Telling a friend about a gigolo

Telling a friend about a gigolo works best small and without pressure. There are three ways: you bring it up in passing, you write an anonymous letter to the woman you once were, or you give her a book. At every step you can turn back, and you decide each time how far you go.

A woman like you… searching

There’s a woman who is at a loss. Maybe like you were, before you found this site. She knows something is missing and she has no idea who to turn to with it. She asks no one, because how do you even start a conversation like that.

So she stays stuck in the same loop. Another date who looked better in the photos than across the table. A man on Tinder who, four messages in, starts about an emergency and a payment request. Someone who doesn’t hear that she wants to take it slow and just pushes on. And in between, the searching at hours when everyone else is asleep, past ads she can’t make any sense of. Maybe you recognize her path. Maybe what you mostly recognize is how tired it makes you.

Searching for “gigolo” or “male escort” isn’t something she does. In her head that belongs to women who take life more loosely than she does. And underneath that sit a few more thoughts. That it isn’t done, that you just don’t do something like that. That it can’t or shouldn’t be for her, not with her life, her age, her work, the people who have opinions about her. And the most stubborn one of all: that it doesn’t exist. Not really. Not the way she’d want it, with someone who listens and who stays sitting when it goes quiet for a moment.

She only gets here if someone points her to it.

You can help her, and give her an enormous gift with it. Mention my site, or tell her how it went for you, why you started looking. That’s all it is.

Almost every woman says afterward that she wishes she’d known sooner. She’ll be grateful to you. Below is how to go about it.

Look too at what that makes you. You’re not the woman who booked a gigolo. You’re the one who told someone else that it was allowed, and that’s a story you can tell in any company.

In the menu this is called “help someone”, because something has to be up there. What you really are is her first voice. The one who said it out loud first.

You earn nothing from passing it on. On purpose. There used to be a voucher here and I took it away, further down I explain why that’s better for you.

1. Tell your friend about a gigolo

This doesn’t have to be a big thing. There’s a huge range in what you could say, and the smallest end often works best.

At one end: you read something. In &C there was the story of Maud, who dated a gigolo, and in the &C Summer Book the one about Anna, who is married to a gigolo. That you read something like that in a magazine is not a confession. It’s a topic. Whoever finds it interesting asks more.

At the other end: a whole conversation about what women actually want, about why that so rarely gets said out loud, and about what it does to you when for once you act on it. Some evenings drift that way on their own.

Everything in between counts too. One sentence over coffee. Forwarding a magazine story with no comment. Your own story, if you want that.

Planting works better than recommending

“You should give Victor a call” rarely lands well. Too direct. And it turns her into someone who has to be fixed.

What does work is this: “I know someone who did this and it did her good.”

That sentence costs you nothing. It’s true as well, because you are that someone, and you can’t hear that in the sentence. If she asks more, you decide how far you go. If it stays quiet, nothing happened. And if it comes up again six months later, you can say it was you. Or not.

That may sound calculated. But this kind of conversation only goes that way: step by step, with a door left open behind you at every step. Someone who has to put it all on the table at once usually says nothing at all.

Talking about the site can just as easily be indirect. That you ended up on a gigolo’s site the other day, that it seemed surprisingly interesting to you, and that you were amazed by what other women say there. It doesn’t have to be more than that. Whoever recognizes it asks more. Maybe not right away, maybe only when she calls you two weeks later about something completely different and suddenly circles back to it.

Don’t think only of girlfriends here. I’m also booked by couples who want to make things exciting together again, so there’s just as much opening there.

One sentence per moment

You’re not going to raise this out of nowhere, and you don’t have to. It comes by on its own, more often than you think. The only thing you need in a moment like that is one sentence. No story, no explanation.

• A date that let her down yet again. “Wouldn’t something like that be for you? At least then you’d skip all the hassle.”
• She complains about her marriage, for the third time this year already. “Apparently there are women who just arrange that on the side. Without it turning into an affair right away, I mean.”
• Just divorced and she’s dreading the dating scene. “I read that some women, after a divorce, just start with a gigolo instead of with Tinder. Honestly, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me.”
• Not touched in a year, and she says it almost in passing. “I heard someone say the other day that she’d booked someone for exactly that. Not even for sex, just to be held again for a moment.”

If a different sentence works better for you, let me know. Then I’ll add it for the woman after you.

You can always turn back

Everything on this page is set up so you can step out if the reaction disappoints. That’s not a detail, that’s the whole design.

You can say you read it somewhere. Forward an article without typing anything with it, or lend a book and stay quiet about it after that. The letter you write goes online without a name and comes back off again at your request. Nobody knows anything about you that you didn’t tell them yourself.

If a conversation goes the wrong way, you just stop. You don’t have to finish anything or ever come back to it.

If you do tell her directly

Start with the why. Why you booked someone, and why it wasn’t a man from an app or from the bar. That’s the question that lives loudest in her, even if she doesn’t ask it out loud. Tell her right away what you had doubts about beforehand. She’s probably sitting with exactly what you thought back then, and that helps her more than any argument.

You’ll be surprised how many women have secretly thought about this for ages and just never dared to take the step. If she’s a good friend, a conversation like that soon turns a way you hadn’t seen coming. More open than you’re used to from her.

• Be specific. What did you like? The attunement, the pace, that nothing was required of you? The more concrete you are, the more believable it sounds.
• Let her hear what it did to you. “I can’t believe how good this felt, I should have done this much sooner” says more than a recommendation in tidy sentences.
• Be honest. If something disappointed you, feel free to say so too. That’s exactly what makes the rest believable.
• Tell her where to find me. She needs nothing more than gigolo-victor.com.

What you’re better off leaving

• Sending my site to someone who didn’t ask for it. That reads as advertising, even coming from you. Forwarding a magazine story is fine: that’s a topic, not a recommendation.
• Coming back to it a second time. Whoever’s ready for it comes back to it herself.
• Framing it as advice. “This is what you should do” turns her into a case that has to be fixed.
• Passing her name to me. I don’t approach women who didn’t ask for it themselves, so it’s no use to me.

2. A letter to the woman you once were

Write a letter to who you were in the time before you got in touch. Anonymous, no name under it, and I’ll put it on the site.

That’s the text I can’t write myself, and it’s the text that gets read the most. Hundreds of women who are unsure come in here, read my words, and believe half of them. From you they believe all of it.

This layout makes it easier:

• The beginning. Curious, aroused, nervous? What held you back, and what finally tipped the scales?
• First contact. How did it feel to write to me? Did it go well right away, or did something keep gnawing at you?
• Making the arrangement. What was it like to speak your boundaries and your wishes out loud?
• The date. The tension beforehand, the moment of walking in, whether you felt at ease quickly.
• Afterward. How you felt afterward, and what the contact did in the days that followed.
• Finally. What has changed, and what would you say to someone who’s unsure right now?

Worried about your writing style? No need. Write it the way it comes to you, in bullet points if you have to. I turn it into a flowing story and send it back, so you can check whether it’s still right. Nothing goes online without your okay, and you can have it taken down again later too.

Honest and full of detail is worth more than nicely phrased. Criticism is welcome. Honesty is what matters most.

3. Giving the book

This is the easiest way of all, because recommending a book gives nothing away about you.

Secret Desires by Dahlia Midnight is about four friends in a spa who say out loud what they don’t dare to at home, and about what happens when one of them takes that step anyway. It’s on the-phoenix-society.com, and three excerpts are free to read.

There are a few ways to get it to her:

• Give it as a gift. With a novel, no one wonders why you’re turning up with it.
• Lend it. If you have it yourself, hand it over. A book that has to come back actually gets read.
• Just mention it. That you came across it somewhere and it stayed with you. Nothing more needed.
• Bring it to your book club. Then the group has the conversation and you don’t have to send it anywhere.

Then the story does the work you can’t reach yourself. If she brings it up later herself, you decide whether to tell her you took that step long ago.

The survey, and that one is simply paid

This isn’t a recommendation but advice I’m hiring you for, and that’s why there is a fee attached to it: €200 with a booking of four hours or longer. It costs you about half an hour.

The questions are about you and about me. What you were looking for, what held you back, how this site comes across to you, and where I can get better. Criticism is welcome, it helps me more than a compliment does. The questionnaire is on the discount page.

Working together or thinking along

Maybe you want more than passing it on. Organizing an evening, a podcast, a women’s circle, something within your work where this subject fits. Or you have an idea that resembles nothing and that you’ve never said out loud.

Let me know, even if it’s half finished. Anything that helps women take their desires seriously and speak them out loud too, I’m glad to think along about. It doesn’t have to lead back to me.

And what’s in it for you?

A fair question, and you’re welcome to ask it.

Money, at any rate, no, the survey aside.

You do this because you want to. Because you wish her what you had, and because you like seeing her become happy. There’s nothing else behind it.

She hears that too, because nothing stands in between. Just you, wanting things to turn out well for her.

What you get out of it, you get from her. You touch a woman at the moment one decision turns her year around, and that’s not a pretty line from me. Read the reviews again and count how often it says things went differently afterward than she’d expected. Setting something like that in motion, and later hearing her tell you herself how happy it made her, there’s no gift voucher for that.

And something else happens that you don’t see coming beforehand. Helping someone else with exactly what you went through yourself does you good. You grow. You stand firmer. It makes you happier and it strengthens you in your own personal growth and choices, without you ever having asked for it.

Most of all it does something with your own choice back then. If you wondered at the time whether you could really do this, that question disappears the moment you see her pick up. If it helped her, it was good that I did it.