The rich, older man

Yes, I know I haven’t posted in months. But I’ve been busy doing things worth posting about, working on a special report you could say.

I have somehow become an accidental gold digger, and my special report concludes thus: it seems that being a gold digger isn’t easy.

The rich, older man and young woman combination is such a cliché in this city and so widespread, it was just a matter of time. Here’s how I got drawn into it.

Two months ago I was introduced to the CEO of a private equity business. Let’s call him Mr.X. Many things about him didn’t make sense: why did he have the time to take me out to lunch? Why did he make so much effort to be charming? And why did he stay in touch? In my naivety I thought he just wanted sex. He flirted a lot and talked to our mutual friend about me. All my insecurities were activated. I thought I had found a mentor of sorts.

But through all the graciousness, he had the most intense stare. His eyes fixed on me with blue-gray steel. He said he was good at reading people, but I didn’t know what he was looking for, and what he had found in me.

Now I think maybe it’s this. Female journalists are supremely placed to meet rich, older men, and, for the sake of the job, to charm them. After years of doing this two or three times a week, you also become quite good at it. Worst of all normal people doing normal things begin to bore you.

You find ways to escalate experiences, to find the extremes.

After a period of ‘courtship’ he made his real move – he introduced me to his client, Mr.Y, an even richer, older man. This man had been the real object of his courtship for an investment of US$ 3 million. He also happened to go to the same school as me in London twenty years ago, and was divorced and lonely. Given his cold and fastidious character, an ordinary whore would have been too vulgar. He needed a high class escort without the escort label: i.e. a well educated, cultured, gold digger.

Yes, I’m the perfect fit – except for the motivation. I’m motivated not by money but by what? I don’t even know. Curiosity perhaps, validation. I was a welcoming present, an object.

I went on a date with Mr.Y – where he changed the time to fit his schedule, and changed the location to his building. On these dates the man gets it all his way, they’re not really interested in you. That was how he related to the whole world: when he says jump, everyone says how high.

I found all the gatherings of this circle to be sad, surreal affairs - a mishmash of oddly matched people who had nothing to say to each other, but who were still desparate to be there. Young, beautiful local women sat in silence like they didn’t exist while the men talked shop. Young guys hanging on to their every word, the lackeys, the groupies. A friend became one of them, a young man who was changing before my eyes from a sweet hearted kid.

But crazily enough I consider continuing. Perhaps because I’m used to self abuse. Or because the story isn’t finished yet. Curiosity always has me in its grip, and I’m compelled to open the blinds.

At the same time I walk away from innocence.

The artistic type

“There are times, when my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in, to sin
Because you have to make this life liveable” - Strangelove

This week I’ve been in a strange state of disarray. I took up dancing recently and met someone with the artistic temperament. He’s basically an unpleasant person - bad tempered, unfriendly and inconsistent. But when dancing he becomes totally different – gentle, warm and creative.

This is what always gets me about artistic types. The duality of extremes. You get a glimpse of the naked soul across an abyss of masks that’s impossible to cross. They are trying to reach for themselves, like a mute trying to speak.

There’s a desperation and romanticism in it that captures my imagination. It reaches into my unconscious and rearranges things there. Some connections reach right into your soul, sidestepping all the usual checks and gatekeepers. But it threatens to open boxes in my psyche that I went to a great deal of trouble to close – like the dangerous tendency to rescue.

In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the soul is described as the crew of a ship that hides, fearful below decks until something or someone calls it forth. I’m normally unashamedly selfish and uninterested in helping other people. But rarely and inconsistently I see sparks of trapped, frustrated potential, beautiful and fragile, and it’s like making sudden eye contact with that fitful crew.

I see myself in my earliest attempts to be a person and to learn to love. I see the same sparks that no one saw in me when I needed it the most.

And then again, I’m interested in desperation. If sex and relationships are only a reflection of who we are, then desperation forms the core (at least for me).

One of my favourite films is The Piano Teacher, famous for its explicit and perverted sex scenes. But people miss the point because it’s not actually about the sex. It’s about the desperation of her hopelessness and lack of control, isolation and inability to connect with any other person in the world.

Connection

There’s a great deal of talk about relationships and sex as if it's this fixed concept that can be applied across the board. As if it has rules. But being a relativist as always I think a better analogy for a relationship is a book. Though every book has two covers and letters on a page, the similarities end there. The content of each and every one is different, so is its mood, its depiction of the world, its view of reality.

There are endless possibilities and varieties. Maybe that's why some people are addicted to new relationships. How can you ever read enough books? There is always more to learn.

Similarly sex is not a thing in itself. It can be as complex, and varied and take on as many forms as the individual person who engages in it. It is a mirror held up to the soul. Anything ugly or beautiful in a person, will be reflected and intensified in sex. When people talk about what sex is, I think they're missing the point. Rather I want to ask them, who are you? What can or can't you express?

We are owners of souls like a big house with floors and stairwells and rooms we don't even know exist. The public sitting rooms and master bedroom are for the official spouse (someone who can help you pay the rent), but what about exploring the whole house?

I've always found this duality between appropriate partner material – financially or personality wise – and the inappropriates. But connection has nothing to do with that distinction. It's much wider, more flexible, more capricious than that.

The inappropriates slip in easily by the back door. They take me by the hand down unused corridors and unlocks secret rooms. And inside I look out of a whole new window with a completely different angle on that house, revealing endless facets of myself.

Monogamy is neither natural nor unnatural, it is simply one of many possibilities.