Would you give up escorts...

[foxy]

I'm on a roll here. Does Rick Munroe's boy friend Derrick think he's cheating when he sees a client? I would suppose not since it's business and all upfront and doesn't threaten their relationship. Can us regular folks have that same sense of security in our personal lives? Does an escort ever worry about these things if he's in a realtionship? Where does one draw the line?

[foxy]

if you found the man of your dreams? I suppose what I'm asking is, is monogomy something you could be happy with? Can one man satisfy all your desires? My suspician is that men, gay or straight, have this need for variety in their sex lives. I think escorts go a long way in fufilling that need. We all know, at least in most cases, there is no real emotional involvement in sex with escorts. Chances are they aren't going to fall in love with us and any emotional attachement we might have is usually one sided. Anyone who is honest with himself will know this relationship does not have a future. It's a business relationship. I don't think that's a bad thing as long as everyone knows the score. But back to my original question. Is one man enough for you, even if he's "perfect"?

[Guest pokes]

I have since I met the man I love now and would not hire again as long as we are together. Unfortunately, I may be back out on the streets (so to speak). He has moved away and wants to marry and have children. I think it is critical for a relationship to survive that both parties be completely faithful to each other unless before making the commitment it is agreed otherwise. True Love takes the desire for anyone else from your psychy. I am currently in that mode, so it will still be a while before I could be with anyone else. Hopefully, time will cure me.

[Guest JON1265]

Great question and there really is no "right" answer.

 

I would like to think (as would my shrink) that if, and when, I fall in love again I would not desire the need for escorts. But I also know that I am a highly sexual person and have always enjoyed multiple sex partners. I think in the "newlywed" phase of a relationship - the sex is intense and hot - and one feels at that point that no one else is required. Those feelings change over the years I believe. Not necessary the love - but the lust diminshes - and some spice is required.

 

Ideally I would love to find a partner who would love to play with others - but be emotionally attached to me and vice versa. I am sure many couples maintain that balance - but I am not sure what the toll is down the road.

 

I guess anything is possible.

[OneFinger]

My answer is YES and NO.

 

I feel it would be morally wrong for me to hire an escort for myself if I'm in a committed relationship. However, I do not think it is "wrong" to hire an escort for a three-way. But, I would never see an escort without my lover.

 

Several years ago I was in a committed relationship with a man that was very well endowed. He loved to fuck but it was very difficult for me to accomodate him. We found that his needs could be satisfied by hiring a willing bottom. He'd take the back door while I serviced the front and we had a great time. :9

[tedbear]

I think if I had a faithful, loving partner, that would satisfy my needs beyond any yearnings for anything else.

[Jeff]

Same here.

 

Jeff

[+ glutes]

As a sexually charged individual, I don't think so. I could be with Cruise, Damon or that pure 'chunk - a - hunka' in SpiderMan, think I would stray. And for the sexual component, not the emotional. That is what makes escorts so great!!!!

[foxy]

So do you think that seeing an escort, someone you pay for sex is the same as picking up someone in a bar for sex, and could potentially have a relationship with, all come under the heading of "cheating". Are they both an equal threat to the "sanctity" of "marriage"? Sorry for all the quotes, but we're dealing in grey areas. Or are we? Maybe this is a whole other post. Are there some things sexually that threaten a relationship and others that don't, just because they have no future? If I found out my boyfriend was seeing an escort would I feel the same if I found out he was seeing "another guy". More quotes, sorry. I think I would feel less threatened by an escort knowing it was "just sex". Personally, I think there's a distinction, but perhaps I'm just rationalizing. Cheating is cheating, or is it....?

[Guest]

>Is one man enough for you,

>even if he's "perfect"?

 

No guy is even close to being perfect. Nevertheless, I've been in relationships with some hot men, and during those periods of time have not felt the desire for sex with other guys. It's been a while since I've been in a relationship, and I'm starting to wonder if I should just settle on someone who's just nice and not necessarily really hot, and then have some nooky on the side...

[Guest RushNY]

Yes and did as other people have posted i think it's more about the individual then a generalization,for me after 9 years of hiring escorts a couple of times a month in cities all across the USA,when i met my BF and decided he was the one for me the idea of monogomy became the right thing to do.

 

Personally it would feel like cheating if i hired whilst still in a relationship and he is too sure about escorts,even after nearly 3 years he doesnt get the paying for sex thing but to be honest i wouldnt want anyone else,i love him and dont want anyone else mind you if he changes his mind....:9

 

And as i say on a regular basis to him and he agrees..there's no harm in looking.Its not the same for everyone and i wouldn't expect it there are people gay and straight that think monogomy is a type of wood !!!:+

[Guest JustANametoPlay]

I have always defined cheating as doing something without your partners knowledge/OK. If somones partner is OK with them having sex with others then it isn't cheating.

 

For me, I couldn't handle an open realtionship, just isn't something I would want to do. Maybe I am petty but I wouldn't be that secure.

[+ Axiom2001]

I agree with Jon, Foxy, and a few others who wrote! Therefore, I shall not reiterate their thoughtful and sensible sentiments!

[Will]

This is a really interesting question and I'm enjoying reading the responses. I'm not ready to write one myself, yet, but a cognate question comes to mind. This is something I've been thinking about lately -- a lot -- and I sort of toss it out here to stimulate more responses to this thread. Sorry if it's a little long, but I'll be as concise as I can manage:

 

We all know from our experience of parents, siblings, friends and even pets that "love" and "sexual desire" can be very different and even unconnected experiences. How many times have you lusted for somebody without even knowing his name? Can you say that is "love"? How many times have you thought what it would be like to have sex with your best friend? Can you say you felt "lust"?

 

While it's true that most people want to have an intimate emotional and psychological relationship with the person they most desire sexually, do the two things -- love and desire -- grow and mature at the same rate? Do I actually know you better the more sexually attracted I feel to you? If I get to know and even love you intimately, does that mean that I'll be sexually attracted to you?

 

If we really love each other, will our sexual desire for each other increase over the years, just as our intimacy does?

 

So I guess I am making a response here after all. It seems to me that we all want the security of a committed sexual relationship, that is, the knowledge that we are chosen and that the choice is somehow inviolable.

 

I know gay couples who have lived in what they say is absolute fidelity for years. I have no reason to doubt their word. But frankly, I don't think that's often possible for two men. It may be possible for a man/woman relationship, and certainly it is for a woman/woman relationship. But I really do believe that men are hard-wired to seek multiple sex partners, and that it puts intolerable stress on a deeply loving and committed relationship to hold it hostage to some arbitrary law of "absolute physical fidelity."

 

I agree with those who say that it's up to the individual couple to work out their own ways to cope with this issue.

[Will]

I forgot to add a comment relative to escorts: The relationship between love and sexual fidelity is also determined by what one thinks is the purpose of sex. If it's only for the mutual giving and receiving of love or for procreation, I can see an argument for absolute fidelity. But if sex means other things, in addition to the bonding agent of a relationship such as recreation, what place does the rubric of absolute fidelity leave?

 

I think an escort could save a relationship. Escorts offer all of the pleasures of sex with none of the dangerous emotional entanglements that so often accompany it when the partners require that it be accompanied by emotional love and intimacy. That isn't to say that there can be no love in an escort-client relationship. Those of us who enjoy friendships in such relationships know perfectly well that a great deal of genuine love can exist between client and escort. It's just not (thank God) romantic love.

 

Sometimes I think that the world might have been an easier place to live in, emotionally anyhow, before they cooked up the idolatry of romantic love in the eighteenth century and then convinced us all that we couldn't live without it.

[+ Charlie]

I think Will's comment about romantic love is the answer. We are all raised in a culture that conditions us to believe that romantic love is the answer to all our needs. Most men, however, experience sexual desire for men or women who are total strangers, and often lose sexual desire for partners who are familiar. Women, on the other hand, apparently experience sexual desire differently. The propaganda about love and marriage seems to be based on a woman's perspective, because it is that approach which is necessary for the building of an organized civilization. Promiscuity=rebellion. So call me a rebel, because I will never give up sex with strangers, especially escorts (the most attractive strangers), even though I have been in a happy committed emotional relationship for more than 30 years.

[Guest scrtlovr]

As someone said in a previous post, there is no right or wrong answer. I've been in a committed relationship for several years now. I love my partner and will probably stay with him for good. HOWEVER, I also love hiring escorts - for variety, because of midlife crisis, whatever - and I think it is the (emnotionally) safest way to have sex outside marriage. I could never have an affair - just too damn complicated for one thing and the lying and the deceit, it's just not my style... Whereas with hiring the occasional escort, nobody gets hurt. Escort gets a little richer, I get a little less horny and my lover doesn't feel threathend that I'm having sex with another man. Obviously the rule applies to both of us. If he wants a younger, firmer, harder body for a couple of hours.... But in the end, we always trust in our love.

:-)

[Will]

"We are all raised in a culture that conditions us to believe

that romantic love is the answer to all our needs. The propaganda about love and marriage seems to be based on a woman's

perspective, because it is that approach which is necessary

for the building of an organized civilization.

 

"Promiscuity=rebellion."

 

I'm right with you, Charlie. I think there's plenty of evidence that the ideology of romantic love grew up as part of the eighteenth-century bourgeois notion of domestic (translate: economic) stability. While it certainly wasn't invented by women, who were hardly in a position to invent and impose anything at that time, it does put the highest possible premium on the man's desire to know that his wife's children are also his and the woman's desire to know that her husband won't abandon her along with his children. The doctrine of physical fidelity has very little to do with free and voluntary acts of love, it seems to me.

[Guest Tampa Yankee]

>if you found the man of your dreams?

 

Definitely.

 

This question goes beyond escorts to include casual relationships as well.

 

Physical lust is great }> It is a temporary but recurring itch that wants to be scratched and it afflicts most of us. A truly intimate shared life experience between two men addresses emtional needs that are longterm and in some instances life-long. Not all men seem to posses these emotional needs. It is my overly broad conjecture (and an ovbious one) that those who seek and sustain longterm emotional relationships are primarily givers while those who engage almost exclusively in recurring short term/multiple affairs are primariy takers in relationships.

 

Then again, maybe this is just late-night BS.

[+ Charlie]

What about those who do both? An ability to sustain a long term emotional relationship and a desire to have one night stands are not mutually exclusive. The assumption that a fulfilling emotional relationship automatically eliminates the desire--or need--for other kinds of relationships, including playful sex with virtual strangers, is based on an ideology, not on existential reality. One can choose not to have sex outside of a relationship because one feels that it is not "right" or because one fears that it will damage the relationship (which it very well may, if the partner shares the same ideology), but that doesn't change the fact that one is cutting himself off from other possible kinds of fulfilling experience by doing so. The affection shared between a client and an escort is not valueless simply because it lasts only an hour.

[Guest scrtlovr]

Thank you Charlie!

That's exactly what I was trying to imply in my earlier post. Without wanting to sound arrogant, I know I'm very nurturing to my lover on all levels, but I still love the company of escorts once in a while and I don't feel any less committed to my 9 year relationship because of it...

[Guest BareBoy]

Would the guys who claim they would be faithful to a loving partner for fifty years claiming that they would be happy never to eat anything but caviar, or steak, or any one dish? I'd never have a close relationship with anyone who didn't realise that I need variety in my sex-life (and might like to share it). But it's horses for courses, and if guys can be physically faithful and that's what turns them on, fine!

[Will]

Not only are you a gentleman and a connoisseur of fine animals, Charlie, but you're smart and fearless. If as a young man I had been able to learn and internalize what you said in this post, I think my life might have been immeasurably happier. However, I bought -- hook, line, and sinker -- the ideology of straightdom, which of course has also appropriated the New Testament along with everything else.

 

Just this week I had a long conversation with a very confused and very unhappy eighteen-year-old African American man. He needed to talk because he is being torn limb from limb by his inability to reconcile the homosexuality he fully and frankly acknowledges, on the one hand, and his desire, on the other, to put a check-mark in every one of the perfection boxes he learned in the church he grew up in. He told me, even, that he has been "delivered" of a "spirit of homosexuality," which somebody saw dissolving in the air over his head. He then told me that God has not yet "manifested" the deliverance. When I asked him what that meant, he said that nothing had happened to his homosexual desires. I then observed that one can hardly be healed if one is not sick.

 

That moved the consversation on, of course, to the Bible. When I told him that nobody in the New Testament, Jesus included, thought of marriage as the free choice of two people caught up in romantic love, I thought his eyes were going to pop out. I think he's just as confused as ever, but at least somebody has at last fed him something to chew on that might actually nourish rather than diminish his soul.

[+ Charlie]

I appreciate the compliment. I was raised in the same sort of religion-centered culture, but fortunately it didn't seem to sink in as deep. Also, when I came out to my parents at 19 I was lucky enough to be sent to a psychologist who had the sense to tell me to trust my own feelings about my sexuality, and at 21 to be befriended by someone who constantly challenged me to logically support the platitudes about love and sex that I casually accepted from popular culture, which I found I could not do. Keep up your good work!

[Guest elwood]

Great thread and some very thoughful posts. I too agree that the "romantic love" concept is a relatively recent invention and has decidedly clouded the issues of love, committment, sexual attraction and pleasure. All the "Valentines Day" mush and Hallmark drivel has nothing to do with love. I have lived with the same man for twenty years now and knew him for five years before that. The lust part of our relationship was hot and heavy for those years before we began to share the same house. But that gradually faded and for many many years now there has been virtually no physical relationship, just a deep and abiding friendship and brotherhood. We know each others likes and dislikes and we have a history together which is a major part of each of us.Over the years I have gone into and out of periods of sexual activity and in the past year or so have hired several escorts.Sexual pleasure and fantasy is a part of each of us. Sexual pleasure can certainly enhance and strengthen a relationship early on but it is not the basis for that relationship nor what keeps it going. I feel lucky to have spent my adult life with a wonderful partner..but I have had multiple sexual partners almost none of whom I have had any further relationship with..but several were great people and really could have been friends in other circumstances.I do not view myself as "married" in any sense. That is a cultural-religious-legalism that I simply do not feel applies to our relationship. Our relationship has not been totally smooth either. It has involved many aspects from co-dependency to deep friendship to comfortable habit.