Category: Marriage Affairs

• The Sunday Problem: Why Weekends Are Often the Hardest Part of an Affair

  There’s an assumption about married dating that goes something like this: weekdays are for the marriage, and weekends — those stolen Saturday nights, those long unhurried afternoons — are when the affair really comes alive. It sounds plausible. Romantic, even. But ask anyone who’s been on a married dating site for more than a few…

• Essay: Is My Wife Having an Affair? The Signs Husbands Usually Miss

  James from Reading had been married for fourteen years when he first noticed his wife Laura had started taking her phone to the bathroom. Just the once, at first — then twice in the same evening. The third time he mentioned it, lightly, and she laughed it off. Said she was replying to her mother.…

• Where Desire Actually Goes When a Marriage Stops Feeling Sexual

  Clare had been married sixteen years when she realised her husband’s laugh didn’t land anymore. Not that he’d stopped laughing, or that she’d stopped loving him. It was just that the sound no longer did anything to her — didn’t tug, didn’t warm, didn’t make her look up across the kitchen. It was a friendly…

• From Sign-Up to First Coffee: What the First Six Weeks on a Married Dating Site Actually Look Like

  The honest answer to “what happens when I join a married dating site?” is: a lot less than you fear, and a lot more than you expect. We asked long-standing members to walk us through what their first six weeks on Illicit Encounters actually looked like — not the glossy fantasy version, the real one.…

• Why Your Marriage Being ‘Fine’ Might Be the Problem

  People know what an unhappy marriage looks like. Arguments that spiral into silence. Contempt wearing thin the conversation. Separate bedrooms, separate lives, the slow build toward a door finally slamming. But there’s another kind of unhappy marriage — one that doesn’t announce itself at all, and in some ways that’s far harder to reckon with.…

• He’d Forgotten He Could Be Like This

  Paul hadn’t planned to join a married dating site on a Tuesday evening in February. He’d planned to watch the end of a football match, drink one beer too many, and go to bed at ten. That was a Tuesday in the Whitmore household. That was how things went. His wife Karen was in the…

• Why Do People Stay in Unhappy Marriages? We Asked Our Members Directly

  It’s one of the most common questions asked about married daters, and one of the most misunderstood. If you’re unhappy, why don’t you just leave? It sounds so simple. A neat moral equation. And yet anyone who’s actually lived inside a long marriage knows the honest answer is almost never simple. So rather than guess,…

• Essay: How to Start an Affair: Everything You Need to Know Before You Begin

  There’s a gap that a lot of people live in for a very long time. On one side: the marriage they’re in, which may be perfectly functional and completely unfulfilling. On the other: the idea of something different — more alive, more seen, more them — which feels simultaneously obvious and impossible. This post is…

• Married but Lonely: When the Person Beside You Feels Like a Stranger

  The house is tidy. The kids are fed. The mortgage is paid on time. And Claire, 44, from Sheffield, goes to bed every night beside a man she has shared her life with for seventeen years — and feels profoundly, utterly alone. She’s not dramatic. She’s not unhappy in any way that would be easy…

• She Almost Cancelled Three Times Before Their First Coffee

  Millie had her coat on before she talked herself out of it. Again. It was a Tuesday in early March, one of those grey Birmingham mornings where even the coffee shops look like they’re still waking up. She’d arranged to meet a man called David at a café near the Mailbox — somewhere she’d never…