Category: Marriage Affairs

• Daytime Affair vs Evening Affair: Which Actually Fits Around a Marriage?

  Most people picture an affair the same way: dim restaurant, late-night taxi, a hotel bar after work. It’s the cinematic version. Candlelight, lipstick, secrets whispered over a second glass of wine. But the cinematic version isn’t the one most married daters actually live. The members on Illicit Encounters tend to fall into two distinct camps.…

• Essay: Sexless Marriage: Why It Happens, How Long It Lasts, and What Married People Actually Do About It

  Janet is 52. She lives near Reading. She and her husband haven’t had sex in just over four years. She knows the exact stretch because she remembers the last time — a Tuesday evening, a takeaway curry, half a bottle of wine, neither of them quite paying attention. She didn’t know it was going to…

• Why Some People Only Feel Like Themselves Around Their Lover

  There’s a strange admission that comes up again and again on Illicit Encounters, usually somewhere around the third or fourth coffee. People will say it half-laughing, half-embarrassed, because they don’t quite know what to do with it. “I’m a different person when I’m with him.” Or, “I feel like me again when I see her.”…

• Essay: Why Married Men Have Affairs: The Reasons Most Won’t Admit (Even to Themselves)

  David is 53, lives near Reading, and runs a small logistics business with thirty-two employees. He’s been married twenty-six years to a woman he describes, without irony, as “genuinely my best friend.” She knows about his stress and his back pain and his complicated relationship with his late father. She makes him tea the way…

• 8 Tiny Habits of People Who Make Married Dating Look Effortless

  Some people seem to glide through married dating. Not in a smug way — they’re not pulling off some elaborate double life. It’s quieter than that. Their phone stays calm. Their week feels steadier, not more chaotic. The affairs themselves tend to last longer and feel kinder, on both sides. After more than twenty years…

• Essay: Why Married Women Have Affairs: The Reasons Most Won’t Say Out Loud

  For years, the public conversation around infidelity was framed almost entirely as a male issue. Cheating husbands. Wandering eyes. Dad-on-the-business-trip clichés that fed a thousand BBC dramas. But anyone who actually works in this space — and Illicit Encounters has been around for over twenty years now — knows the picture is rather different. About…

• Are Married Daters Selfish? After 20 Years, Here’s What We’ve Actually Found

  People assume the same thing about married daters. They picture someone smug, restless, hungry — somebody who’s already got everything and wants more anyway. The greedy spouse. The one who couldn’t be content if their life depended on it. It’s a clean little story. It gets shared in newspaper comment sections and around dinner tables,…

• Essay: How to Hide a Dating App on Your Phone: The Complete Privacy Guide for Married Daters

  The phone is where most married daters get themselves into trouble. Not through anything dramatic — not a private investigator, not a late-night text scroll — but through a series of small, boring, largely invisible mistakes that add up to a spouse asking a question no-one wants to answer. If you’ve been thinking about using…

• iPhone vs Android: Which Phone Actually Hides a Married Dating App Better?

  It’s one of the questions Mia is asked most often through the IE inbox: “I’m signing up to Illicit Encounters — is my iPhone safer, or should I be doing this on my Android?” It’s a fair thing to wonder. Most people choose their phone for the camera or the colour. Almost nobody picks one…

• We Asked Our Members What They Actually Miss Most. It Wasn’t Sex.

  There’s a question we’ve started asking long-standing members of Illicit Encounters when they renew, almost as a quiet exit interview in reverse. What is it, really, that brought you here? Not the moment you signed up, not the row with your husband or the silent Sunday with your wife. The thing underneath it. The ache.…