Tag: affair psychology

• “Just Tell Him What You Need” — The Advice That’s Quietly Failing Half of Married Britain

  There’s a piece of advice that gets handed out so freely nobody stops to check whether it works. Tell him. Just tell him what you need. Sit him down, be honest, use your words — and the implication underneath it is that if you haven’t done that yet, whatever’s wrong is at least partly your…

• The 48 Hours After a First Meeting Decide Almost Everything

  Ask most married daters about a first meeting and they’ll tell you about the meeting. The pub in Harrogate with the terrible parking. Whether he looked like his photos. Whether she laughed at the right bit. Almost nobody talks about the drive home. Which is a shame, because that’s usually where the whole thing is…

• 5 Reasons Married People Fall Hardest for Other Married People

  Ask anyone who has spent a few months on a married dating site what actually surprised them, and you tend to get a version of the same answer. Not the meeting up. Not the nerves in the car park. It’s how quickly they felt understood by a total stranger. Rebecca from Chester put it better…

• She’s Played the Same Eleven-Second Voice Note Forty-One Times

  There’s a voice note on Nicola’s phone that lasts eleven seconds. She’s played it forty-one times. She knows the number because her phone told her, in that breezy way phones do, that she’d spent the better part of eight minutes that week listening to one man say one fairly ordinary thing about a car park.…

• The Most Dangerous Hour of an Affair Isn’t the One You Spend Together

  Ask a married dater where the risk lives and they’ll point straight at the meeting. The car park you can be seen crossing. The restaurant with unfortunate lighting and a waiter who went to school with your brother-in-law. The room key, the lift, the hour behind a closed door. That’s the bit that keeps people…

• Why You Can Tell a Stranger Things You’d Never Tell Your Husband

  People assume intimacy and honesty travel together. Twenty years of marriage, the logic goes, should buy you the right to say anything to the person sleeping beside you. They know your mother, your medical history, the exact way you take your tea. Surely they’re the safest possible place for the difficult stuff? And yet. Ask…

• She Kept the Train Ticket in Her Coat Pocket All Winter

  The ticket is creased now, soft at the corners the way paper goes when it’s been handled too many times. Macclesfield to Manchester Piccadilly, off-peak return, a Thursday in November. Rachel could have thrown it away eight months ago. She hasn’t. And somewhere around February she stopped pretending she was going to. She found it…

• He Wants Every Weekend. I Can Only Give Him a Tuesday. How Do I Stop This Falling Apart?

  Dear Mia, I’ve been seeing someone for about seven months — we met on here, actually — and it’s the best thing to happen to me in a decade. The problem is time. I’m married, three kids, a job that swallows my evenings. Realistically I can give him one afternoon a week. A Tuesday, usually.…

• Why an Old Flame Can Undo You Faster Than a Stranger Ever Could

  There’s a particular kind of message that arrives on an ordinary Tuesday night and changes nothing and everything at once. “Is this still you?” Three words, from a name you haven’t seen in twenty years. And suddenly you’re not standing in your kitchen in Guildford with the dishwasher humming and the school bags by the…

• She Always Said She Didn’t Want Pudding. She’d Been Lying for Twenty Years.

  Diane had a script, and she’d long since forgotten she was reading from one. The waiter would come round with the dessert menu, and before he’d even finished the sentence, she’d hear herself say it. “Oh, none for me. I’ll just steal a bit of his.” Graham would order the sticky toffee, she’d take the…