Married to the marriage wreckers

LIKE many women Kim Scott is proud of her husband’s career achievements – and well she might be.

After all Adam is chief executive of a hugely successful internet business, a job that affords the couple and their 10-year-old daughter a very comfortable lifestyle.

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Yet mixed in with Kim’s pride is a reluctance to discuss Adam’s job in too much detail. Small wonder, given that the business he heads up is called Illicit Encounters, one of a mushrooming breed of tawdry websites for married people wanting to cheat.

“I’d never heard about this sort of website until Adam was headhunted for the role of chief executive three years ago having previously held senior positions in the music and digital media industries,” says Kim, 42, a corporate events manager. The couple live near Whitechapel in London. “Although I wasn’t entirely surprised that they exist, inevitably it threw up lots of questions about human morals and why people would choose to cheat.”

Illicit Encounters was conceived at a dinner party in 2002, the brainchild of computing boss Stephen Lines who has since taken a back seat to Adam. Lines reportedly came up with the idea after he and his wife hosted a dinner and one friend, after too much wine, confessed that the same illness that had kept her husband away from the party that evening had also put paid to their sex life.

She confided she was desperate to get sexual thrills elsewhere without compromising her marriage. It gave Lines the idea to overhaul his ailing mainstream dating website and turn it into a cash cow by facilitating affairs instead.

The website was launched in 2003 and with more than 300,000 members is now the UK’s largest extramarital dating site, spawning a raft of copycat and equally tawdry websites for married people wanting to cheat. They operate in the same way as singles internet dating sites – members pay a hefty sign-on fee, usually in excess of £100 for a two-month period, create profiles for themselves and then connect with other members.

Kim Scott says her husband’s involvement with this industry hasn’t altered her views on infidelity. “We’ve been together for 18 years and married for 12 and I don’t think I could forgive an affair,” she says. “When you marry you form a union with that person and you don’t cheat. I can’t deny though that Adam’s job has opened my eyes to the reasons why people have affairs and it has made me more understanding of some of the triggers.

There are many members on the website who have a disabled or terminally ill partner and they love them dearly but miss a sexual relationship.” What, then, is it like being married to a man who makes a mint from infidelity? It’s difficult to imagine it being a topic Kim waxes lyrical about at dinner parties or within earshot of her daughter.

“Close friends and family know about Adam’s job but if we’re at a drinks party and somebody asks what my husband does I simply say he is CEO of a social networking site. Our daughter is too young to be wondering about the intricacies of adult life. All she knows is that her dad has a great job in the internet.

When she’s old enough we’ll have to find a way to explain what Adam does in a way that doesn’t undermine the morals we’ve taught her. “I detach myself from Adam’s job. It’s business and I don’t feel guilty that his career combined with mine affords us a nice lifestyle.”

Adam’s website carries a warning on its home page: “Not everyone is suited to having an affair,” it reads. “They are not an alternative to working on or ending a marriage. Not all affairs have a positive effect on a marriage – some can be very damaging.”

Denise Knowles is a counsellor with Relate, the marriage guidance experts, and says people should resist the temptation of such websites. “Having a fling with another married person isn’t going to work like a plaster on your marriage,” she says. “My experience of them in my counselling room is that anyone who has used such a website has done so because there is already a crack in the marriage.

It’s that crack they should be focusing on repairing rather than thinking that joining a cheating website is going to solve the problem.” Amelia Smith’s husband Simon, 46, set up rival company loveisthebug.com in 2006, offering basic accessibility for free in the same way that social networking sites like Facebook do.

Though the couple insist they feel no guilt or embarrassment about the site, neither was willing to be photographed for this article. “Affairs have been going on for over 2,000 years,” says a defiant Amelia, 43, a housewife who lives in Guildford, Surrey, with software designer Simon and their nine-year-old daughter.

Neither has committed or been on the receiving end of adultery. “Adultery wouldn’t stop if our website didn’t exist, it just makes it more accessible. It’s a business, it makes us money and who are we to judge the actions of others?”

Despite being defensive of her husband’s website, Amelia admits it doesn’t sit well with her own morals. “I don’t talk openly about what Simon does, especially as you never know what problems people have in their own marriages.

“ People’s reactions ar emixed. Some are slightly open-mouthed but that soon turns to intrigue and a vague sense of bemusement. There are those we deliberately don’t tell such as the parents of our daughter’s friends. I wouldn’t want them or her school to know because I’m certain there would be some who would disapprove.

But cheating happens and it makes some people happy so we’re just capitalising on that.”