By Georgia Westgarth
HER online dating portfolio asked for companionship, but one-night stands was what she got time and time again.
It was in ‘Hayley’s’ quest for love that she realised she could be a prostitute.
The Cardinia Shire mum of one has a story like no other.
Imagine your committed and loving husband of 15 years telling you he is addicted to brothels, and has been meeting up with women online for 12 years of your relationship – that’s what happened to Hayley.
It was a shock to her system to say the least – “I was mortified,” she said.
The 35-year-old, now separated from her husband, did the unthinkable.
She quit her high-faluting corporate job and after a few Google searches and more than a few one-night stands became a prostitute.
Hayley is a working girl at the Garden of Eden brothel in Dandenong.
To this day she has only stepped inside two brothels and has been in the business for just eight months. Her quest for love continues, but her resume reads very differently now.
“I felt like I was all too old for Tinder,” she said.
“I joined Oasis and some other more reputable dating websites and over months of meeting and going on dates, I established that men didn’t really want to date and that despite saying that they wanted to get to know me, they had no investment in doing those things,” Hayley said.
“To be honest I wasn’t really looking for my next husband, but I was looking for something more than just a quick bang or one-night stand.”
As she opened up about her online dating experiences to other women, Hayley found their stories almost identical to hers.
“Initially I didn’t really care, I didn’t want anything serious and the more I tried to establish myself as looking for something serious men would reciprocate those notions, but then they’d get to the date and the same thing would happen.
“I thought this is crazy, these people are not genuinely interested, all they want is sex.”
When asked if she went on a lot of dates, Hayley said: “Essentially by a lot of dates what happened was I met a lot of men and gave them a lot of what they wanted.”
This pattern soon started to take on a life of its own, and Hayley recalls men lying to their bosses to leave work and drive a two-hour round trip to have sex with her – unpaid – at her Cardinia Shire home.
“I had four men coming to see me,” she said.
“I started joking to my girlfriends about charging them for it,” she said – a joke that soon became a reality.
“Men started telling me that I had some real skills and that people would pay to see me – all the while they didn’t know what I was thinking in my head.”
Hayley admits the online love drought doesn’t discriminate, and that men experience letdowns just like women do.
“I felt sorry for some of the guys and the women that they had come up against through the online dating scene,” she said.
“You see it on both sides – it’s quite an insightful experience to go through, and I don’t think it’s different for people younger than me either.”
For many months Hayley had one-night stands or thereabouts with different men, which ultimately changed her mindset forever.
Hayley realised she could detach herself emotionally from the men she was intimate with, and that that was all she had to master to do it for a living.
“It then solidified that I could get paid for it, several men actually told me I should do it as a job,” Hayley said.
“I didn’t know if I could do it with the background that I had with my husband, but I knew I could very much detach myself emotionally from the situation.
“To the point where I can very easily go ‘glad you had fun catch ya later’ and I knew that was the biggest skill I would need to do this job, even though I know I can be very emotional when there is a connection.
“But when there’s not a connection I seem very good at making them feel like they are the only one, that they are special to me … and then waving goodbye to them.”
When asked what she wanted to be referred to as, Hayley laughed and said: “I don’t know – I call myself a whore.”
With her sense of humour very much intact, Hayley says she’s “shit scared” her ex-husband will walk in, “It’s pretty much my only fear.”
But she knows exactly how she’d handle it – “I’d say to him, ‘you’re booking me and we’re going into that room and discussing our son’s homework.”
Hayley made sure she pointed out how wonderful her ex-partner had been.
She called him the “epitome of a fantastic husband and father”.
“He was supportive and always there for me and probably could be all those things because he was getting a little bit more service – essentially he never pressured me to take on more than I could give him at the time.”
Hayley’s advice to other women in the same situation is this:
“Now that I’ve been on the other side of it, I have come to realise very clearly that him going to a brothel is a service in every sense of the word, and whether I felt that I was giving him enough sex or not, in our marriage, clearly he had more needs than I was serving,” Hayley said.
“In reality I can appreciate him going to a brothel more than I can him meeting women online – if I had a choice between the two, I would only ever wish that he went to a brothel and didn’t meet women online.
“Because ultimately he formed a relationship with a woman online and that is nearly non-existent in brothels – friendships yes, relationships no.”
Hayley said being a prostitute wasn’t a career goal but that it had served its purpose – “I was doing it for free before, now I get money for it, and I have met some amazing people, both clients and girls.”
[ Return to ‘Behind the brothel door’ feature page ]
