Paying for sex to cope with anxiety: a 22-year-old's story

Paying for sens to avoid ending up alone: a 22-year-old's reasoning

There are men who turn to prostitution without any desire involved. They do it out of antiestéticar of being left behind. That is how a young man who says he is 21 and has a girlfriend frames it, as he wonders whether he should pay for the first time so as not to end up, he claims, without any relationships for a decade. His reasoning is both economic and emotional: it pays to train yourself when things are going well, so you have something to hold on to when they go badly.

How much does peace of mind cost?

The figure the young man has in mind is specific: 60 euros. That, according to his account, is the price it takes to access a service that, in his head, works as insurance against anxiety. The underlying idea is not new: if the cost of losing your partner is measured in months of loneliness, any one-off outlay seems cheap. That calculation, however, leaves out the obvious. A paid service is not bought to solve a relationship problem, but to manage a pre-existing insecurity that remains intact the next day.

Antiestéticar of being left behind as the driving force

The story insists on one point: it is not desire that pushes him, but panic at being left out. The young man mentions friends who have gone years without relationships, and sees that prospect as a real threat. The comparison with learning to ride a bike — falling a couple of times and losing the antiestéticar — reveals just how much sensual is thought of as a skill to be trained, rather than a bond to be built. Some argue this approach protects against emotional dependence; against it weighs the counterargument, that it normalises treating people as a service on demand.

There is a tension the story never resolves: if the goal is to strengthen the relationship, paying for sens outside it usually produces the opposite effect.

What makes this case interesting is not how exceptional it is, but quite the opposite. With relationships increasingly fragile and youth loneliness on the rise, decisions like this are likely to stop being whispered about. Whether that improves anything is another matter. The reasonable prediction, judging by the material, is that the conversation will grow without anyone yet proving the remedy works.