What men really want - my intimate observations

This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?

I hold a vantage point few people ever have. Hundreds of hours spent with men in contexts where the masks slip - not all of them, not entirely, but enough to see things their colleagues, their wives, their friends never see. What I’ve learned about men in this profession goes far beyond what I could have learned in any other setting. And the main conclusion is this: what they truly want is almost always simpler - and more touching - than what they ask for.

I'll be direct from the outset: this article is not a list of fantasies organised by category. There will be another one for that - the chapter on fantasies, what they have concretely asked me for, the elaborate scenarios, all of that. What I want to talk about here is something else. What I observe beneath the surface of requests. What men are truly looking for when they call someone like me, often without being able to explain it to themselves.

Because in the vast majority of cases, it is not what people think.

Being Seen - Truly Seen

The thing that comes up most often, in very different forms, is a need for visibility. To be seen as a complete individual, not as a role.

These men spend their days being the director, the husband, the father, the executive, the expert. Each of those roles implies an expected way of being, a constant social performance. With me, there is no expectation of that kind. I am not their colleague judging them on their performance. I am not their wife who has known them for twenty years and has her own needs and grievances. I am someone new, someone who looks at them without the weight of shared history.

That creates a particular freedom. And many men, in that space, reveal themselves in ways they never allow themselves elsewhere. Not necessarily in a sexual sense - sometimes simply in a human one. They talk about doubts they never voice at home. They confess exhaustion, fears, ambivalences. A man who manages two hundred people can sink slightly into a hotel armchair and say he no longer quite knows why he does any of it. That moment of truth has nothing sexual about it. But it is at the heart of why he is there.

Being Desired - Not Just Tolerated

Second observation, and this one moves me more because it says something sad about many couples: these men have often lost, within their marriages, the feeling of being desired. Not loved - love can linger long after desire has gone. But physically desired, looked at with want, wanted for their body and not only for what they represent or provide.

When I receive a man and show him - sincerely, not performatively - that his presence affects me, that his body interests me, that I am glad to be there with him specifically, the effect this has is sometimes out of proportion to the gesture. Men of fifty who are accustomed to controlling everything become almost vulnerable in the face of it. As though one were offering them something they had stopped hoping for.

I don't perform this desire. That is important to clarify. I don't see someone if I don't think I'll be capable of being genuinely present. But I am also honest about the fact that this desire, even when real, is made easier by the context - by the absence of shared daily life, by novelty, by all those factors that make desire easier to feel. That is not a flaw in the arrangement. It is simply its nature.

The Surrender of Control

This one took me a while to truly understand. Because on the surface, many of my clients give the impression of wanting to be in control - they choose the hotel, they set the time, they arrive with an idea of how the evening will go. And it's true that they enjoy having that kind of control, over the logistics, over the setting.

But in the room, once the evening is underway, what many of them are actually seeking is precisely the opposite. They want someone to take the reins. To decide. To guide them without their having to ask. This isn't about domination in the fantasy sense - though it can be that too. It is more fundamental than that. It is the exhaustion of deciding. These men make decisions all day, often all their lives. For a few hours, no longer having to decide - even about intimate things, even about their own pleasure - is a profound relief.

I have learned to sense this early in an evening and to adapt what I do accordingly. Men who need someone to take the initiative - I take the initiative. Those who need to feel they have the upper hand - I let them believe they do while subtly steering things. In both cases, I am the one driving. The difference is simply that they don't always see it.

Tenderness - The Most Unspoken Need

This one, men never ask for directly. Never. That would mean admitting something they are not ready to admit. Yet it is perhaps what comes up most often, in disguised forms.

A man who, after making love, lies still without speaking and rests his hand on my arm for no apparent reason. A man who asks whether I want to stay a little longer, not for that, just to stay. A man who asks whether I'm doing well and genuinely waits for the answer. These are requests for tenderness. For simple human contact, without agenda, without performance.

I have a client I've been seeing for two years - let's call him René, sixty-one, widowed four years ago, someone who lacks nothing financially and who would manage perfectly well socially if he chose to. He comes to see me once a month. The evening always goes well. But what I believe he is truly seeking is the twenty minutes afterwards, when we talk about nothing in the dark and he is no longer alone in his apartment at the far end of the world.

That is not sad. I refuse to see it as sad. It is human, it is real, and if I can offer that to someone who needs it, then those twenty minutes have as much value as everything else.

The Men Who Cry

It happens. Not often - perhaps ten times in four years. And each time, it is unexpected, never predictable in advance.

It is never during. It is always after - in that moment of post-intimacy release when the defences are still low and something surfaces that had no place elsewhere. A grief unprocessed. A relationship ending. A loneliness that spills over at the wrong moment.

The first time it happened, I was twenty-four with a year in the profession. A man in his fifties, someone I didn't know well, who had begun to cry silently and took several seconds to notice it himself. I had a moment of inner panic - what do I do, what do I say - and then something more instinctive took over. I placed my hand on his shoulder and waited without saying anything.

He apologised, of course. Twice. I said there was nothing to apologise for. And I meant it.

Those moments taught me something important: in this profession, one is sometimes the only safe space a man has to set down something he has been carrying for too long. Not because one is a therapist - I am not a therapist and I don't play at being one. But because one is someone external, someone who won't speak of it, someone who has no expectations about who he should be.

That is a responsibility I take seriously.

What They Don't Want Me to Be

Just as instructive as what they seek: what they don't want to find.

They don't want someone who fakes everything. False enthusiasm is visible immediately and creates an irreparable distance. They don't want an overly self-effacing presence either - someone who agrees with everything, has no opinion, doesn't really exist. Paradoxically, the men who come to see me want someone with character. Someone who can contradict them on a subject, who has her own tastes, her own limits, her own way of seeing things.

They don't want a surface. They want a person. That is often what surprises them most - that an escort can be a complete person with a genuine inner life. And it is on that misunderstanding that many received ideas about this profession are built.

What It Has Taught Me About Myself

Observing men in this way, for four years, has changed me. Not in a cynical direction - I have not become someone who no longer believes in anything. Rather in a direction that has made me more patient, more capable of seeing behind façades, more aware that human vulnerability takes very different forms depending on the individual and the culture.

I have more compassion than before. That is not what I expected when I started.

And I have learned something about myself in particular: I am someone who needs things to be real. I cannot spend an entire evening inside something false without it costing me something. This profession has forced me to find the real in situations that many consider fundamentally artificial. And that reality - I find it almost every time. In an unexpected moment of humour, in a confidence that slips out, in a gaze that says something the mouth would never say.

That is why I am still here, four years on. Not only for financial reasons, though those matter. But because this work, when it goes well, is one of the most intensely human experiences I know.

And men - in their complexity, their contradictions, their unspoken needs - continue to fascinate me deeply.

Sofia

Sofia, 27 — Based in Geneva, she fully embraces her life as a luxury escort and speaks about it openly.

Through her stories, she shares her beginnings, her experiences with an international clientele, the advantages of the job (luxury, freedom), but also the more complex realities. She writes in a simple, honest way about what truly happens behind the doors of Swiss hotels.

This text was originally written in French. It was then translated to be readable in your language.
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