I’ve never been married but the institution looms large in my professional life because it often determines how a client engages with me. My best clients are in long-term, committed marriages. They are respectful of my private life because they have their own; they speak of their wives kindly and often have no desire to push boundaries because they have too much to lose. Often, they see me because they are seeking something fetishist or kinky that their wife would not be interested in, or because they and their wife no longer have sex. In some cases, their wife has even encouraged them to seek sex elsewhere.
My arrangements with men like this can go on indefinitely. For the sake of my own finances, I hope that they never get divorced. When they do, they usually begin to shop around for serious dating prospects, and our time must come to an end. This is either because he wants to be with me and I reject him, or because he ends up seeing a potential partner and wants to try monogamy with her. Or he doesn’t need my services during the honeymoon period of a new relationship.
Another common type of client is a man who instigates a professional relationship with me just after he has gone through a divorce. These are usually men who haven’t engaged in paid sex during their marriage and have likely been sexually monogamous with their wives. I am simply filling a temporary spot in their life until they begin seriously dating again. These men are not long-term clients, though they may be regular clients for a time—seeing me for between six months and two years till they settle down again. Sometimes they do cycle back a few years down the track if they go through another breakup. I become, quite organically, the go-to rebound.
Then there are those who have never been married or divorced, either because they are too young, are perceived as undesirable in some way or are “confirmed bachelors”, if I may borrow that term without the connotation of homosexuality. The first of these tends to be quite a casual client, not demanding much beyond time and attention in the room itself, as they are not yet at a stage where they want a girlfriend. With the second I can sometimes find myself in slightly dangerous territory, as they may project their wishes and desires for a relationship onto me. The third are often the most chaotic. If they are serial bookers of sex workers, they fluctuate between girls and desires, expressing vacillating passions and promises that I can only assume they express with the women they engage with outside of sex work too.
Of course, there are plenty of other things that impact the way a client treats me, such as addiction or disability or class. But after more than 11 years in the industry, marital status is one of the strongest predictors of how things will pan out. It tends to have a bearing on whether my client will be long-term or a one-off, whether he’ll harass me over text or be entirely considerate, or whether he’ll struggle to stay hard with a condom. The tropes of the amoral cheater and the pathetic divorcee are, I suspect, what people most associate with the clients of sex workers. And it is true that there are archetypes among our client bases. However, they are neither as simplistic nor as sad as people imagine. I see them in a more practical and personal way.
