Month: Sep 2026

36% of cheats say going back to the office has made arranging an affair easier than working from home ever was — and it is the commute, not the office, where the midweek ‘rail-mance’ happens

Key findings

  • 36% of members say being back in the office has made arranging an affair easier than it was when they worked from home. Almost none of it happens at work.
  • 52% say the commute is the only part of the week a partner cannot account for.
  • Two thirds have used a drink near the station before the train home, and 55% have blamed a train that was late or never turned up.
  • Midweek sign-ups are up 32% on the same period last year, peaking on Tuesday and Wednesday between 5pm and 7pm. The site calls them rail-mances.
  • From a poll of 1,400 married members by IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, and the site’s own registration data.

The train home is the one part of the week nobody checks. Not the office, where there are colleagues. Not the house, where there is a partner. Just the forty minutes in between, and the hour before it that nobody can account for.

Bosses have spent years ordering people back to their desks, and office attendance is now at its highest in five years. Hardly anyone has gone back five days a week. What most people got instead is a fixed day or two in town, and IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, asked 1,400 married members what that has done to their marriage. 36% said the office day has made arranging an affair easier than it ever was when they worked from home.

Almost none of it happens at work. The office day itself is a day at a desk — what changed is the hours bolted onto either end of it. 52% said the commute is the only part of the week a partner cannot account for, and asked what they actually do with it, two thirds named a drink near the station before the train home. 55% have blamed a train that was late or never turned up.

The site has started calling them rail-mances.

Chris*, 43, from Reading, is in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. “That’s it, that’s the whole arrangement,” he says. “Nobody at home knows what time the 18:42 actually gets in, and nobody has ever checked. I’m not clever about it. I just get the later train.”

The site’s own figures say the same thing. Midweek sign-ups are running 32% above the same period last year, and they peak on Tuesday and Wednesday between five and seven — the two days the offices are fullest, and the two nights a partner is least likely to ask.

Hannah*, 39, from Leeds, goes in on a Tuesday. “My husband thinks Tuesday is my late one. It is a late one. It’s just not late because of work.”

Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert for IllicitEncounters.com, said: “We have started calling them rail-mances, because they nearly all start in the same place — a drink near the station and a later train home. A partner knows what the office looks like and they know what home looks like. They have no idea what the forty minutes in between looks like, and they have never once had a reason to ask.”

She added: “Working from home was terrible for affairs. There was no reason to be anywhere and no gap in the day that anybody could use. A mandated office day hands people back a reason, a postcode and a train time, and that is all anyone has ever needed. The bosses who called everybody back have done more for our business than any advert we have ever run.”

Results

What the office day is used for (of the 36% who say office days have made an affair easier; more than one answer allowed)

Use of the office day% who have used it
A drink near the station before the train home67%
“Working late” on an office day62%
Blaming a delayed or cancelled train55%
A hotel near the terminus40%
Meeting someone who uses the same line31%
Lunchtime, well away from the home postcode25%
Getting an earlier train in17%

*Names have been changed.

About Illicit Encounters

IllicitEncounters.com is the UK’s largest and longest-running extramarital dating site, established in 2004. The site has over one million UK members and publishes regular research on modern infidelity and relationships in Britain, with expert commentary from sex and relationships expert Jessica Leoni.

Press contact: [email protected]

‘We agreed we’d wait until she left’: a quarter of parents say their marriage ends the day their child moves out

Key Findings

·       26% of members with a child leaving home this year say the marriage ends once they go, an arrangement the site has dubbed the ‘empty-nest pact’.

·       Of those, 58% say it was agreed more than five years ago, and 21% put it at more than a decade.

·       Sign-ups from members aged 45 to 54 are forecast to rise 39% across September, against the August average.

·       The results come from a poll of 1,600 members by IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, and the site’s own registration forecasts.

The cars have been loading since the start of the month. By the beginning of October most of this year’s students will be living somewhere else, in a city their parents will from now on only visit. For a quarter of those parents, according to new research, that is also the week the marriage ends.

IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, has started calling it the empty-nest pact: an agreement to stay together until the youngest has gone, sometimes said out loud and more often not.

The site polled 1,600 members who are parents. Of those with a child leaving home this year, 26% said the marriage would end once the child had gone.

Very few described it as a recent decision. Of the parents who reported such an arrangement, 58% said it had been agreed more than five years ago, and 21% put it at more than a decade. That is half the child’s life.

Asked what had kept them going in the meantime, 63% pointed to shared logistics rather than affection: the school run, the fixtures, the holidays that only really work with two adults in the house.

The finding lines up with separate research by Direct Line, which found that 22% of parents had stayed in a relationship longer than they wanted to for the sake of their children, and that those who did stayed an extra five and a half years on average. IE’s members date the pact at more than five years old.

Mothers were more likely than fathers to say it had been discussed out loud, at 34% against 19%. Fathers described something both of them understood and neither had said.

The site’s own figures point the same way. Sign-ups from members aged 45 to 54 are forecast to rise 39% across September, against the August average. The sharpest days are Sundays, once the parents have driven home.

Helen*, 49, from Sheffield, joined in the week after she drove her daughter to Leeds. “We’d said it out loud once, about eight years ago, and then we never mentioned it again,” she says. “It wasn’t a row. We both just knew. I’d driven back on my own, made a cup of tea, and that was that.”

Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert for IllicitEncounters.com, said: “We can almost set our watch by this one. It’s every September, without fail, and parents join to tell us they’ve been counting down since the child was in Year 9. There’s no crisis and no big row. They’ve just reached the end of an agreement they made a very long time ago.”

She added: “I’ve had this conversation with more parents than I could count, and what still surprises me is how calm they are about it. Nobody’s shouted. Nobody’s stormed out. They’ve packed the car, put the shelves up in halls, driven home and then sat down to work out who’s moving where. If you want to know how long a marriage has really been over, ask when the youngest started secondary school.”

Results

What has kept the marriage going until now (of those with an empty-nest pact; respondents could select more than one)

Reason given% of those with an empty-nest pact
Shared logistics: school run, fixtures, holidays63%
Not wanting to disrupt exams54%
The cost of running two households47%
Keeping the family home until they leave41%
What extended family would say28%
Still being friends24%
Hoping it would improve on its own19%

*Name has been changed.

About Illicit Encounters

IllicitEncounters.com is the UK’s largest and longest-running extramarital dating site, established in 2004. The site has over one million UK members and publishes regular research on modern infidelity and relationships in Britain, with expert commentary from sex and relationships expert Jessica Leoni.

Press contact: [email protected]

57% of married Brits say the club football season does more damage to their relationship than a summer tournament, and this year there is no break until the end of September

Key Findings

  • 57% of married Brits say the club football season does more damage to their relationship than a summer tournament does.
  • Of that group, 72% say the difference is that a tournament ends and the league season does not.
  • Female sign-ups on a Saturday afternoon run 29% higher on a fixture weekend than on an international-break weekend, peaking between five and six.
  • The results come from a poll of 2,400 married members by IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site.

One of the busiest hours of the week for women looking for an affair is five to six on a Saturday afternoon. That is full time for a three o’clock kick-off. The football is back, and this year it does not stop. There is no international break until 26 September, and the league season runs to May.

IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, polled 2,400 married members about the return of the league season. 57% say the club season does more damage to their relationship than a summer tournament does. Women said so more often than men, at 64% against 50%.

Hours are not really the issue. Of the 57%, 72% put it down to the open end of the thing: a tournament finishes in July, while the league season runs through to May, with thirty-three match weekends in it and five midweek rounds on top.

48% say plans are now built around the fixture list, weddings and birthdays included, and 43% say football has taken midweek as well now that cup ties and European nights sit alongside the Saturday routine. 22% of all those polled have already argued about football in the two weekends since the season started.

38% say the other half of it is that nobody treats the league season as an occasion. A tournament is something the whole country knows is on, and being sidelined by it at least comes with a bit of sympathy attached. Nobody is sympathetic about a wet Saturday against Coventry, and nobody thinks to ask how she is getting on with it either.

The site’s own figures point the same way. Female sign-ups on a Saturday afternoon, between three and six, run 29% higher on a fixture weekend than on an international-break weekend, which are the only weekends inside a season that carry no club football.

The effect is strongest in cities where a fixture takes up the middle of a Sunday. This weekend Everton play Manchester United at two o’clock and Arsenal play Chelsea at half four, so Manchester, Liverpool and north London all lose the same afternoon. The Manchester derby falls inside the same run on 13 September, and with the September and October international breaks merged into one, five match weekends now follow each other from the opening day.

Rachel*, 41, from Nottingham, joined in the second week of the season. “In the summer I kept telling myself it was four weeks and then we’d get back to normal. We never got back to normal. It just turned into Saturdays instead. Same thing, except now there’s no date in the diary where it stops. That’s when I started messaging someone. I just wanted somebody to talk to on a Saturday afternoon.”

Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert for IllicitEncounters.com, said: “Every summer tournament I’ve worked through here, and there’ve been a lot of them now, we get a spike and then it settles down in July. That’s the bit people forget. The league season never settles down. It starts in August, it’s still going in May, and nobody hands you a date when it finishes.”

She added: “The women contacting us this week are describing an ordinary Saturday rather than a crisis. He’s in front of the football from lunchtime, the phone’s going with the group chat, and by the time the results are in nobody’s asked them a single question all afternoon. The fixture list gives them nothing back this year either. There’s no break until the end of September, so that’s five weekends of it in a row. That’s long enough to make anybody open an app.”

Results

What makes the club season harder than a tournament (of the 57% who say it does more damage; respondents could choose more than one)

What partners say the problem is% who name it
A tournament ends. This one runs until May72%
Plans have to be built around the fixture list48%
It is midweek as well now, not just Saturdays43%
Nobody treats it as an occasion, so there is no sympathy for it38%
The club results matter to him more than England’s did33%
His mood after a club defeat is worse than after an England one30%
The cost of the subscriptions16%

*Name has been changed.

About Illicit Encounters

IllicitEncounters.com is the UK’s largest and longest-running extramarital dating site, established in 2004. The site has over one million UK members and publishes regular research on modern infidelity and relationships in Britain, with expert commentary from sex and relationships expert Jessica Leoni.

Press contact: [email protected]