I recently started dating an escort that I’ve been seeing professionally for a while, but I found out that all of her escort friends are warning her away from me. Why are they so skeptical about my feelings toward her?
Relationships with escorts are fraught with complications for a number reasons, including but not limited to:
- Clients trying to get free sex by promising “love”, just as men have done to amateur women for millennia;
- Clients who are turned on by whores qua whores, and not really attracted to the women as individuals;
- Guys who really think they love a whore, but are not prepared for the social stigma or the burden of having to keep her secret from employers, family, friends, etc;
- Men who really are in love with whores, but let jealousy destroy the relationships;
- Men who fancy themselves pimps and try to manage their girlfriends’ work, even to the point of abusive and controlling behavior;
- Boyfriends or husbands who demand that the sex worker give up her work and either become economically dependent (“barefoot and pregnant”) or go to work in a shitty non-sex “straight” job that will wear her down;
- Clients who think they’re in love with a woman, but are actually just infatuated with her business persona;
- Guys who imagine that sex workers’ sex drives are higher than those of amateur women, or that they’re always more open-minded about preferences and kinks that they’re not being paid to indulge.
Those last two are probably the most insidious, because they may be hard for either party to tell apart from real affection and only reveal themselves once the couple is cohabiting and he discovers that he doesn’t like her relaxed, yoga-pants-wearing, housework-hating, menstruating, bad-hair-day-having, moody, personal-problem-suffering, family-drama-experiencing, opinion-expressing, not-always-in-the-mood, idiosyncratic self. And this is just a start; if I sat here for a while I could probably think of half a dozen more, and I invite sex workers to include others in the comments. I’m not saying a relationship with a sex worker is impossible; most of us do indeed have intimate partners, most of whom are male and some fraction of whom were formerly clients. But there are special difficulties inherent in such relationships that require patience, wisdom and love to overcome or circumvent, and because several of those only apply to partners who started as clients, many sex workers are of the opinion that it’s better to minimize problems by eliminating those potential avenues of difficulty through the strategy of never, ever becoming emotionally involved with clients in the first place.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)