My wife and I have been together for 13 years, and our sex life is basically nonexistent. She was always very conservative about what she would do, but she has serious chronic health problems so even straight intercourse is now rare (less than 20 times in the past 3 years). She’s an excellent housewife who takes excellent care of me and my son, and I love her and would never want to hurt her. But I do need sex, and if I bring it up she says it’s because I watch too much porn. So I decided to see an escort and found one I think I’ll like, but what if I become addicted to seeing escorts? I searched the internet and found that this can be a scary addition that can cause a marriage to crumble. How can I know if I’ll be addicted or not?
Your situation is not at all unusual. Though there are various reasons for it and various degrees of the problem, the basic situation (husband wants more and better sex than wife will give) is so common it probably accounts for the majority of sex workers’ business and I’ve written about it six times in just over a year: “The Twig is Bent”, “Fossil”, “Familiarity Does Its Thing”, “On a Mountaintop”, “Late Bloomer” and “There Ain’t No Bad Guys” all contain advice that you may find useful, but it’s clear that you also feel guilty about getting your needs met. If your wife said, “if you wouldn’t look at food on TV you wouldn’t need to eat,” you’d recognize this as a patent absurdity, yet our culture tries to convince people this is true of sex; the myth of “sex addiction” is part of that attempt. It is impossible to get “addicted” to escorts, just as it’s impossible to be “addicted” to sex or porn (and if you don’t believe me, click on those 7 links). It’s certainly possible to become obsessed with seeing escorts, because people can become obsessed with anything from stamps to television shows to policing other people’s sex lives. But if you don’t have a history of becoming obsessed with things, you needn’t worry that it will suddenly happen now. Escorts are not witches with the ability to enchant you with a kiss; we’re just ordinary women providing a service. So unless you’ve had problems with spending too much money on liquor or cigarettes or gambling or DVDs or strippers or whatever in the past, I sincerely doubt you’ll run yourself broke with escorts. Once you see a few you’ll be able to determine how often you need it and how much you can afford, and then as long as you’re careful you might actually find (as so many men have before you) that seeing sex workers saves your marriage rather than endangers it.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
