What Men Who Pay for My Time Are Really Paying for

I would leave the lecture hall to meet my boyfriend, ten years my senior, at a corner café. My friends thought I was cool for dating older; it had always made sense to me. I seemed to edge out men my own age with my maturity and depth of experience. Even though my boyfriend at the time made substantially more money than me, we’d split the bill whenever we went out. I felt a nagging dissatisfaction and couldn’t discern why. Everyone around me did the same thing, and it seemed to work for them, yet I became increasingly exhausted and disinterested.

I soon realized that my relationship standards were completely incompatible with the neo-feminist blueprint, and that conventional dating was just a slow accumulation of unacknowledged grievances and growing resentment.

While completing my undergraduate degree and minoring in Women and Gender Studies, I dissected how power structures and institutional systems perpetuate inequality. In a burst of ideological rebellion, I stopped shaving, abandoned makeup, gained weight, and bought into the idea that I could dismantle a system that reduces women to their desirability simply by making myself undesirable.

It took very little time to realize how entirely hollow that strategy was. While I could protest with my own body, the world would keep turning. The women who understood how to wield desirability as capital continued to thrive, while those who rejected it were praised for their "integrity" while working twice as hard for half the return.

I began a complete paradigm overhaul. I sought new ideas to redefine what feminism meant to me and how I could engage in relationship with myself and others to honour and reclaim my own femininity. My reality shifted entirely; I’d finally recognized that I am in control of my life, and what and who I allow into it. Soon after, I was stepping into rooms that would normally take decades of painstaking corporate networking to access. I dismantled limiting self-beliefs and changed my relational philosophy. While my peers worked retail shifts in the mall, my reality looked entirely different: one hour I was presenting academic research on campus or meeting with faculty; the next, I was seated in exclusive clubs and moving through circles of affluence I had previously only read about.

What remains unspoken in discussions about this world is how fundamentally it revolves around asymmetry, not just the obvious imbalances of age and wealth, but deeper asymmetries of need and visibility. The men who sit across from me possess more capital than they know what to do with, yet their entire professional existence is a claustrophobic web of leverage, risk assessment, and constant score-keeping, where everyone is looking for an extraction.

Rather than pretending those dynamics don't exist, we acknowledge them honestly. When booking time with me, money changes hands for a singular, radical purpose: to make the transaction instantly obsolete. The economic arrangement doesn't corrupt authenticity; it enables it by removing pretense, leaving a rare, unhurried sanctuary free of performance or hidden agendas, where he can finally put down his armour and experience a calibre of human presence money can never manufacture.

I had spent years treating my standards as something I needed to justify, when they were simply mine to choose.

That, more than anything, is why I date this way now.

It may be unconventional, but I’ve found that unconventional suits me rather well.