Tag: emotional neglect in marriage

• Why It’s Attention, Not Attraction, That Sparks Most Affairs

  Most assume affairs start with looks. Our members tell a different story — one about being noticed, remembered, and properly listened to for once. Ask anyone why people have affairs and you’ll usually get the same answer: attraction. As if straying is simply a case of someone fitter, funnier or better-looking coming along and turning…

• Essay: Emotional Neglect in Marriage: The Signs, the Damage, and What People Quietly Do About It

  Emotional neglect in marriage rarely looks dramatic — it looks like silence. The signs people dismiss for years, why it hurts so much, and what they do next. Claire, 49, from Nottingham, worked out what was wrong with her marriage at somebody else’s dinner party. A man she’d never met when she turned to married…

• There Was a Lipstick in Her Bag She Never Wore at Home

  A quiet story about a woman who started getting ready again — and what one small, secret habit revealed about a marriage that had stopped noticing her. The lipstick lived in the zipped inside pocket of her handbag, tucked behind her reading glasses. A deep berry shade the woman at the counter in Harrogate had…

• Walking on Eggshells in Your Own Home: The Marriage Nobody Would Call Unhappy

  Plenty of unhappy marriages aren’t loud at all – they’re careful and tense. Here’s why walking on eggshells at home wears you down more than any row. Picture an unhappy marriage and most people imagine the same thing. Slammed doors. Raised voices. Somebody sleeping on the sofa after a blazing row that the neighbours probably…

• Why Some People Only Feel Like Themselves Around Their Lover

  There’s a strange admission that comes up again and again on Illicit Encounters, usually somewhere around the third or fourth coffee. People will say it half-laughing, half-embarrassed, because they don’t quite know what to do with it. “I’m a different person when I’m with him.” Or, “I feel like me again when I see her.”…

• Everyone Says I Should Just Leave. But I Don’t Want to Blow Up My Life. Is That Stupid?

  “I’ve been married 14 years. Two kids, the mortgage, the school run, the lot. My marriage isn’t bad exactly — it’s just gone. We don’t fight, we don’t really talk, we don’t share a bed in any meaningful sense of the word. Every friend I confide in tells me I should leave. They make it…

• She Didn’t Expect to Like Him. That Was the First Problem.

  Rachel from Winchester was forty-three when she signed up. She’d been married for sixteen years to a man who, by any reasonable account, was decent. Mark wasn’t cruel. He didn’t forget her birthday. He put the bins out, went to their daughter’s netball matches, and occasionally remembered to bring home flowers on a Friday —…

• Why Your Marriage Being ‘Fine’ Might Be the Problem

  People know what an unhappy marriage looks like. Arguments that spiral into silence. Contempt wearing thin the conversation. Separate bedrooms, separate lives, the slow build toward a door finally slamming. But there’s another kind of unhappy marriage — one that doesn’t announce itself at all, and in some ways that’s far harder to reckon with.…

• The Loneliest Place in Britain Isn’t a Bedsit. It’s a Marriage.

  There’s a particular kind of loneliness that only comes from being not alone. Not the clean, almost bracing loneliness of a Saturday night by yourself — takeaway on your lap, no one expecting anything of you. Not the loneliness of the spare room, the divorce flat with bare walls and a single plate. Those kinds…

• David’s Story: The Affair That Saved My Marriage

  Names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. This is a real story shared by an Illicit Encounters member, published with permission. “I know how that sounds,” David says, stirring his coffee without looking up. “The affair that saved my marriage. Like I’m trying to justify something selfish by pretending it had a…