The reason I wouldn’t even consider dating the vast majority of my clients isn’t based on their looks or social status or mannerisms. My clients aren’t all men who I would otherwise find ugly or off-putting. The issue is the dynamic that is created by paying me for sex.
Someone who pays me for sex has started our sexual relationship by financially incentivising me to put on an act. I will fake pleasure for the client’s enjoyment, act in ways that do not come naturally to me to make myself more attractive, and avoid giving personal details about myself for safety. If someone falls for that act, he is falling for my physical attributes and a false personality. That’s a terrible foundation for a relationship.
Flaws are hidden from clients as best I can. I smile where I might otherwise frown, dress to attract rather than for my own comfort, and I turn my face to hide winces when my joints ache from the positions a client puts me in. Conversations about my hobbies and life are riddled with inaccuracies and outright lies that make me look good and cover for my chronic executive dysfunction issues. A partner would see me at home in my Star Trek pyjamas and knee braces, stuck in a loop where I try to write and keep getting distracted and then realize it’s 4am and I haven’t eaten since I woke up in the early afternoon. They’d deal with my standoffishness and my hatred for birthdays and my constant failures to reply to texts.
To even begin an honest relationship with someone who was a client, I’d have to correct this false idea that he has of what I’m like before we could go any further. After revealing my true personality and how much I probably disliked the sex, he would then have information which he could potentially share and use to harm me if his ego was bruised by this reveal.
The first time you have sex with a new partner is very unlikely to be mind-blowing sex, which isn’t a big deal if the sex continues to improve as you get to know the other person and their preferences better over time. With paid sex, a precedent is set that the sex worker’s pleasure is at worst irrelevant and at best secondary to the client’s. Correcting this imbalance takes time and effort and will result in a lot of terrible sex in the meantime. Beyond the quality of the sex, the sex worker may experience the sense that they should tolerate sex they don’t want because it’s what they’re used to doing for money. I have enough trouble with this in my personal relationships as it is, without adding the mental fuckery that comes with converting someone from a client to a romantic interest in my mind.
So many of the men who have purchased my time also express feeling an entitlement to sex. Of those who do not, how many are being careful not to share it and burst the bubble of my fake enthusiasm? I can’t be sure that a client asking me out isn’t just a manifestation of that entitlement, believing he shouldn’t have to pay for me to service him sexually. The chances are unbelievably high that he sees dating as a way to get money off of sex I won’t enjoy. At a certain point, it becomes foolish for me to roll the dice on if this particular client might be different from the majority.
If I imagine the rare scenario in which a client’s sexual preferences happen to line up with mine and we have good sex, and his values and politics line up sufficiently with my own to the point that I’m honest about my thoughts during any conversation we have, the client assuming that my responses are genuine would still tell me that he knows very little about the realities of sex work. As a sex worker, this would pose a problem for me in any serious relationship. Too many times I have seen friends date men who think this way and presume sex workers are genuine with our clients, which ultimately leads to them becoming jealous when the sex worker he has feelings for continues to do their job.
Since a client who ends up dating a sex worker they previously paid to see has become an exception, he is likely to feel insecure that his partner might feel the same way about another client in the future. No matter how many times he is told that seeing clients is purely about work, he knows that at least once that wasn’t true. Over time that jealousy grows and turns into suggestions to quit the job that ultimately become huge fights and accusations of cheating. Anyone who dates a sex worker needs to be secure enough not to fall into thought spirals about whether one of our clients that day made us orgasm for real or whether we might have a crush on one of our regulars who financially provides for us.
Beyond these concerns about the viability of a relationship, there is the issue of sharing real personal information with someone who already knows our sex work personas. Revealing my name before a first date could go poorly. I cannot be sure of someone’s intentions prior to getting involved with them more deeply and this puts me in a very vulnerable position. The date would occur with the looming threat that the ex-client might be dissatisfied and decide to connect my real name to my sex worker alias. The alternative is a relationship with someone who doesn’t know me real name, which feels deeply impersonal. It would take a long time to build the necessary trust or to be able to introduce my new partner to my social circle.
I’ve never seen a transition from client to partner go well for a single sex worker I know. I’ve tentatively managed to see a few former clients as fuckbuddies after a period of silence between us, but even then there is a lingering strangeness that I cannot shake from our interactions.
Once we consider these barriers all together, it never seems worth the effort to try dating a client. No matter how charming or attractive I find might a few of them, they started our acquaintance by paying me for sex and that can never be undone.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 