Tag: affair psychology

• 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…

• Everyone Called Her Mum. Even Her Husband. Then Someone Asked What Her Name Was.

  Rosalind can tell you the exact moment she realised nobody had said her name in a very long time. It was a Wednesday in March, she was sitting in the car outside a Tesco Extra on the edge of Harrogate, and a man she had never met had just typed a question into a chat…

• 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…

• 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…

• “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…

• 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…

• 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…

• The One Person Who Knows: Three Members on Telling a Friend About Their Affair

  There’s a moment most married daters would recognise instantly. You’re two glasses in with your oldest friend, the conversation has drifted somewhere honest, and there’s a sentence sitting at the back of your throat like a stone. Say it or swallow it? Almost everyone arrives at that fork eventually. Carrying something this size on your…

• 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…