Sometimes it's not about the sex. There, I've said it. After twenty years of marriage and two years of stumbling through post-divorce loneliness, I've learned that what I'm really buying isn't physical pleasure, but a kind of temporary intimacy that feels almost impossible to find elsewhere.
Last week, Sarah from Cork (not her real name, obviously) spent three hours with me. We talked more than we touched. She listened to me ramble about my grown kids, about how strange it feels to be fifty and suddenly unmoored from the life I'd planned. Her profession is companionship, but in those moments, she was something more complex than a transaction.
I know how that sounds. Sad old man trying to romanticise something clinical. But human connection isn't always neat or predictable. Some nights, I just want someone to look at me like I'm still worth seeing.
The physical stuff happens. It's pleasant enough. But what I remember later are the soft conversations, the gentle touches that aren't sexual, the brief illusion of being truly understood.
Lonely, I suppose. But aren't we all?