Tag: affair advice

• The Clocks Go Back Next Month. Here’s What Dark Evenings Quietly Do to an Affair.

  Nobody plans an affair around British Summer Time. But ask anybody who has been seeing someone for longer than a year and they’ll tell you the last Sunday in October changes a great deal more than the clock on the oven. Janine, 51, from Harrogate, put it neatly when she messaged us last autumn. “From…

• The Best Part of an Affair Isn’t the Affair. It’s the Two Days Before It.

  Ask most people to picture an affair and they’ll give you a hotel room. Curtains drawn, phone face down, a couple of hours that nobody else knows about. The whole imagined thrill sits in that room, in those two hours, and everything either side of it is just logistics. But ask somebody who’s actually having…

• “He Said I Had a Good Laugh.” Three Members on the Compliment They Still Haven’t Forgotten

  Ask somebody who has been on this site a while what they actually remember, and the answer is almost never the thing you would expect. Not the hotel. Not the first time. What comes back, again and again, is a sentence. Usually a short one. Usually said in passing by somebody who had forgotten saying…

• He Lives Four Streets Away. Is That Too Close for Comfort?

  Every week we get sent questions by members who’d rather ask a stranger than a friend. This one arrived on Sunday night, which is usually a sign somebody’s been turning it over all weekend. The question “I joined in June and I’ve been messaging someone for about a month. We get on brilliantly — better…

• WhatsApp vs Signal: Which One Actually Keeps a Married Dater’s Messages Private?

  Ask a room full of married daters which app they message on and nine of them will say WhatsApp. It’s already on the phone. Everyone’s on it. There’s a little padlock and a line about end-to-end encryption, and that feels like plenty. Then somebody mentions Signal, usually in a slightly conspiratorial tone, and the room…

• Three Days of Silence: Why a Lover Going Quiet Almost Never Means What You Think

  There’s a particular kind of quiet that only married daters know. It isn’t the quiet of someone drifting off, or losing interest, or quietly deciding you were a mistake. It’s the quiet of a man whose mother-in-law has turned up for four days with a suitcase and opinions. It’s the quiet of a woman whose…

• 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…

• 7 Apps That Will Quietly Grass You Up Six Months From Now

  Most people who date discreetly think in terms of the next twenty-four hours. Delete the messages, clear the browser, park round the corner, be home by six. And that’s sensible enough. It’s how the overwhelming majority of people manage it perfectly well for years. But phones aren’t only interested in tonight. They’re archivists. They sort,…

• Six Weeks of Radio Silence: How Do I Restart My Affair Now the Holidays Are Nearly Over?

  Dear Mia, My affair partner and I agreed to go quiet for the summer holidays. Six weeks, kids at home, a family fortnight in Cornwall — there was simply no safe way to keep messaging, and we both knew it. We said we’d pick things up in September, and at the time it felt sensible.…

• 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…