Choosing Her From Two Sofas

One of the quieter pleasures of arranging this kind of evening from a distance is that the choosing happens weeks beforehand, in a chat, with both of you at home. A link goes into whatever thread the two of you already use. You both look. A name comes back. It is unhurried in a way that the same decision made at nine in the evening in a hotel room never is.

Why the profiles carry photographs

Because the decision is visual and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Twenty-three women work with the house, each with her own page, and each page carries her photographs, her district, her age, the languages she speaks and the full set of figures for one guest and for a couple with one therapist or two. The roster is the whole list rather than a shortlist for your dates.

What the pages do not do is describe a type or promise a temperament. A biography is a few paragraphs about how she works, written for this site, and it stops there. Everything about what a session includes belongs to her and is said in the room at the start, which is a better arrangement than any description written in advance could be.

The two failure modes

The first is deciding in your own chat and never writing it down to the house. A name agreed between the two of you eight days out is straightforward to hold with a deposit. The same name asked for at seven on a Friday evening may simply not be free, and the reply then says who is, which is not the same conversation.

The second is deadlock. Two people, two favourites, neither willing to overrule the other, and a fortnight of nobody writing anything. The fix is to send both names. Ask which of the two is free across the evenings you are in the city, and let availability make a decision that the pair of you have declined to make. It is not a romantic solution and it works every time.

Agreeing without one of you conceding

A pattern worth avoiding: one partner cares more, the other says any of them is fine, and the booking is made on a preference one person never actually held. It usually surfaces later as a flatness nobody can explain.

A better method is subtractive. Each of you names two you would rather not, for whatever reason, without having to justify it. Whatever survives, pick from. It sidesteps the enthusiasm gap entirely and it keeps the decision genuinely joint, which for a booking that both of you have to want is more than a nicety.

Languages, when English is the second one for both of you

English appears on all twenty-three profiles and it is the working language of the arrangement. Beyond it, several of the women read and speak others, and each page lists which. If a shared language beyond English would make the evening easier, say which one in the first message and the reply will tell you who is free among the women who have it.

What the profiles will not tell you is which language anybody learned first, and that is deliberate. A page lists what a woman speaks and leaves it there. The same goes for where anyone is from, which is not on any page of this site and is not a question the house answers.

Two therapists means two agreements

If the two of you are booking a therapist each, you are choosing twice, and availability tightens considerably. Two women free for the same hours on the same evening is a smaller set than one woman free, and it narrows further the closer you get to the date.

Name two, name a third as a fallback, and say in the message that a therapist each is what you want rather than leaving it to be inferred. A booking for two cannot become a booking for one at the door, or the other way round, so this is the one detail that genuinely has to be settled in writing.

Asking again for the same person

Couples on this kind of trip come back, often three or four times a year, and the second arrangement is easier than the first in every respect. Write the name, the format and the length into your own chat when the trip ends, dated, because in four months neither of you will remember whether it was ninety minutes or two hours.

Then ask from the same thread. Nothing is guaranteed, since each of these women keeps her own hours and takes the bookings she chooses, but a named request made eight weeks out is a very different proposition from the same request made on the night.