Age
Age is one of the questions I find myself least able to answer with any certainty, and I have been thinking about it for a long time. I know what I observed. I know what the patterns suggested.
What I am less certain about is which came first—whether I attracted men of a particular age because my marketing aimed at them, or whether my marketing aimed at them because they were the men I found most interesting, or whether the men simply found me and the marketing followed what they showed me. The honest answer is that I don’t know, and I’m not sure the question has a clean resolution. Chicken and egg problems rarely do.
What I can say with certainty is that the men who visited me tended to be forty and older. I had clients in their eighties and nineties, which is a fact I mention not as a curiosity but because it puts paid, fairly definitively, to the assumption that sensual or sexual interest reaches a natural terminus at some point in middle age. It doesn’t. Or at least, the evidence in front of me consistently suggested it doesn’t. I’ll leave the fuller observation for another occasion.
I began working when I was older than most of the men coming to me—or at least, older than I might have expected to find myself doing this work. The men I saw at the start of the business were, by and large, older than I was, and the asymmetry felt natural at the time. They arrived with money, which reflected careers that had run long enough to produce disposable income at the level my fees required. They arrived with prior experience, some of it with others in my field, which meant they came with a formed idea of what to expect and occasionally with the willingness to discover that what I offered sat at a different register. And they arrived with the particular quality of time that a man in his fifties or sixties has made a certain peace with: not infinite time, time with texture, time that has shown him what it costs to waste and what it feels like to spend well.
As I moved through my own fifties, I noticed something shift in the encounters with men of roughly my own generation. The shorthand that sometimes takes years to establish in any relationship arrived quickly, or already existed before the session began. We had lived through the same decades, which meant we carried the same references—not identical experiences, but overlapping ones, a common set of before and after points that produced a particular quality of mutual legibility. I did not need to explain certain things. He did not need to receive them as information; he already had them as experience. That equivalence—I kept returning to that word for it—created a floor under the conversation that was not available with men twenty years younger or twenty years older, or not available in quite the same way.
This is not to say I preferred it. I found value in every configuration the work produced, in different ways. A much younger man’s curiosity had a quality I found genuinely interesting, when the curiosity was real rather than a proxy for entitlement. A much older man’s particular relationship with time—with what he had accumulated and what he was still interested in and what he had gracefully relinquished—produced a quality of presence that was unlike anything available at forty-five. But there was something in the encounter with a contemporary that felt like a different kind of ease: the ease of not needing to translate.
I suppose I am describing what happens when people age into a shared frame of reference and find, inside that frame, that a certain amount of performance becomes unnecessary. The man in his sixties who has already encountered a great deal is less likely to spend the session demonstrating his sophistication, because he knows what he knows and doesn’t need the evidence reflected back. The man in his twenties, however curious and however genuinely open, is still in the process of assembling his sense of himself, and that process has a way of making its presence felt. It isn’t wrong. It is simply where he is. And where he is means the encounter has a different texture from the one with a man who has already arrived somewhere and has stopped needing to prove it.
I said earlier that I cannot fully resolve the chicken and egg question—whether the age profile of my clients reflected my marketing, my preferences, or something about who found me and why. What I can say is that the question became less interesting over time than the thing itself. Age is not a number or a bracket or a demographic. In the room, it was a quality of relationship with time and with the self that had been shaped by time. I noticed that this quality—whatever the number attached to it—was what most determined how a man moved through the session, what he was willing to put down and what he insisted on carrying. The men who arrived most able to simply be where they were tended to be men who had been somewhere long enough to know that being there was the point.
We become, I suggested at the start, more like chickens and less like eggs. I find this more accurate as an image the longer I think about it. The egg contains everything in potential. The chicken has already become something and has the texture and the evidence of that becoming. I found I liked the chickens. They were less perfectly formed, more visibly themselves, and considerably more interesting to spend an afternoon with.
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