Dating Burnout

by Gwen Cooper — September 19, 2007

A good friend of mine has worked for many years at what the industry refers to as a "phone actress"--or, in the more common parlance, phone sex. The money, she tells me, is actually pretty good, and since she's also a writer it allows her the flexibility in her schedule to get her "real" work done.

Her job used to be an endless source of fascination to the rest of us, who would eagerly press her for all the gory details, and force her to give us renditions of her sexy phone voice. "I fake approximately 50 orgasms a day," she said once. "Could you imagine if I had even a quarter that many in real life?"

Truly, it boggles the mind.

After a while, though, we realized that with very few exceptions, there really weren't that many exciting stories to be told. After a while, her accounts of what she was asked to "act" on the phone all started to blend together. It's the same for her. She says that what's really depressing about her job, sometimes, is that talking to these guys day in and day out makes you start looking at every guy you date and assume he's just like the guys you talk to on the phone. "Most of what they want isn't even that interesting," she shrugs. "Oral and lesbians--that's, like, 95% of what they ask for. The really sad part is how badly they want those things, and how completely unable they've ever been to ask anybody but a 'professional' for them."

When she talks like this, it makes me glad that--despite my years on the dating front lines--I've remained fairly "unspoiled" in certain respects. I've known women who've sunken into deep despair over what they considered (at the time) the general unworthiness of the average guy. For my own part, I've had very few moments of genuine dating burnout. Still, I wondered if there were any secret fantasies Robert was harboring that we'd somehow managed to overlook or avoid discussing--or that maybe he was embarrassed to bring up.

When I asked him, he started spinning some elaborate fantasy involving me in a short skirt (going commando, naturally) meeting him at some restaurant somewhere...

"No, no, no," I said impatiently. "I don't mean like that. I mean is there, like, one specific act that you've always fantasized about doing that you've never done with anybody?"

Robert thought about if for a moment. "Not really," he finally said. "You get to be a certain age, and if you haven't at least tried everything you really wanted to try, you're probably way too repressed."

Robert, I'm sure, has been called many things over the years--but I'm guessing "repressed" isn't one of them...

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.