The Reverse Prostitute

Words by Olivia Howell

We always went to the same Hampton Inn in a small town on Long Island. It had white stucco on the outside, and absolutely nothing about it suggested sex. The rooms were clearly designed for people stopping through town for one night: salesmen with early meetings, families who needed somewhere to sleep before continuing on to a funeral. There was no sexy lobby bar, no soaking tub, no dim lighting, not even one of those cheesy heart-shaped tubs you see in questionable motels online. In fact, our bedroom at home was probably cleaner, and I say that as someone who rarely cleaned our bedroom.

Still, every few months during the last few years of my marriage, I would walk through those doors carrying a little bag—probably an LL Bean tote—specifically packed so I could have sex with my husband. I was always in charge because I was always in charge of everything. I booked the room. I paid for the room. I arranged the babysitters. I figured out exactly when they could arrive and exactly when we needed to be home. I made sure the kids had dinner. I made sure the babysitters had dinner. I shaved. Sometimes I waxed. I did my hair, usually with a flat iron. I packed fresh underwear, maybe a nicer bra, sometimes a cute robe I would never wear at home, and, just for fun, I might throw in the travel-size shampoo and conditioner I had stolen from some previous trip, pretending I was actually going somewhere with my husband instead of to a Hampton Inn fifteen minutes down Jericho Turnpike.

Then I would check us in, eyeing the little complimentary bar of cookies and tea bags in the barely-there lobby, all of it looking like it had been sitting there since 1975. My husband would slowly trail behind me. Sometimes he carried his work briefcase with a change of clothes tucked inside, which I think was partly because neither of us wanted to look too suggestive walking into a hotel together in the middle of the afternoon. God forbid the woman working the Hampton Inn front desk realize that the married couple checking into a room at three o’clock intended to have sex.

There was no honeymoon energy to any of it. No giddy elevator kiss, no hand sliding onto an ass, no sense that we were escaping somewhere delicious. It was much more clinical than that. We were there to test something. Take the marriage out of the house. Take the children out of the equation. Remove the dishes, the emails, the laundry, the bedtime routines, the lost dreams, and all the other things we had blamed for the fact that we no longer seemed to know how to be together. Place husband and wife in a neutral environment. Add hotel room. Observe: could the marriage still produce desire under lab conditions?

It was basically Pretty Woman if Julia Roberts had made the reservation herself, hired the babysitters, packed snacks for the children, and needed to be home before bedtime. Also, Julia Roberts was paying Richard Gere. Actually, Julia Roberts was paying everybody in this scenario. This is what I eventually started thinking of as the Reverse Prostitute situation.

Sometimes these nights were planned ahead of time, but sometimes my husband would text me from work that he was having a shitty day and hated life, and I would immediately go into production mode. Maybe what he needed was a break. Maybe what we needed was a break. I would text the babysitter in a panic: Are you free tonight? Can you bring your friend? Can you stay for five hours? Six? I usually hired two babysitters who were friends because that made me feel better about leaving the kids for an extended period of time. They each made twenty dollars an hour.

Let’s total the night. Two babysitters at $20 an hour for six hours: $240. The hotel room, which we booked for the entire night even though we had absolutely no intention of spending the night there: call it $199. That’s $439 before pizza, or whatever food we eventually decided to binge-eat. Four hundred and thirty-nine dollars for the opportunity to have sex with my own husband and still be home in time to put my kids to bed.

At the time, I didn’t think this was ridiculous. Was I ashamed of it? Yeah. We’ll get to that. Mostly, I thought it meant I was trying. That I was giving him something he couldn’t get at home, which was me: my attention, my energy, my body without a child interrupting us. We talk endlessly about date night after children. Prioritize your marriage. Date your spouse. Keep things exciting. Make time for intimacy. Get the wax. Don’t become roommates. There is an entire ecosystem built around convincing mothers that if the sex disappears, perhaps the solution is better project management. Better product management. And God knows I knew how to do both.

Give me a husband having a shitty day at noon, and by three I could have two babysitters in my living room, dinner figured out for the children, a hotel room charged to my credit card, my legs shaved, my underwear upgraded, and the marriage relocated to a controlled environment for testing. What I could not control, schedule, arrange, or manage was whether, once we got there, we would actually want each other.

We would open the hotel-room door and there would usually be two queen-size beds. Then we had to choose which one we wanted to have sex in. Nothing says raw animal desire quite like standing beside your spouse in a fluorescently lit Hampton Inn deciding which identical queen bed will become the designated fucking bed. Sometimes we would shower first. Sometimes we would just sit there and stare at the wall. That might actually be the strangest part to remember now: the silence. I had worked so hard and paid so much money for us to finally be alone, and then we would sit on the edge of the bed for a few minutes like we were waiting for someone to tell us what happened next. Sometimes he would plug his phone into the little outlet on the bedside table lamp, lie back with his shoes still on, and scroll.

I had imagined leaving the house would free something in me. At home, I was always listening for a child getting out of bed, crying, calling my name, a door opening—the thousand tiny domestic alarms mothers keep running somewhere in the background of their minds. Surely, if I could just get out of the house, I could become my feral sexy-girl self. I could spread my legs, let him in every which way, be loud and wild and unselfconscious and whatever else I imagined a sexually liberated married woman was supposed to become when presented with a locked hotel-room door and several uninterrupted hours.

Except I still wasn’t free. I was listening for my phone. Was the babysitter texting? Did somebody have a fever? Did one of the kids fall and crack his head open? Was everybody okay? I watched the clock. I minded my noises because there were strangers on the other side of the wall and I didn’t want to embarrass myself or him.

Oral sex was supposed to be one of the perks of the hotel. At home, I could never lie back and actually enjoy it because my brain was always somewhere else, listening for a kid or wondering how long this was taking. I thought that in the hotel I would finally be able to lie back under those scratchy white Hampton Inn sheets, spread my legs, and let somebody take care of me for a minute. Instead, I would have my phone beside me, sometimes actually looking at it while he was going down on me, making sure the babysitter hadn’t texted, making sure nobody was sick, making sure nobody had cracked their head open. And underneath that clock was another one: Am I taking too long? Is he bored? Does he want me to come already? Does he actually want to be doing this, or does he want pizza? There I was, supposedly receiving pleasure, and I was still managing everyone else’s experience.

There was shame in the secrecy, too. I hadn’t told anybody where we were. God forbid my mother called. God forbid my sister called. If I didn’t answer, they might worry, and then eventually I would have to explain where I had actually been. I wasn’t someone who lied. I would just say, “We’re out,” which was technically true. I guess I could have asked my parents or my sister to watch the kids, but how do you text your mother: Hey, can you take the kids for five hours so I can go give my husband a blowjob and hopefully make him love me again?

Once, my mother called while we were checking in. I remember trying to hand over my credit card and answer the phone in a calm voice at the same time. I picked up because I knew if I didn’t, she might call again. I was curt and distracted, juggling her, the front desk, the stupid little overnight bag, my guilt about leaving the kids, and the very expensive clock that had already started ticking. By the time we got upstairs, my husband was furious.

“It’s always something,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed facing away from me. “You’re always putting them first. You couldn’t just not answer the phone?”

I reminded him that if his family had called, he probably would have answered, too. Then he iced me out. He sat there in his button-down and jeans, black socks, shoes still tied. I had paid for the hotel. I had paid the babysitters. I had packed the bag. I had shaved. I had brought the good underwear. And before we had even had sex, I had somehow fucked up fucking.

So I did what I always did. I begged and negotiated and tried to spin straw into gold. “Come take a shower with me. Come on. Please. Let’s not ruin the night.” The shower was cold, which is such an embarrassingly obvious metaphor that I resent reality for writing it.

I’m sure we had sex. I’m sure it was fine. That is mostly what I remember about the sex in those hotel rooms: fine. Not transcendent. Not particularly memorable. The job got done. We never had sex twice in one “stay.” We were tired, and despite spending hundreds of dollars creating these tiny five- or six-hour vacations, we somehow seemed determined to speed through them. Have sex. Shower. Order pizza. Watch something. Check the phone. Go home.

Afterward, we would do what we actually wanted to do, which was eat. He would sit on one side of the bed. I would sit on the other. A movie played somewhere in the background while our individual screens lit our faces. Once I suggested we have sex again before we left. He was too full. He had heartburn.

For years, I thought the problem must be that I wasn’t sexy enough, relaxed enough, spontaneous enough, adventurous enough. Maybe motherhood had made me too tightly wound. Maybe I needed different underwear, fewer thoughts, a flatter stomach, or a better ability to shut off the section of my brain responsible for keeping everyone alive, including a man in his mid-thirties. I didn’t understand how much energy my body was spending paying attention—to his mood, whether he was angry, whether I had said the wrong thing, made the wrong noise, to the clock, the phone, the kids, the babysitters, the people through the wall, whether this very expensive experiment was working. My nervous system was doing cartwheels while I was supposed to be spreading my legs.

And this is where I think so much advice about married sex gets it wrong. We prescribe novelty when what some women are starving for is safety. You cannot put lingerie over hypervigilance. You cannot hotel-room your way out of resentment. You cannot orgasm your way out of feeling unsafe.

The strangest part was that I knew exactly what turned me on: my husband telling me he loved me, unprompted. That was the exotic thing. That was my dirty fantasy. Not handcuffs, not other women, not roleplay. My husband looking at me and saying, “I love you,” without being asked. It happened so infrequently that my body reacted to it like a drug. Everything softened. For a few seconds I could stop scanning. Maybe I didn’t make a horrible decision. Maybe he really does love me. Maybe he is who I thought he was.

Eventually, even that became transactional.

“Tell me you love me.”

And he would.

Even during sex, while his fantasies could pull him somewhere else, I needed these tiny scraps of tenderness dropped into the middle of it so I could stay emotionally present. A few I love yous. That was my kink. Proof.

I used to feel embarrassed by that. Now I think my body was probably the smartest person in the room. I wasn’t desperate for better sex. I was desperate to feel cherished. Safe.

And this is what I mean when I call it the Reverse Prostitute. Yes, I was paying for the room where I was going to have sex with my own husband. But sex wasn’t actually what I was purchasing. I paid the hotel. I paid two babysitters. I paid for the pizza. I paid with my time, the logistics, the preparation, the mental labor required to make sure everyone else was okay before I disappeared for six hours. I paid with my nervous system.

What I was trying to buy was evidence that I was still wanted, still chosen, that something underneath all of it was still alive. I thought if I constructed exactly the right conditions, we might find our way back to each other.

Instead, I built a laboratory: two queen beds, tiny shampoo, cold shower, good underwear, pizza, heartburn, requested I love yous, checkout.

Then I would walk back through the Hampton Inn lobby with my makeup a little smudged, my hair a little messier, texts from the babysitter lighting up my phone, passing the same ancient cookies on my way out. I remember feeling dirty, not because of the sex, but because I had turned myself into the product.

I wasn’t the woman being desired. I was the woman footing the bill for the performance of desire.

I was the product and the customer at the same time, swiping my own card to buy the illusion that I had been chosen.

Then Pretty Woman went home before bedtime.

She paid the babysitters. She paid for the room.

And she never even stayed the night.

Olivia Howell is the CEO and co-founder of Fresh Starts Registry — recognized by Forbes as "the first divorce registry of its kind" and by New York Magazine for "destigmatizing divorce." A clinical hypnotherapist, certified divorce and life coach, and award-winning podcast producer of multiple podcasts including the top-rated Divorce Happens, she built Fresh Starts with her sister Genevieve Dreizen after her own 2019 divorce when she realized there was no real system to help people rebuild. Today the platform has supported millions of people worldwide through free resources, 150+ vetted experts, free one-on-one Zoom consults, and Divorce Guide Magazine — the only divorce magazine in America. Olivia is also the author of the forthcoming Divorce Happens: A Compassionate Guide to Starting Fresh (Sheldon Press, 2027). Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Newsweek, and Business Insider, and her work has been shared by Monica Lewinsky, Shannon Watts, and Eve Rodsky.