What the work is really like
Recruitment pages describe travel, money and interesting people. This is the part that decides whether a man is still doing it in two years.
Recruitment pages describe the work as travel, good money and interesting people. None of that is untrue. It is also not the part that decides whether a man is still doing it in two years.
The hours are inconvenient by definition
Bookings happen when clients are free, which means evenings, weekends and the occasional weekday afternoon. Anyone with a conventional job is giving up the time other people use for a social life. Cancellations and last-minute requests are ordinary, and an escort who cannot absorb either will find the work stressful rather than lucrative.
Most of a booking is not sex
A two-hour booking contains conversation, drinks, possibly a meal, reassurance for a nervous client and an unhurried ending. Dinner dates run to four or five hours and are mostly talking. Men who come to the work expecting the reverse ratio find it harder than expected, and clients notice immediately when someone is going through the motions between the parts he is interested in.
The emotional labour is the actual job
A substantial share of clients are booking for reasons that have very little to do with sex: a recent bereavement, the end of a long marriage, a disability that makes ordinary dating difficult, a body they are unhappy with, or simply years without being touched by anyone. Handling that well is what produces repeat bookings and reviews, and it takes something out of a person. Escorts who last are the ones who notice the cost and manage it, rather than the ones who insist it does not exist.
Who books
There is no standard client. Ages run from the early twenties to the sixties, with the thirties and forties slightly over-represented. Some are wealthy, many are on ordinary incomes and have saved for the booking. Most are single; a minority are married or in a relationship. Any account of this work that describes a typical client is describing a fantasy.
Quiet months
The income is not smooth. A good month can be followed by three weeks with nothing, and the quiet periods are where the doubt sets in. This is why treating escorting as a supplementary income works better than treating it as a salary, and why the men who give up other work to do it full time are the ones most likely to stop within a year.
Rejection
Enquiries that go nowhere, clients who book someone else, messages that stop mid-conversation. It is a market, and being passed over is a routine part of it rather than a verdict. Men who take it personally find the first six months unpleasant.
The parts that are genuinely good
They are real and they are worth stating. Control over the diary, in a way almost no employment offers. Money that arrives immediately and in full. A rate set by the person doing the work. Regulars who become genuinely enjoyable company. And an unusual number of conversations with people who are being more honest than they are with anyone else in their life, which a good many escorts describe as the part they did not expect.
Why men stop
Rarely a bad experience. Far more often it is one of three things: the income never became reliable enough to justify the hours, a relationship made it untenable, or the emotional weight accumulated to a point where it stopped being sustainable. All three are foreseeable, and all three are worth thinking about before starting rather than after.
The honest summary: good hourly money, unreliable weekly money, more talking than expected, more emotional work than expected, and a degree of control over working life that very little else offers. Men who want that trade tend to do well. Men who want easy money do not.