Brits Respond to Record Cold Snap With … Mass Infidelity?

© NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response via BBC

As you may or may not have heard, the UK has reverted to the Ice Age. No kidding. Nature has gone so far as to re-evolve woolly mammoths and unleash them across London, just so something will wander around outdoors. That’s a fact. You can look it up.

Also a fact: Brits, at least when they’re locked up in their homes, tend to let their minds wander to sex. Not like “honey we’re stuck inside with nothing better to do, let’s get randy” sex. More like “I want to bang someone who is neither my husband nor my wife” sex. Popular UK adultery website IllicitEncounters.com is seeing a huge spike in their traffic as the cold snap drags on:

Britons snowed in by the wintry weather have been flocking to an extra-marital dating site in the last 24 hours. IllicitEncounters.com, which provides a platform for married people to conduct affairs, said on Wednesday it has seen an unexpected increase in visitors over the past 24 hours, and received a record number of new profiles on Wednesday morning… “In light of these figures, I’d be interested to see how much work those ‘working from home’ have actually done,” IlicitEncounters.com spokeswoman Sara Hartley said in a statement. “Perhaps these wives and husbands have just been waiting for a time when they could join, away from the eyes of their work colleagues and, most importantly, their partners…”

Isn’t that backwards though? If you’re trapped indoors with your husband or wife, doesn’t that precisely prevent you from surreptitiously joining a cheating site? If the entire country is on lockdown, ya know…?

Are couples just sitting across from each other with laptops and logging into the site? That would make for an admirable number of sociopaths, but again it seems a bit off. In the first place the Brits have a well-deserved reputation for being standoffish but still kind of decent. Even more importantly, that kind of behavior would require Tiger Woods-level nerves, and you just don’t find that kind of talent sprinkled liberally across the public.

Much more likely: people are surfing IllicitEncounters for quick hookups, the assumption being that most customers won’t be looking for long-term relationships. That makes the site a more expensive and less efficient version of Craigslist, with a bunch of extra layers and formalities that have to be attended to before people can get down to business. Now that sounds more like the Britain we know and love.