A late reply, but I’ve been without internet— and soon will be again. And this thread captures my interest because I over-analyze everything since being “on the spectrum” means, for me, never being sure I’m behaving properly.
I started up with an SB shortly before my travels began this spring, at the end of my crazy April P4P-a-looza, and have had the chance to do a couple of overnights and a day date with her, and at first it did feel awkward knowing she was seeing other guys even though intellectually I couldn’t justify the feeling. One thing that helped was, when we first discussed it, we agreed to be brutally frank regarding the “contract.” Better, we agreed, to manage expectations — both financial and emotional— up front than have complications and hurt feelings down the road. So we talked about the sugar, about the polygamy, about gifts and how they did not in any way stand in for the sugar, and emotions and how they did not affect the sugar, either. I mean, you can’t get more open than that. “We’re going to like each other but this is a business transaction above all.” Go ahead and try to misunderstand that, if you think you can, eh? And there were expectations stated on my side, too, about dates and their frequency and the components thereof, so don’t think it was some bitchy, one-sided thing. On the contrary, we both agreed to all the terms and I feel like that has cleared the way for there to be no need to have any more uncomfortable conversations about “The Deal.”
That said, the first date, an overnight, went so well for me that there was that moment I thought I might get too attached, because as this was my first SB (pretty much... I have sort of an unspoken one in Guam that’s almost too complicated to go into), I was finding myself really into this new opportunity to be more involved than just setting up a cold “appointment” with a lady. I ran around beforehand planning all the details, checking out the hotel, the restaurant, the karaoke room, making sure it would all be perfect, which I stopped doing with my wife because she never finds anything “perfect” or even OK. We went out, we sang, ate, drank, watched a movie in the room... And then awhile later, something just clicked and I was able to compartmentalize it and the idea of losing perspective and getting attached stopped being a problem. It feels now like an open relationship, which was something I’d always been curious about. I love seeing her when I can, we email when we’re apart and I get her goofy stuff when I’m traveling which she accepts gracefully instead of telling me the present sucks and to stop, even when I put her on a train home with two arm loads of crap that reminded me of her. We’ve gone to the beach, to temples, to cute little obscure restaurants, and we’ve watched movies that one or the other of us particularly wanted the other to see. There’s always sex — that was part of the contract — but I’m not counting pops and she’s not watching the clock. And I’m not thinking about her other encounters while I’m with her, unless we’re discussing “the profession” as a topic. Far from being jealous, I sometimes find it fascinating talking about her other encounters (with zero private details about the guys, as she maintains professionalism in that respect) and not in a sexual way... I mean, it’s not a turn-on to me like ‘oh baby, tell me how he did it to you;’ it’s just one of the few conversations that I can have with her and only her, an insider’s discussion of sex work, from a sociological and philosophical standpoint as well as getting insights from her perspective.
If she doesn’t also at least like me as a person, she does a good job pretending — and she’s never been one to really go over the top with the pretending even when we had non-SB P4P encounters before the arrangement. She’s always been pretty WYSIWYG, so there are not these moments where I question her sincerity since she’s never laying it on thick.
So, of course, these things are different for everyone and I did have a moment where I thought I might get attached and where I therefore felt uncomfortable — but that was my caveman instinct trying to rise to the fore. I just had to give it a moment’s thought and say to my brain, “Yo, she’s an escort, Sting; she’s gonna put on the red light so get good with it or get gone.” And as I said, now it makes the relationship kind of more interesting, though TBH that topic has kind of played out and we’re as likely to talk about opening a cafe where the waiters serve cinnamon rolls in bear costumes, or what are the attributes of a really great refrigerator magnet. (And they are legion, these attributes.)
