Boyfriend experience

What is the boyfriend experience?

Boyfriend experience is paid company from a man, set up to feel like a relationship rather than a transaction. You rent his time and his attention: talking, eating together, touch, and sex as far as the two of you agree to it. The female counterpart is called the girlfriend experience.

What does boyfriend experience actually mean?

The boyfriend experience is the male version of a term that comes from the escort world. Wikipedia describes the girlfriend experience as a commercial sex service that ranges “from a transactional sexual encounter to a client paying a sex worker to act as his or her partner during the session,” adding that when the sex worker is a man, the service is called boyfriend experience.

That “acting as” is exactly where the term chafes, and where most of the confusion comes from. In practice it is rarely playacting. Wikidata sums the concept up more sharply as a commercial experience “that blurs the lines between a financial transaction and a romantic relationship.” Blurring, not imitating. Money changes hands, everyone knows that, and at the same time something happens in those hours that feels real.

Where the idea comes from

The term is not a marketing invention from escort agencies but a research term. Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, in Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2007), described a shift in what the sex trade actually sells. In her words: “Rather than the businesslike exchange of money for a sexual act, what sex workers are increasingly paid to do is to provide an erotic experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection.”

That one sentence holds the whole term. The product is not the sex. The product is the connection, and the sex can be part of it.

Bernstein called this “bounded authenticity”: realness inside a frame. Both sides know there is a beginning and an end, and that it costs money. That does not make what happens in between fake. It makes it bounded.

Why women look for this, and what it gives back

For most women the pull is not the sex itself. Sex is easier to come by than attention. It sits in an evening where someone listens to you without thinking about anything else at the same time, and where you owe nothing back.

What it gives back depends on who you are at that moment.

• If you have not been touched in a long time, the gain is physical before it turns emotional. Skin against skin does something to your body, even when nothing else happens.
• Fresh out of a relationship, it works like a practice space. Being close to someone again with no future attached, and without having to explain yourself.
• Stuck in a relationship that has gone quiet, it is often less about the other person than it looks. What comes back is usually the feeling that you are still someone worth making an effort for.

A boyfriend experience does not glue a relationship back together and does not fill a loneliness that runs deeper than one evening. If you hope it will cure being in love, you will be let down. The boundary that makes it safe is the same boundary that keeps it temporary. That is not a side effect but the heart of the arrangement.

How it goes in practice

A boyfriend experience almost always starts with a conversation that stands apart from the date itself. A phone call, a video call or a coffee, where wishes and limits come out on the table before anything is booked.

From a distance the date itself looks like a date. Dinner out, a walk, an evening at home. The difference from a real date is that it was talked through beforehand: what can happen, what definitely will not, and how you say it if you change your mind.

The difference between a careful and a sloppy version rarely sits in the hours themselves. It sits before and after. Whether there was room to say no without a fuss, and whether there is a little contact once it is over. Skip that, and you are left with an evening that only added up on paper.

Misunderstandings

“It is playacting.” Partly. The setting is agreed on; the feelings that come up inside it need not be. That tension is exactly what Bernstein describes: bounded realness, not a reenacted relationship.

“Then it is just an escort under another name.” It overlaps, but the weight sits elsewhere. In a classic escort booking the sex is the product and the rest is framing. In a boyfriend experience the attention is the product.

“Surely that is not even allowed?” It is. Sex work is a legal profession in the Netherlands. The Rijksoverheid (the Dutch government) puts it plainly: “You may work in prostitution in the Netherlands if you are 18 or older.” For the client there is no ban as long as the work is voluntary.

What I see of it myself

I work as a gigolo, and this is the biggest part of what I do. What strikes me most is how little it is usually about sex, and how often women say halfway through the evening that they did not know they were missing this.

The most nerve-racking moment is never the date. It is the email before it. The step from thinking about it to writing it down is the hardest for almost everyone, and after that it turns out fine.

The mistake I see most often is women wanting to know exactly how the evening will go beforehand, out of nerves. That backfires. A script nailed shut leaves no room for the one thing you are actually after.

What you can do if you are considering this

• First write down for yourself what you are after. Company, touch, a conversation, sex, or some mix of those. It saves a lot of searching.
• Go looking for the introductory talk. Anyone who makes no room for that will make no room for it during the date either.
• Name your limits before you need them. Halfway through is harder, even though you always can.
• Assume one evening. Not a beginning.
• Count on nerves. They come with it and say nothing about whether it is a good idea.

Read more

This site spells out the practice. The page on the boyfriend experience as a service describes how an evening goes and what does and does not belong to it. If you want something quieter, intimate togetherness is about closeness where sex need not play a part, and touch and skin hunger is about what happens when you have not been touched in a long time.

Beyond this site, Elizabeth Bernstein’s book is the source most later literature falls back on, and the Wikipedia article on the girlfriend experience gives the shortest way into the term and its variants.

Sources

• Girlfriend experience. Wikipedia. The definition of the girlfriend experience and the note that the service is called boyfriend experience when the sex worker is a man.
• Girlfriend experience (Q3107635). Wikidata. Describes the concept as a commercial experience that blurs the line between financial transaction and romantic relationship; “boyfriend experience” and “BFE” are listed there as synonyms.
• Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Elizabeth Bernstein, University of Chicago Press, 2007. The shift from paid sexual acts to a paid experience of authentic interpersonal connection, and the concept of bounded authenticity.
• Wanneer mag ik in Nederland in de prostitutie werken?. Rijksoverheid. Sex work is permitted from age 18.

Related terms

• Glossary. All the terms worked out so far.
• Sex work. The umbrella term for the paid work that a boyfriend experience is a form of.
• Cuckolding. Another term from this list where consent and agreements made in advance are the core.
• Touch and skin hunger. Where skin hunger is explained, the need for touch that plays underneath a boyfriend experience.