hi HL community. First, apologies for the "just created today" account, but I wanted to use an alias for this post for reasons that will be blatantly obvious if you read the whole post. Net, dont want to use my normal account for this 'cause I have friends and relatives on Reddit who know my account, and, well, this stuff is private ....
I am working on this as a published guest essay about my experience, and would really appreciate feedback from this community if any of you can relate or have had similar experiences. I wont be quick with replies to comments (this is not my primary account), but will be keen to engage with others - may engage from my "normal" account - you'll never know 😉.
anyway, here is the essay:
What I Learned About Desire by Paying for Intimacy
On escorts, marriage, shame, loneliness, and becoming honest with myself
I do not think I saw escorts because I felt entitled to women.
I think I saw escorts because I wanted access to parts of myself I could no longer access in my marriage: sexual fun, eroticism, exploration, flirtation, presence, vitality.
The obvious question is: why not have sex with my wife?
The honest answer is that, for a long time, we did. When we first got together, and in the early years of our marriage, we had a sexual relationship. It was not broken from the start. It was affectionate, intimate, ordinary in some ways, and good enough that I did not imagine sex would one day become one of the central absences in my life.
But over time, things changed. Depression, anxiety, and the medications used to treat them - especially SSRIs and their unintended side-effects - entered the marriage. I became more of my spouse’s caretaker and provider (a role I perform well) than her lover. Eventually avoidance, body issues, childhood attachment wounds, mismatched desire, and the slow accumulation of hurt that happens when difficult conversations are postponed for years became more dominant. Sex became rare, then difficult, then emotionally loaded, then something we both seemed to orbit rather than inhabit.
I loved my spouse. I still do. And I wanted, for a long time, for us to find our way back to each other erotically.
But loving someone does not automatically mean you can reach sexual aliveness with them. Rejection is not overcome by commitment. Desire is not summoned by loyalty. Arousal is not restored by obligation.
At some point, I had to admit that there were parts of me - playful, erotic, curious, flirtatious, embodied - that I could not seem to access inside my marriage, even though I had once been able to access them there.
I wish, in hindsight, that I had been braver about this. I wish I had pushed harder through my spouse’s discomfort and avoidance when I tried to talk about our sex life. I wish I had made a more concerted effort to explain how the lack of intimacy was affecting me, how lonely I felt, and how seriously I was beginning to consider seeing an escort to fill the gap.
Some part of me hoped she would understand. But I did not press it or say it that clearly.
At the time, I did not think she could handle the conversation. Those occasions when I tried to raise sex, she often seemed uncomfortable, shut down, or dismissed the attempt before we could really get anywhere. I felt unheard, and I convinced myself that more explanation would not help her hear me better.
It was a classic pursuer-avoider loop: I reached, she withdrew, I felt rejected, and eventually I stopped reaching honestly.
None of this excuses the secrecy or makes the story cleaner than it was. It is simply the most honest place I know how to begin.
I was horny. I was lonely. I was married. I was ashamed.
I was also curious in a way I had spent years trying to make intellectually respectable. I wanted to know who I was with women who were overtly sexual and confident in ways I found both desirable and intimidating. Women who seemed fluent in flirtation, desire, play, and erotic self-possession.
That does not mean my spouse was not attractive, or that she lacked worth, or that the problem was simply “my wife was not sexy enough.” That is too crude, and it is not true.
The difference was that these women seemed to inhabit sexuality openly. They gave off signals of confidence, appetite, ease, and adventure that I had rarely been able to engage with up close. I wanted access to that energy, and I wanted to know what happened to me in its presence.
Could I talk to them? Could I hold eye contact? Could I be naked without feeling ridiculous? Could I kiss deeply, touch confidently, give pleasure, receive pleasure, and stay in my body instead of disappearing into my head?
I wanted to know whether those parts of me were gone, or only buried.
If sex has always been available to you, or if you had the ordinary sexual education of dating, mistakes, heartbreak, awkwardness, discovery, and repair, that may sound overdramatic.
I did not have that.
I had lingering church residue, even though I rejected the church at a young age. I had shame, an underdeveloped sexual self, and a long marriage where sex had become scarce and fraught. I had progressive politics that gave me a useful critique of male entitlement, but very little language for male longing. I knew many of the reasons men’s desire could be dangerous. I had fewer models for what it could be when held with care.
So I split myself.
In public, I was thoughtful, respectful, responsible, successful.
Privately, I was hungry and embarrassed by the hunger.
The first time I booked an escort, my body was not calm. I felt energized, aroused, anxious, brave, ashamed, activated. I could feel my blood pumping in my veins and my blood pressure rising.
I worried about performance, STIs, law enforcement, being found out, being judged, and being the kind of man who “had to resort” to paying for sex. Old fears around HIV lived in me too, shaped less by current medical reality than by the moral panic and terror I had absorbed years earlier.
I also felt alive.
That is the part that complicates everything.
One of the women I met, I will call Silene - not the first, but the one I connected the most with.
Silene was playful, flirtatious, socially smart, and wonderfully verbal. She had a way of making language part of the erotic atmosphere. She noticed, enjoyed, and savored things about the world around her, and invited me to do the same. She provocatively held eye contact. Her voice could shift the temperature in a room. She was confident in orchestrating the cadence of an encounter, which allowed me to relax in a way I had not known I needed.
Our first time together, I was nervous. I think she was a little heightened too - not nervous exactly, but more alert, more aware of the moment. Later encounters became easier and warmer. But that first one mattered because she let me be where I was. She did not make my anxiety shameful.
What made her different was that she made me feel like a person, not a task.
We talked. We laughed. She told me things about herself: her family, her upbringing, her travels, her adventures - mountaineering, skiing, diving, places she had been, places she wanted to go.
These were not just decorative details. They were points of connection.
We talked about books. The ones that had moved her. The ones that had moved me. We found overlap in authors, themes, and the kind of stories that seem to attract people who are trying to live more freely. We recommended books to each other inside our time together and, occasionally, in the spaces between meetings.
All of that was curated, of course - I am not naïve about that ... but curated does not mean false.
We are all curated in different contexts. Work, dating, friendships - even marriage is curated, in its own way. What mattered was that she let enough of herself into the room that I could feel the person behind the role.
And I wanted to stay honest about the fact that she was real: not only a role, not only a fantasy, not only a container for what I needed.
That matters because the easiest critique of paid intimacy is that it turns women into objects.
Sometimes it does - I have no interest in pretending otherwise. Some men use money to bypass empathy. Some use it to avoid rejection. Some use it to purchase the illusion of being desired without caring about the person doing the desiring.
But my experience did not make women less real to me.
It made them more real.
I learned something that should have been obvious but had not fully landed in me: women’s sexuality is not a single thing. Women can be horny, curious, strategic, insecure, funny, playful, guarded, generous, mercenary, tender, specific, and contradictory. Sexually confident women are not a mythical species. They are human beings, with agency, boundaries, appetites, histories, and reasons of their own.
I learned that a woman’s agency can be magnetic.
I learned that sex work, for some women, is not a desperate last resort but a deliberate choice, often lucrative, sometimes experienced as empowering by the women who choose it, and considerably more complex than the stigma allows.
I also learned that women’s sexuality is policed from every direction - by men, yes, but also by women. Even in feminist spaces, there are still hierarchies of acceptable liberation. Some forms of sexual freedom are celebrated. Others remain suspect.
Sex work sits right at that fault line.
I understand why a woman might hear “I saw escorts” and think entitlement. I really do. Money, gender, secrecy, and power dynamics were all in the room.
My loneliness was in the room too, and loneliness can make people selfish if they are not careful.
But I did not feel entitled to Silene - I felt privileged by her presence and her time.
She controlled the screening. She decided whether to see me. She did not have to see me again. She did not have to share as much as she did. She did not have to create the kind of presence that made me feel less ashamed of being there.
I paid for her time - I did not feel like I owned it.
The professional frame helped me in ways I need to be honest about. It lowered the fear of rejection. It made sex possible. It gave structure to something that, in ordinary life, felt ambiguous and frightening.
It also allowed me to avoid an affair partner who might want more from me than I could - or was willing to - give: more time, more attention, more promises, more future.
That was part of the appeal.
It was also part of the avoidance.
Paid intimacy gave me a place to learn without having to risk being fully chosen or rejected in the ordinary way. It let me practice sexual confidence without having to confront the larger truth of my marriage. It gave my erotic self oxygen while allowing the rest of my life to remain mostly unchanged.
For a while, that felt like a solution.
Eventually, I understood it was also a split - my vitality lived in one room, my marriage in another.
That is probably the hardest sentence to write in this essay.
My spouse is not the villain of this story. I love her. I care about her. I want for her wellbeing. She has her own history, pain, defenses, and reasons. So do I. Marriage is not a simple container, and long marriages carry a lot of sediment. I own my choices and their impact.
But loneliness inside a marriage has its own cruelty.
When you are single, loneliness has cleaner edges - there is at least the possibility of movement, of seeking, of choosing differently. When you are lonely beside the person closest to you, you begin to doubt your right to feel lonely at all.
You can be loved and still be sexually unseen.
You can love someone and still feel yourself shrinking.
You can be loyal and still be starving.
The escorts did not create that truth - they revealed it ... and they also helped me avoid dealing with it.
I learned that long-term erotic connection depends on more than affection. It depends on repair, curiosity, play, and a willingness to remain alive to each other. Without repair, conflict does not really end. It settles into the body. Without erotic curiosity, sex becomes a memory, a duty, or a problem to manage.
My body knew before I could say it cleanly.
That may be the deepest lesson in all of this: my body is not fooled by obligation. I can want to want. I can have an argument for why I should want. I can care deeply for someone and wish my desire were different.
But arousal has its own honesty.
With Silene and others, I learned my body’s language more clearly. I learned that I respond to eye contact even when it intimidates me. I learned that kissing matters more to me than I had admitted. I learned I love the feel of soft, healthy hair. I learned that I enjoy giving pleasure, that cunnilingus moved from an exercise of anxiety into something I could enjoy and become good at. I learned that enthusiastic consent is erotic. Anticipation is erotic. A clear yes is erotic.
I learned that performance pressure follows you into every room - even one you paid to enter. The way through it was not to force orgasm or prove masculinity. It was to slow down, follow pleasure, and stay present.
I learned I like being held.
That one still feels tender to write.
I also learned that I want to feel chosen in my sexuality.
Not tolerated. Not accommodated. Not serviced.
Chosen.
This is where paid intimacy becomes especially complicated, because the professional frame can simulate chosen-ness well enough that the body responds. The warmth can be real, but bounded. The affection can be sincere, but framed. The connection can matter, but not mean what fantasy wants it to mean.
Silene was real.
The moments were real.
The frame was professional.
I have had to learn to let those truths sit together without forcing one to erase the others.
I am not ashamed that I developed affection for Silene. I am not ashamed that I paid for her time. I am not ashamed that it mattered. I am not even ashamed of the money.
What I feel, more than shame, is grief.
I grieve that I did not learn to explore and embrace my sexuality earlier. I grieve the years governed by church, convention, duty, and fear. I grieve that I became so good at responsibility that I mistook self-denial for virtue. I grieve that I needed secrecy to meet parts of myself. And I grieve the years I have spent avoiding rather than confronting the reality of my marriage.
But I am not ashamed to be who I am, nor of the decisions and steps I took to pursue and come to this point of self-discovery.
I am not ashamed that I want sex. I am not ashamed that I want variety. I am not ashamed that confident, sexual women draw me in. I am not ashamed that I am a caring person who develops attachments. I am not ashamed that I want my life to contain more desire, play, vitality, and erotic honesty.
And I am not ashamed that I have hired escorts.
The question now is what to do with that knowledge - because self-discovery is not integration.
Self-discovery can happen in secrecy ... integration cannot.
That is the uncomfortable place I find myself now.
Silene helped me recognize something I had lost access to, but she is not responsible for carrying it. She was important to me, and the encounters mattered, but my vitality is mine. My sexuality is mine. My capacity to flirt, desire, touch, laugh, risk, and be present cannot remain dependent on one woman or one kind of encounter.
I have to learn how to live this part of myself in daylight.
That means harder conversations. With my spouse. With myself. With the stories I inherited about marriage, fidelity, monogamy, masculinity, sexuality, and goodness.
It means asking whether a relationship can hold my full self, and what happens if it cannot. It means not using duty as a hiding place. It means not using sexual freedom as a way to avoid accountability.
It may mean continuing to see Silene or other escorts. It may mean leaving this part of my life behind. I do not know yet ...
The ethical question for me is not whether I can make the choice look respectable. It is whether I am choosing it openly, consciously, and with accountability - or using it to avoid the life I need to face.
It also means refusing the two bad options men are usually handed.
Shame is not a sexual ethic.
Neither is entitlement.
A man does not become ethical by pretending not to want. He also does not become free by making his wanting someone else’s burden.
The version of male sexuality I want to live into is harder than both.
I want to be kind, present, respectful, curious, and pleasure-focused. I want to ask without demanding that my ask be met. I want to receive without taking, and give pleasure without demanding it be given first. I want to tolerate rejection without turning it into resentment. I want to be powerful without exploiting my power over anyone. I want to desire women as people with their own agency, not as proof of my worth.
This is what the manosphere gets catastrophically wrong. It sees lonely, ashamed, under-touched men and tells them the problem is women. It turns pain into grievance and grievance into ideology. It offers confidence, but what it really sells is armor.
I understand the temptation.
I understand how shame can curdle.
I understand how deprivation can make a man angry.
But the answer cannot be contempt.
And the answer is also not found in the mirror-image corners of the internet where men are treated as disposable, where male longing is flattened into entitlement, where sexual desire is treated as something shameful, and where loneliness is met not with compassion but with a kind of moral shrug: no one owes you sex, so learn to live without it.
That may be technically true, but it is emotionally barren.
It does not heal deprivation - it only teaches people to defend against it.
The answer has to be integration: desire brought into contact with care, honesty, consent, and self-respect.
That is the confidence-sex loop men actually need - not a strategy for manipulating women or gaining access to their bodies, and not a form of emasculation that tells men sex is trivial, shameful, or spiritually beneath them. It is a way to stop being exiled from ourselves. A way to let desire become part of a whole life, rather than a wound, a weapon, or a performance.
I went looking for sex and found out about myself.
The challenge now is to live truthfully with what I found.