Tag: affair psychology

• 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…

• The Back-to-School List Had One Item She Couldn’t Write Down

  The list went up on the fridge on the first of August, the way it does every year. School shoes. Shin pads for the eldest. A pencil case in a very particular shade of purple, because there had been tears about this before and nobody in the house wanted a repeat. Name tapes, because Rachel…

• She Loves Her Kids. She’s Still Been Crossing Off the Days Until September.

  There’s a calendar stuck to the side of Rachel’s fridge in Nottingham, the kind with a column for every member of the family. Swimming on Mondays. Dan’s five-a-side on Wednesdays. And on Thursday the 3rd of September, in her own column, a small pencil star. No word next to it. Just a star. If you…

• 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…

• Your Husband Is Your Best Friend. That Might Be the Problem.

  “He’s my best friend.” It gets said at anniversary dinners, in wedding speeches, and to a friend over a second glass on a Tuesday night. It’s meant as the highest compliment a marriage can be paid. Twenty-odd years in, still each other’s first phone call, still the person you’d ring from a hospital car park.…

• They Deleted Their Profiles and Went Back to Trying. Three Members on What Happened Next.

  Every week, a handful of members close their accounts. Some have met someone and don’t need us anymore. A few have been caught. But there’s a third group, and they’re the ones nobody writes about: the people who delete because they’ve decided to give the marriage one more proper go. And then, sometimes months later,…