Category: Dating Advice

• Where Do Married People Actually Go on a First Date? Picking a Spot That Won’t Give You Away

  Ask anyone about to meet someone from Illicit Encounters what’s worrying them, and they’ll usually start with the outfit. What to wear, what to say, whether there’ll be any spark at all. All fair enough. But the thing that actually decides whether a first date feels relaxed or fraught is something most people barely consider…

• She Deleted the Messages. She Forgot About the Map.

  Hannah from Reading thought she’d been thorough. She’d cleared the WhatsApp thread, deleted the photos, even untagged herself from a brunch picture on Instagram that placed her near a hotel she shouldn’t have been near. She had a separate email account, a passcode her husband didn’t know, and the kind of paranoid little routine that…

• The Day Beige Became Unbearable: Why Routine Pushes People to Cheat

  Tuesday: lasagna, TV, bed by ten. Thursday: fish and chips, TV, bed by ten. Weekend: gardening, grocery shopping, visit to the in-laws. Every week identical to the last, stretching into a future of infinite Tuesdays. This is the routine that brings many to Illicit Encounters—not dramatic unhappiness, not cruelty or neglect, just the slow suffocation…

• The Loneliness That Nearly Killed Her — And the Affair That Brought Her Back

  The marriage wasn’t abusive. It wasn’t traumatic. It was simply empty—a decades-long desert of emotional and physical neglect that slowly drained the life from Sarah, 48, from Edinburgh, until she could barely recognise herself. “I wasn’t living,” she told us when she joined IE. “I was surviving. Getting through each day, maintaining the facade, performing…

• Red Flags in Your Relationship You Shouldn’t Ignore

  Early Warning Signs of Relationship Problems Every relationship has rough patches – at Illicit Encounters, we know this. But how do you distinguish between normal turbulence and genuine warning signs? Recognising red flags early can help you address issues before they become insurmountable—or help you understand when a relationship may not be salvageable. Communication Breakdown…

• Rekindling the Spark: Can You Get It Back?

  The question arrives in different forms, but the core is always the same: “Can we get back what we lost?” Sometimes it comes from IE members considering whether to leave their marriages and try again with someone new. Sometimes it comes from people still hoping to fix what they have. The honest answer is complicated.…

• Creating the Perfect Dating Profile When You’re Already Married

  Your dating profile is your first impression, your elevator pitch, and your security policy all rolled into one. When you’re married, the stakes are even higher — you need to attract the right people while maintaining your privacy, signal what you’re looking for without being explicit, and present yourself authentically without revealing your identity. After…

• What is Same Sex Infidelity & Why Does It Happen?

  Infidelity takes many forms, from emotional affairs to classic physical cheating, but what is same sex infidelity, and why do people engage in it? Same sex infidelity involves someone in a heterosexual relationship cheating with someone of the same sex.  Often, they convince themselves that it doesn’t count as cheating to justify the behaviour. Read…

• Can a Marriage Survive an Affair? How to Keep the Love Alive

  Wondering whether your marriage can survive an affair? Whether you’re the one who strayed or the one who was betrayed, you can ease up a little knowing that it is possible to repair your relationship. Licensed marriage and family therapist David Klow said for Glamour Magazine, “Couples do and can stay together after an affair,…

• 8 Red Flags in an Affair Partner That Show It’s Time to End Things

  Are you currently exploring an extramarital affair, but something feels off with your affair partner? Keep your eyes peeled for these 8 red flags in an affair partner that might suggest something else is going on… We can hear the shouts, “Isn’t being in an affair a giant red flag?” No, not necessarily.  Affairs can…