I came across this article recently and thought it worth commenting on in the context of my work as a male escort in Sydney, Australia.
The gist of the article is that older women (and also younger generations) are moving away from the model of conventional romantic relationships and instead finding happiness in deeper friendships (possibly with people of the same sex) rather than trying to get that from a romantic relationship.
This is I suspect influenced by changes in social norms and the decline of women’s financial dependence on men. (Many) women no-longer need to be in a relationship with a man to be able to provide for children, or just to get by.
So this opens up the opportunity for women to find different ways of satisfying their emotional needs and according the research quoted in the article many women are doing this through close friendships rather than romantic relationships with men.
I think that on the whole this is a positive thing. It is good to challenge conventional ideas about how we find happiness in life – and realising that it is possible to separate things like emotional fulfillment, intellectual fulfillment/challenge, and sexual fulfillment makes it much, much easier in my opinion to be able to fill your life with those things without being forced to compromise.
I literally see women doing this with my work. Women who have no-sexual relationships with a committed partner come to me for the sex that the relationship doesn’t give them. Others don’t have a committed relationship, but do have a strong friend network who give them emotional fulfillment, but not sex, so they come to me to get the physical intimacy that they don’t get elsewhere.
This isn’t a passing thing either. I have clients who have been coming to me for between five to ten years. So some women really do see my service as a long term part of their lives.
This won’t work for everyone, but I’m glad that sex work is decriminalised (mostly) here in Australia and can therefore help women to create better lives for themselves.
John