and it wasn’t any of the moments you’d guess. Not the first message. Not the hotel in Leeds. Not the drive back with the windows down and the radio up. It was a Wednesday evening, eleven days later, when her husband came into the…

• Needed vs Wanted: Why Being Indispensable at Home Can Still Leave You Lonely

  Ask her husband and he’d tell you she’s the most important person in that house, and he’d mean every word of it. She knows where the passports live. She knows which child has swimming on a Wednesday and which one has forgotten his PE kit again. She knows how his mother takes her tea. Take…

• Your Husband Is Your Best Friend. That Might Be the Problem.

  “He’s my best friend.” It gets said at anniversary dinners, in wedding speeches, and to a friend over a second glass on a Tuesday night. It’s meant as the highest compliment a marriage can be paid. Twenty-odd years in, still each other’s first phone call, still the person you’d ring from a hospital car park.…

• 5 Reasons Married People Fall Hardest for Other Married People

  Ask anyone who has spent a few months on a married dating site what actually surprised them, and you tend to get a version of the same answer. Not the meeting up. Not the nerves in the car park. It’s how quickly they felt understood by a total stranger. Rebecca from Chester put it better…

• Why You Can Tell a Stranger Things You’d Never Tell Your Husband

  People assume intimacy and honesty travel together. Twenty years of marriage, the logic goes, should buy you the right to say anything to the person sleeping beside you. They know your mother, your medical history, the exact way you take your tea. Surely they’re the safest possible place for the difficult stuff? And yet. Ask…