Tag: married dating UK

• 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 —…

• Where Desire Actually Goes When a Marriage Stops Feeling Sexual

  Clare had been married sixteen years when she realised her husband’s laugh didn’t land anymore. Not that he’d stopped laughing, or that she’d stopped loving him. It was just that the sound no longer did anything to her — didn’t tug, didn’t warm, didn’t make her look up across the kitchen. It was a friendly…

• 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.…

• Do I Actually Need a Second Phone for Married Dating? A Reader Asks

  This week in the IE postbag — Karen from Guildford writes in with one of the questions we’re asked more often than almost any other on the discretion front. Mia answers. Dear Mia, I’ve just joined a married dating site for the first time. I’m 43, my marriage has been a polite flatshare for about…

• Discreet Dating Site vs Mainstream App: Which Is Actually Safer for Married People?

  Ask most people where to go for dating online, and they’ll name a handful of the usual apps. Tinder. Hinge. Bumble. Match. The brands are so recognisable now that they’ve become shorthand for dating itself. And for a long time, married people looking outside their marriage tried to use them too — quietly, cautiously, hoping…

• He’d Forgotten He Could Be Like This

  Paul hadn’t planned to join a married dating site on a Tuesday evening in February. He’d planned to watch the end of a football match, drink one beer too many, and go to bed at ten. That was a Tuesday in the Whitmore household. That was how things went. His wife Karen was in the…

• Essay: How to Start an Affair: Everything You Need to Know Before You Begin

  There’s a gap that a lot of people live in for a very long time. On one side: the marriage they’re in, which may be perfectly functional and completely unfulfilling. On the other: the idea of something different — more alive, more seen, more them — which feels simultaneously obvious and impossible. This post is…

• My Husband and I Are Basically Flatmates — Is That Normal?

  Dear Mia, I’ve been married for fourteen years and I love my husband — I do. But somewhere along the way we stopped being a couple and started being… housemates? We split the bills, coordinate the school run, argue about whose turn it is to ring the plumber. We haven’t been on a date in…

• 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…