Tag: choosing change

• 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.…

• 7 Quiet Signs You Stopped Being Happy in Your Marriage (Long Before You Admitted It)

  Most people don’t wake up on a Tuesday and realise their marriage is unhappy. It arrives more quietly than that — settling in slowly, like damp into old walls, and by the time anyone notices the smell, they can’t quite remember when it started. Sarah from Nottingham, who joined Illicit Encounters in 2025, put it…

• The Lonely Marriage: When You Feel Alone Together

  Emotional Distance in Long-Term Relationships You share a home, perhaps children, finances, and a history together. Yet somehow, you feel profoundly alone. This is the paradox of the lonely marriage—a surprisingly common experience that people at Illicit Encounters know well. How Did We Get Here? Loneliness in marriage rarely happens overnight. It creeps in slowly:…

• She Hadn’t Made a Playlist for Anyone Since She Was Nineteen

  She thought she’d stopped being the kind of woman who falls for someone. Then she found herself making a playlist at midnight, and everything shifted. The first song went on the list at quarter to midnight, while the house was asleep and the dishwasher was doing its long, sighing final cycle downstairs. Claire from Solihull…

• Rekindling the Spark: Can You Get It Back?

  The question arrives in different forms, but the core is always the same: “Can we get back what we lost?” Sometimes it comes from IE members considering whether to leave their marriages and try again with someone new. Sometimes it comes from people still hoping to fix what they have. The honest answer is complicated.…