Meet the members of Illicit Encounters

More than 600,000 people have joined the dating website for married people. Tom Whipple went to a masked ball to ask why

Let us be clear: R loves his wife. In fact, he says, stroking the arms of J, “I love my wife to bits.”

J is sitting beside him on a chaise longue, wearing an elaborate Venetian mask, and isn’t R’s wife.

“I don’t like the idea of anyone getting hurt,” R says. That’s why he doesn’t tell his wife about his affairs. Not that he lies, mind. He prides himself on his honesty. “I only deceive my wife in ways she wants to be deceived.”

R, 41, met J — neither of them want to use their real names — on Illicit Encounters, a website for married people looking to have affairs. Tonight, in a Soho champagne bar, they are attending its masked ball. And they are far from ashamed.

“The whole idea is to not wreck a marriage,” says J, who has in fact been round to R’s house for a family dinner — his wife and children thinking she was a business contact. “It’s to enhance a marriage. Some couples don’t have enough time for each other. This provides a way of finding fulfilment.”

The time was when having an extramarital affair involved significant deception and some considerable risk. But, as with so many things — flight bookings, house-hunting, stalking old schoolfriends — the internet has streamlined the process considerably.

For today’s technophilic philanderer, there is, in fact, an embarrassment of extramarital riches. Maritalaffair.co.uk will help you to arrange dates with married people and “horney” singles from around the country, all the while promising to be a site “where the grass is always greener”. Affairs4u.com(not, it should be pointed out, a sister website of the popular holiday broker cottages4u) offers “discreet intimate encounters” with fellow marrieds. And then there is Illicit Encounters (IE), which is, Rosie Freeman-Jones, its spokeswoman, assures me, “less tawdry and sex-based than the competitors”.

As far as Freeman-Jones is concerned, Illicit Encounters is just recognising a market that most would rather ignore. Despite societal disapproval, Britain is not and never has been an especially faithful country. Even on their wedding day, surveys show that one man in five and one woman in ten do not intend to be faithful. The figures get worse the higher the social class. Professional men, of the sort that Illicit Encounters claims to attract, are twice as likely to have had an affair in the past year than those in more menial jobs.

This is perhaps why IE wants to rehabilitate the image of the affair. “The reputation of people who have affairs is awful,” Freeman-Jones tells me. “But when it comes to affairs that last a long period of time, and exist outside of the marriage? We have a different view on that.”

In the eight years it has been running, Illicit Encounters has gained 630,000 members: 1 per cent of the population, or 3 per cent of the married population. While that includes many who will never have paid the money to be an active member, as a statement of intent it is still illuminating or (depending on your views on this sort of thing) shocking.

R knows where he stands on the illuminating-versus-shocking debate. “This actively helps my marriage,” he says. “It helps me feel attractive, makes me more attractive to her, and gives me an outlet other than disturbing her.” Beside him, J nods.

And, R says, his wife suspects nothing. “Shortly after we got married she said she would be shocked if I told her I’d had an affair. So I looked at her and said, ‘I’ve had three affairs’. She burst out laughing and said, ‘OK, I wouldn’t be shocked, I wouldn’t believe you’. Actually, I had had three affairs since I’d been with her.”

The time has come for R to have his photo taken. Despite his mask, he is worried. “Where is this going?” he asks the photographer. “In the newspaper,” he replies. “Will it be in The Times?” He nods. “In that case,” he says, “I’d better be careful. She reads The Times.” He reaches for a larger mask, poses, then moves on to the party, and champagne, next door.

To break the ice, Illicit Encounters has given each woman a padlock on a necklace, and each man a key. The idea is to find the woman who fits the key and, along the way, to get in some mingling. For a surprising number of women I meet, “mingling” means winking suggestively through a mask, then saying some sort of variant of: “Will you put your key in my lock?”

Follow-up conversations become even more fraught. IE has allowed me to attend the ball on the condition that, other than with those pre-selected for interview — to whom I speak away from the other attendees — no one knows I am a journalist. This causes difficulties.

“You look too young to be disillusioned with your marriage,” says one woman, taking advantage of possibly the sole situation where that gambit is socially acceptable. “How long have you been married?” Three years, I reply. “You should be in the honeymoon period.” She disapproves. “Why are you doing this?” Apparently even among people attending an event specifically for extramarital affairs, there is a moral hierarchy.

I resolve to follow R’s rules about not lying, but also not really telling the truth either. “My wife knows I’m here,” I reply. “Ah,” she seems relieved. “I see — you have one of those kinky open marriages.” I feel I might be clawing back some respect. But she has a follow-up question. “Does your wife do the same sort of thing?” “Er, yes,” I panic, “sometimes.” For the record this isn’t, at least to my knowledge, true. It’s not easy, this not lying thing.

Conversation is franker with those interviewees selected by IE — perhaps partly because, according to R, they were all paid by IE’s publicity team to speak to me.

Suzy, a 38-year-old here with her sister, has “been a mum and wife for years. Now it’s got to the point where my home life isn’t enough. I love my husband, and I love my life with my husband. I know it sounds weird, but I just want more.” She chose Illicit Encounters rather than a normal dating site because “if he found out, it would be a devastation. The whole benefit of this site is both parties have too much to lose.”

O is married with three children. She says she is still with her husband only for the sake of the children. “Physically, there’s nothing there with him any more. I think he suspects, though.”

S, now divorced and wearing an excellent purple dress, joined the site because, well, because we’re living too long. “When they wrote the marriage vows no one was expected to live with anyone longer than 20 years,” she says. “I found I wanted something more. To start with, it was an ego boost. I wanted to know if there was anyone out there who would find me attractive. And I found that!”

The ball is well under way. The padlocks, and most of the masks, have been discarded. Satisfied with the turnout, IE’s employees are talking shop. “Reading is a terrible hotbed,” says Freeman-Jones. “Berkshire and all the Home Counties are great for us.” They all nod. Adam Scott, IE’s chief executive, says he once went on Radio Kent to talk about the site. “We told them that our membership in Kent is the equivalent of the population of Sevenoaks. There was a deathly silence.”

For an aspect of human society that is, for obvious reasons, rather difficult to research, IE’s membership list provides data that most sociologists could only dream of acquiring. London, perhaps surprisingly, has relatively low membership compared with the size of its population. Manchester is high. So, also possibly surprisingly, is Devon. “They probably all know each other,” Scott suggests. The pricing structure, too, gives rather stark clues to the demographics of demand. For men, the site costs £149.99 a month. For women, it is free.

In my absence from the bar, there has been a change in atmosphere. Two hours’ worth of drinking down, the room has taken on the vaguely threatening feeling of a Blackpool hen party in heat. And my cover has been well and truly blown. “This is Tom from TheTimes, I’ve been telling you about him,” O says, pulling me over to a group of ladies.

“Ooh, he’s nice,” says one. “Do you have affairs Tom?” “Err ... no.” “Are you married?” Someone answers on my behalf. “No, he’s gay,” she says. “I can tell. You’re gay, aren’t you Tom?” In the circumstances, it seems more than prudent to acquiesce.

Gradually, I extract myself, and search for someone who isn’t looking — yet — to have an affair. Freeman-Jones, in her mid-twenties the youngest person here, has only just started going out with her boyfriend. “He is intrigued by what I do,” she says of her job with IE. “All I have learnt from working on this site is that I value honesty in people I’m with. All the people I know understand who I am, what I do, and what my views are on monogamy.”

And those views are that it’s not always necessary. She considers herself to be performing a useful service. “We are very much in demand. About 30 per cent of people on singles dating sites are married and we know that many marriages, whether people realise it or not, are kept alive by affairs,” she says.

“If someone has what we call a successful extramarital relationship — that is, one that they are able to maintain alongside their marriage — those things can be passionate, stress relievers, mysterious. They can be all the bits missing from their relationship. And it doesn’t necessarily detract from their marriage.”

Last orders have been called and, instead of a rampaging hen party there is now something of the school-disco-before-the-final-dance feeling to the bar. Except instead of pimply 13-year-olds in Guns ’n’ Roses T-shirts the wallflowers are large bankers in pinstripes. Just as with every good school disco, though, there have been plenty of successes. Among the victorious are Suzy and her sister, each leading a man outside.

I also go outside, but with Carol, who is having a smoke. Carol isn’t with Illicit Encounters, and she wants to know why lots of 35 to 60-year-olds in masks have booked out the first floor of the bar. I tell her.

“So,” Carol begins slowly, “they’re all here to have affairs?” I nod. “That’s sad.” She looks up at the window, where the party is winding down. “That’s really pathetic.”

As Carol goes inside, Suzy and her sister, apparently in unison, pull their conquests closer. And there, in a Soho doorway, at 10.30pm on a Thursday night, they both — there really is no other word for it — have a good snog.