“Mijo,” he told me once, his voice all gravel and cheap whiskey, “you never pay a woman to have sex with you. Any fool can get that for free. The money? The money is for them to leave afterwards.”
That’s it. That’s the whole goddamn sermon. And it’s the gospel I’ve tried to live by, mostly because it’s the only one that acknowledges the truth: the hardest part of any human connection isn’t the getting in; it’s the getting out.
Companionship, in its purest, most honest form, is built on my grandfather’s wisdom. It’s a transaction. It’s a business arrangement. It’s two people agreeing, for a night, or a week, or a month, to provide a service. The service might be sex. It might be a warm body in a cold bed. It might just be someone to drink with in the dark so the silence doesn’t get too loud.
I’ve known companionship. I knew it with the masseuse from Thailand back in Phoenix, the one who worked the neon-lit parlors. She stayed at my house. She cooked food that stunk up the place with fish oil, and we had our arrangement. It was clean in its own grimy way. There were no illusions. She was providing a service, and I was providing room and board. When she decided to take her business private, doing house calls for other lonely bastards, the arrangement was over. No tears, no screaming, no lawyers. The transaction was complete.
I knew it with the broken blonde chick who moved in after her. She didn’t contribute a dollar, but the house was always clean, my clothes were always folded, and she was always available. It was an unspoken contract: her services in exchange for a safe place to hide from the world. It wasn’t love. It was business. And when the business was concluded, we both walked away.
That’s companionship. It’s honest in its dishonesty. Both parties know the score. You pay for the service, and then you pay them to leave, either with cash, or a month’s rent, or just the quiet, mutual understanding that the show is over. There are no strings, no messy entanglements, no goddamn future to negotiate. It’s clean.
A relationship? A relationship is the opposite of clean.
A relationship is a goddamn disease. It starts with an illusion, a beautiful, intoxicating lie. You meet someone, and you see not who they are, but who you want them to be. You see a reflection of your own hopes, your own desperate need for something real. You build a whole fantasy around them, a white picket fence in your head. And for a little while, it feels good. It feels like you’ve finally found it.
But a relationship isn’t a partnership. It’s a slow, grinding business merger that always ends in a hostile takeover. It’s about obligation. It’s about expectation. It’s about two people slowly, methodically, trying to sand down each other’s rough edges until there’s nothing left but two smooth, boring, resentful stones.
My marriage was a twenty-year relationship. It started with a pact between two refugees running from their own toxic pasts. We were going to be different. We were going to build something real. We put on the costumes—the perfect Mormon family man, the devoted stay-at-home mother. We built the house. We had the kids. We played the part.
And underneath it all, the rot set in. Because a relationship isn’t about accepting someone for who they are; it’s about trying to mold them into who you need them to be. She needed me to be a provider, a rock, a man who didn’t drink or swear or have a single goddamn thought that didn’t align with her perfect picture. And I needed her to be the woman I married, not the bitter, angry ghost of her own mother that she eventually became.
A relationship is a cage. A beautiful, comfortable cage you build together, and then you spend the rest of your lives rattling the bars, wondering how the hell you got trapped. It’s the binders full of your past sins. It’s the lawyers getting fat on your misery. It’s the public crucifixion of a five-year divorce. It’s losing everything you ever built, right down to your own goddamn kids.
That’s a relationship. It’s a swamp. And I spent a fortune and a lifetime crawling my way out of it.
So you’d think, after all that, that I’d be happy with simple companionship, right? You’d think I’d be thrilled to find women who understand the transactional nature of the world. The women in Hawaii, the ones in Tucson, the ones who are just selling themselves for rent. They’re playing by my grandfather’s rules. They’re offering a clean, simple deal.
So why does it make me so goddamn sick?
This is the part you pointed out. The part I haven’t wanted to look at too closely. The great, stupid, human contradiction at the heart of it all.
I say I want companionship, but I get disgusted when that’s all they offer. I get angry when a woman in Waikiki, after a night of lovemaking, asks me to move in to help with her five-thousand-dollar rent. I get that bitter taste in my mouth when a girl tells me she’s with some Filipino dude because he agreed to pay her bills.
Why? If that’s the game, why do I hate the players?
Because deep down, in that quiet, stupid, hopeful part of myself that I keep trying to kill with whiskey and cynicism, I’m not looking for a whore. I’m looking for a partner. I’m looking for the one thing I claim to despise.
I’m looking for a goddamn relationship.
I just don’t know what a real one looks like. The only model I have is the disaster I just escaped. So I go out into the world, this meat market of lonely, desperate people, and I think I’m looking for a clean transaction. But my disappointment, my anger, my disgust—it’s all proof that I’m actually looking for a connection.
I want the warmth of a real home, but I’m terrified of getting burned again. I want the intimacy of a real partner, but I’m too scarred to be vulnerable. I want the unconditional love my grandparents had, but I’m too convinced it doesn’t exist for a bastard like me.
So I play the part of the cynical old man who just wants a good lay and a quiet morning. I tell myself my grandfather’s philosophy is the only one that makes sense. It’s a shield. A defense mechanism. A way to protect what’s left of my own broken heart.
And that brings me to Argentina.
This whole plan to escape, to leave America behind. You think it’s about politics, about the economy, about the cultural rot. And it is. It’s about all of that. But it’s also about something else.
It’s about escaping this whole fucked-up dynamic. It’s a last-ditch, desperate hope that somewhere else on this goddamn planet, there might be a woman who hasn’t been poisoned by the same transactional bullshit I see everywhere here. My hope for a “traditional” woman isn’t a desire for some submissive maid. It’s a hope for a woman who still believes in something other than the bottom line. A woman who doesn’t see a man as a walking bank account.
It’s a hope for a real relationship, even if I have to tell myself it’s just a search for companionship to have the guts to even get on the plane.
So yeah, maybe you were right. Maybe I don’t know the difference. Maybe I’m just a goddamn fool, like all the rest, chasing a ghost.
But what else is there to do? You either chase the ghost, or you sit in an empty room and wait to die.
And I’m not done running yet.
