Tag: married dating UK

• Everyone Thought the Allotment Was Keeping Him Sane. They Were Half Right.

  There’s a fortnight every September when an allotment makes a man look like a genius. The beans come all at once, the tomatoes finally turn, and Graham, 57, from Chesterfield, walks up the hill most evenings to plot 12 with a carrier bag and a legitimate reason to be out of the house. His wife…

• 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…

• Six Weeks of Radio Silence: How Do I Restart My Affair Now the Holidays Are Nearly Over?

  Dear Mia, My affair partner and I agreed to go quiet for the summer holidays. Six weeks, kids at home, a family fortnight in Cornwall — there was simply no safe way to keep messaging, and we both knew it. We said we’d pick things up in September, and at the time it felt sensible.…

• 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…

• Alarm to Lights Out: One Ordinary Tuesday in a Marriage That’s Quietly Stopped Working

  Nobody writes to us after a blazing row. That’s the strange part. The messages we get from new members almost never mention shouting or slammed doors or anything a friend would recognise as a problem. They describe something much quieter. So we asked several of them to walk us through a completely normal day at…

• 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…

• Everyone Thinks the Football Season Is a Gift to Married Daters. Ask Anyone Who’s Tried It.

  The Premier League is back tonight, and somewhere across Britain a few thousand people have quietly done the same sum. Every Saturday between now and May, he vanishes into the Red Lion at two and doesn’t resurface until the last score’s in. She’s got the away games in the diary before the fixture list is…

• Needed vs Wanted: Why Being Indispensable at Home Can Still Leave You Lonely

  Ask her husband and he’d tell you she’s the most important person in that house, and he’d mean every word of it. She knows where the passports live. She knows which child has swimming on a Wednesday and which one has forgotten his PE kit again. She knows how his mother takes her tea. Take…

• He Sat on the Drive for Twenty Minutes. Nobody Inside Noticed He Was Late.

  The bags had been in the hall for an hour. The cool box was still on the kitchen floor, half-melted and leaking onto the tiles. Ian was in the driveway, in the car, engine off, keys in his hand. He’d been there twenty minutes. Nobody had come out. That’s the part he kept turning over…