Dear Karma Cleanser:
I am a single guy in my mid-thirties. I have a great job, own a nice home and drive a great car. Everything looks great on the surface. I also have a secret side: I work as a gay male escort.
I am lucky that at this age I can still make a great second income in this field. The problem is I have a client (whom I have seen twice) who I have really fallen for. He feels the same way about me, and I have now been out with him (for no charge) on a couple of dates.
He says he understands what I do and why I do it and he does not hold it against me. I have told him that I am going to stop this life and not escort anymore, but is this possible? Can we have a life under the circumstances of how we met? Won’t this always haunt us? I feel I am being punished. I have finally met someone I really want to be with, but the truth is we met through me being a prostitute (because that’s what I am).
I had always planned to one day bury this part of my life and go on and no one would know. I don’t know what to do. Can someone truly overlook your past?
— Now I’m the One Paying
Said playwright Eugene O’Neill, “There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now,” a statement that fits your current outlook like a latex condom. Until you can make peace with your past, how can you expect your new beau to do the same? The punishment you allude to is coming from nobody but yourself; once that stops, we expect this romance will truly pay off.
Dear Karma Cleanser:
I was seeing a guy for a little while and he ended up cheating on me. The heartache was difficult to avoid. In order to pad my pain, I decided to play around with the dating scene on Craigslist.
Now, I’m neither oversexed, overweight or unattractive. In the midst of trying to find someone who was equally single and willing to have fun, I came across men who wanted to cheat on their wives with me. They came by the thousands. Practically everyone who contacted me was looking and married.
My question to you is: Am I a magnet for cheating? If so, how do I change this? I really hate getting cheated on and I damn sure don’t want to be a part of the cheating cycle.
— Infidelity Magnet?
Your problem isn’t magnetism, it’s imagination. There are 12 jillion dating sites for finding non-attached men up for no-strings fun; why limit yourself to just one? You’ll still need to weed out the creeps no matter what site you use — the online world is teeming with two-timers. Save yourself a lot of grief by spelling out your criteria as clearly as possible: “Married men need not respond.”
Been bad? karmacleanser@gmail.com.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.
