Why Ordinary Men Lose Their Minds and Their Wallets in Brothels

The second group are lonely men who are actually not only buying sex. They are buying company, attention and for a while also the feeling that somebody really cares about them.

But there is one more category of customer. Psychologically much more interesting, and at the same time rather tragic.

They are the rescuers.

They don’t come into the club to rescue their own libido. They come to rescue the woman.

And these are sometimes the men who leave there not only enormous amounts of money, but also their nerves, self-respect and finally the ability to see the difference between a real relationship and a very well managed business.

Everything starts very innocently

The story is surprisingly often very similar.

A man meets an attractive woman. She is nice, smiling, but at the same time she seems a little different from the others. There is sadness in her eyes. She looks tired and somehow broken.

After a few drinks, she starts talking about herself.

Suddenly the conversation is not about weather, cars, expensive alcohol or ordinary problems from work. Her life story comes to the front.

A cruel former boyfriend got her into debts. Her mother is sick and needs expensive treatment. Somebody is threatening her. She has debts. She has nowhere to go. She only came to the club because she didn’t know what else she could do.

Sometimes the story is more complicated, sometimes surprisingly simple. But the principle stays the same.

The man slowly starts feeling that he is not sitting with an ordinary companion. He is sitting with a woman who has somehow ended up in a desperate situation.

And something starts changing in his head.

He is no longer a customer.

He becomes a rescuer.

The seed has been planted

An experienced companion doesn’t even have to invent a complete fiction. Sometimes it is enough to take a part of real life, add some mystery, some sadness and, most importantly, the feeling that the man is special.

He can start believing that she opened herself exactly to him. That she allowed him to see under the surface. That she showed him a vulnerability which she normally hides from everybody else.

And this is the moment when a very old mechanism wakes up in some men.

The need to protect.

The need to be important.

The need to be the person who can repair a situation where everybody else failed.

Thousands of years of human psychology suddenly start working perfectly.

The man stops thinking like a customer and starts thinking like a knight.

And knights, after all, are supposed to rescue princesses.

The rescue has its own price list

First, the man starts buying her time.

He pays for another hour because they want to talk. Then another one. He brings a present. He pays for dinner. He helps with some bill.

And slowly, more problems appear.

A debt.

A lawyer.

Housing.

Rent.

A telephone.

Medicine.

Every problem naturally has a solution, and almost every solution has its price.

But the man no longer sees the money as an ordinary expense.

He is not paying for her affection.

He is investing into her future.

Every new amount of money becomes one step on the road to freedom. One problem less. One more part of the journey which has to be finished before the woman can finally leave the environment which is supposedly destroying her.

And the more money he puts into it, the stronger his belief becomes that he simply cannot stop now.

Because if he stops, all the money he already spent would be lost.

And then comes the crash

Sooner or later, the man may become convinced that the time has come to change everything.

He has found a place for her to live. He helped solve her debts. He offers financial security. He is ready to take her away from the club and start a new life together.

Only then he may discover that the woman doesn’t actually want this new life.

Maybe she doesn’t want to leave her work.

Maybe she doesn’t want to leave the city.

Maybe she has another partner.

Maybe her current life suits her more than the man was willing to admit.

And maybe she simply doesn’t want him.

For the rescuer, this is a huge collision with reality.

He invested time, money and emotions. He helped, planned, waited and believed.

But money can buy time, attention and certain services.

It cannot buy real feelings.

The biggest trap may not be the woman

The interesting thing about all of this is that it is not always only about manipulation by the woman.

The man often starts creating his own story.

He needs to be the only person who really understands her. The one who can save her. The one because of whom she will one day leave her old life behind.

And the more he invests into this story, the harder it becomes to admit that maybe there will never be a happy ending for both of them.

Psychology has a term for situations like this: sunk costs.

People have a tendency to continue with something into which they already invested a lot of time, money or energy, because they don’t want to admit that the previous investment was useless.

For the rescuer, there is something else added to it.

The need to be a hero.

And that can be terribly expensive.

That is why a completely ordinary man, who is otherwise reasonable, careful and experienced, can suddenly be willing to do things which he himself would call completely crazy if he saw another man doing them.

Not because he suddenly lost his mind.

But because he got the feeling that he had finally found somebody for whom he was absolutely indispensable.

And sometimes, that feeling can be much more addictive than sex itself.