Credit: CP Illustration: Jeff Schrekengost

A few times I’ve had women reach out to me, in distress, to tell me that they found out their husbands have seen sex workers.

While I’ve been a sex worker for 10 years, I have been a wife since before I could legally drink so it is easy for me to step into their experience and understand their distress.

In my previous marriage, while my husband didn’t see sex workers (to my knowledge), I did find out about hidden relationships. In my current marriage, I’ve struggled with jealousy and mistrust as a result. I intimately know what it feels like to be unmoored by breaches of trust and/or infidelity. And certainly, finding out that your spouse is doing something behind your back is a reason to be concerned.

What I also know though, as a sex worker, is that we (unlike “civilian” women) are providing a service and have no interest in causing problems in any of our clients’ marriages. More than once I have seen a meme circulating Sex Work Twitter™ that reads something like, “Sex workers want to keep your man in the way that daycare providers want to keep your baby.” That is to say, not at all. We have lives and problems of our own.

That is not to say that sex workers are unfeeling and do not care about the clients we share intimacy with (in whatever form that takes), but presumably daycare providers also like young children but don’t want to adopt every child they care for. For the most part, sex workers want to pay their bills and have pleasant, mutually respectful, and mutually beneficial working relationships with their clients (like any professional service provider).

The question that I often ask anyone who comes to me with this problem is, “What upsets you about this?” This is not to be flippant, but instead to suggest that identifying and working through these feelings may alleviate some of the initial sting. Our subsequent conversations usually go something like this:

My husband will leave me.
In my experience, most married clients have no interest in doing this. If they were interested in replacing their wives, they would date women who are available to them, and sex workers aren’t those women! Part of the appeal of seeing a sex worker is that sex workers require next to nothing outside of the booked time.

With a sex worker, clients can get the sexual and/or emotional attention and validation they crave for a predetermined amount of time, and then go back to their wives and their lives without those interactions bleeding over. In other words, they see sex workers because they don’t want their marriages to be undermined.

There is something wrong with our sex life.
It is really difficult given our mononormative cultural programming (and I know because I’ve struggled with this as well), to trust that desires for sexual experiences outside of the relationship don’t indicate a problem within it. We are taught to believe that we should be everything to our partners, meeting their needs and fulfilling their fantasies. The truth is, this is an impossible standard that sets us all up for failure. While it is possible to be faithful and monogamous, it is impossible to never have any desires outside of your marriage. We are wired to want sexual variety.

It is fine within a marriage to set whatever boundaries are important to both people, including sexual exclusivity and monogamy. However, as Michel Foucault noted in The History of Sexuality, repression often leads to obsession. In other words, sometimes abstaining from something becomes a bigger deal within the relationship than finding a healthy and bounded outlet to explore it.

Family resources are going to another woman.
Sex workers are expensive and if basic needs aren’t being met at home, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. However, if bills are paid and it is just a matter of principle, it is worth thinking about how you also spend money on things that are important to you and feel good.

I’m a sucker for a bougie dinner and will spend more money than I should on a filet mignon and an expensive bottle of red with one of my girlfriends, but I certainly can’t do it every night. Expensive indulgences can be a source of great pleasure but within the bounds of what is possible. This is an issue about family resources and not about sex work.

Clients are bad people and therefore my husband is a bad person.
Some clients mistreat sex workers, just as some husbands mistreat their wives. Whores, for the most part, have more in common with wives than they do with clients (indeed, many of us are also wives).

The vast majority of the experiences I’ve had with clients, though, are not negative. They range from mundane and boring to beautiful and connected, just like most human interactions do. What I can say is that, for the most part, clients come to sex workers because: they are bored, they want to try something new, they are afraid to talk about what they want with the person they love, they are lonely, etc. That does not mean their wife is doing something wrong. We cannot be all things to our partner.

My suggestion to anyone who finds out that their partner is seeing a sex worker is to ask yourself what upsets you about this and to ask your partner what they are getting out of it. Doing so may be an opportunity for self-knowledge, relationship exploration, and connection.

Jessie Sage is a Pittsburgh-based sex worker, writer, and the host of the podcast When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.

You can find Jessie on her website or her socials: X: @sapiotextual & Instagram: @curvaceous_sage.