Key findings
- 38% of members say they have had a relationship outside their marriage that never became physical, conducted entirely through messages, voice notes and calls. The site has dubbed it the ‘pod affair’.
- They are not brief. Those relationships ran for an average of eleven months, and 29% lasted more than two years.
- 44% of that group would call it cheating. 78% say their partner would. That gap is the argument most of them are dreading.
- 61% say it did more damage than a one-night stand would have, because there was more of it and it was harder to explain away.
- The results come from a poll of 2,000 members by IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site.
Love Is Blind UK returns to Netflix on Wednesday, and the premise is the same as it has always been. Strangers talk to each other through a wall for days on end, with no face, no photograph and no touching, and some of them come out the other side saying they are in love. It is presented as a stunt. New research suggests a version of it is going on in a very large number of British marriages already.
IllicitEncounters.com, the UK’s leading extramarital dating site, polled 2,000 of its members. 38% said they had been in a relationship outside their marriage that never once became physical. No meeting, no hotel, nothing that would show up on a bank statement. The site has started calling it the pod affair.
They tend to run for a long time. The average was eleven months, and 29% went on for more than two years. Most were conducted in writing, with 71% saying the bulk of it happened in messages and voice notes rather than on the phone or on video.
The most striking finding is the disagreement about what it even is. 44% of the members who had one would describe it as cheating. Asked what their partner would say, 78% thought their partner would call it cheating. Almost twice as many people expect to be judged for it as judge themselves.
And they do not think it was the softer option. 61% said it had done more damage than a one-night stand would have done, on the grounds that there was simply more of it, it went on for longer, and there was no version of events in which it could be written off as a mistake on one particular night.
Nadia*, 41, from Bristol, messaged the same man every day for over a year and never met him. “It started because we were both awake at half six and neither of us wanted to be,” she says. “It was nothing, really. What we’d watched, his mother, my knee. Then one morning I told him my scan results before I told my husband, and I sat there looking at the message thinking, that is not a friend. I have never once been in a room with him. I would still know his voice anywhere.”
Jessica Leoni, sex and relationships expert for IllicitEncounters.com, said: “Everybody is about to watch a programme where people fall in love through a wall, and half the country will talk about it like it is a gimmick. It is not. We have members who have carried on for a year with somebody they have never once been in a room with. No hotel, no meeting, nothing you could photograph.”
She added: “Twenty-two years I have been doing this, and the ones who get caught this way take it hardest. There is nothing to point at. No receipt, no hotel bill, no lipstick on anything. Just eleven months of voice notes and the fact that he told her things first. Try explaining to a wife that nothing happened. She has read it. She knows exactly what happened.”
Results
What made it stop feeling like a friendship (of the 38% who had a screen-only relationship; respondents could select more than one).
| What crossed the line | % |
|---|---|
| Telling them something before telling my partner | 74% |
| Messaging first thing in the morning and last thing at night | 66% |
| Deleting the conversation | 57% |
| Talking about my marriage to them | 49% |
| Saving them under a different name | 35% |
| Making plans we both knew would not happen | 23% |
*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]
