Not sure if this thread is the right place to post something like this, but there's something I want to write that I think might help some of the new joiners on Seeking. It exceeds the character limit of the thread so I'll split it in two. The mods will move it or delete it if it's not the kind of post one should write here.
I've opened a subscription three times, in the past two and a half years, and particularly on the first two times I've had a lot of experience over 2+1 months. I've met all sort of people and lived a lot of really interesting experiences, at the point that I suspect at some point I'll write a book about it, but there's one kind of Seeking user that I want to warn newbies about. The vampires.
So, let's put it like this, if you try to learn about Seeking from this thread, you'll end up thinking that it's just another way to find prostitutes, and in some cases you'll be able to score some bargains where people will end up doing overnights with you for the price of a couple of hours. That's true, of course, there are a lot of women that just use Seeking as a way to practice some form of prostitution (from the most professional, multiple-men-a-day ones, to the hobbyists that only see one or two men a week to complement their income). This is not all there is, as most people will eventually realise: there are a lot of people on Seeking that are not just after money and really need some form of connection, which is why in a number of cases it's possible to find deep connections, friendships, and even love.
Materialism, though, is obviously a main feature of the site, and most women will be interested in money in one form or another (even if most in my experience are *not* just interested in money, and that's the main difference between meeting people on Seeking and seeing escorts). I think there's nothing wrong about that, as I think that as long as people are upfront about what they want from a situation, everyone can make their own decisions. I've met a lot of materialistic women in my life, among them a lot of escorts that I've fucked with great satisfaction for the past 30 years and in almost all of those cases I had the absolute certainty that the person I had had sex with was first and foremost a human being. In many cases those human beings were really nice human beings. I some cases, I ended up with great friendships. In one case I ended up with a long term relationship.
So, prostitutes are human beings, escorts are human beings, and most Seeking users are human beings. But not all of them.
Vampires are not human beings. Vampires have no soul. Vampires try to feed off your soul, because they are empty shells devoid of any humanity.
The first time I met a vampire on Seeking it was maybe the fourth or fifth girl I talked to on my first experience. I was in a very vulnerable phase of my life, I had split from my partner of 20 years, I was coming out of a decade of shitty or non-existent sex (prossies aside), I was insecure and problematic, and I had joined Seeking to correct all of this. And it worked marvelously because, thank god, the first three girls I met on Seeking were *not* vampires, and brought my old self back to life with a series of astonishing nights were I ended up realising that my sexual prowess in my late fourties was no different at all than in my early twenties.
Then I met a vampire.
She was a lanky model with a bob haircut and some particularly angular facial features. We started chatting without mentioning money or arrangements, and she was smart and interesting. She spoke of her life traveling across fashion capitals around Europe, one day in Paris, one day in Milan, one day back in London. She told me of a job for a fintech company, and hinted at a life spent partying or chilling in exclusive clubs in the city. None of this was particularly impressive for me, but I can appreciate smart people even when they're pretentious, and smart she was. One day she dragged me into a conversation about her country of origin in Africa, where she accused me of some kind of bias and ignorance (that, in all honesty, was true). I found the conversation interesting, challenging and somewhat informative, while still kind of funny due to some evident trace of wokeism that I could easily counter in a way that drove her even more mad. After the conversation I assumed that she would not want to hear from me again, but instead she sent me a video of her commenting on our conversation. In the video she was speaking with what I could recognise even as a foreigner as a markedly posh accent, but most of all she moved her head laterally while speaking, extending her long neck in a way that I found distinctively unattractive, and for some reason reminded me of the "scorpion wife" animated by Gerald Scarfe for Pink Floyd's The Wall.
I'm not one who flees from a challenge, and the conversation had left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. That's because even if I stood my ground and countered decently her accusations of racism and parochialism, I felt that I had not expressed my best arguments, mostly because I didn't want to turn the discussion into too open a confrontation. For the umpteenth time in my life I had been a Good Guy, the kind of figure that I wanted to erase for good from my personality. That was one of the main reasons why I had joined Seeking.
So I kept talking to her, discussing possible dinner meetings on one of the evenings after she would get back from one of her trips. It was difficult to align our schedules, but finally we found a match and I booked my favourite restaurant for what I thought would be a nice evening of tense but intellectually enriching exchanges. Everything was fine until a few hours before the dinner when, after two weeks of chatting never mentioning arrangements once, all of a sudden, she asked me:
"but, wait, do you want an arrangement?".
I had spent the previous month meeting a different woman on average every three days and I had had more sex than in the previous ten years altogether. A woman that I wasn't sure I would even find attractive in person was asking me if I wanted to pay her for sex. I answered hesitantly:
"oh, I'm not sure, I have had a few lately and I'm not sure I'm in the right mood".
She instantly dropped her mask, and I saw the vampire. We were chatting, but the verbal transformation that happened instantly left me with a vivid visual impression, one of a human face suddenly contorting in a monstruous grimace... and hair on fire, and body turning into a scorpion.
She went berserk, started writing that I was taking the piss, that I was treating Seeking like a dating website when it obviously wasn't, wrote that I wasted her time for days and days. I was mostly reading, interjecting only sporadically, and this seemed to fire her up more and more. She became increasingly aggressive, and started showing more and more the traits of the vampire.
The vampire wants to suck your soul, the vampire wants to swallow you, the vampire wants to turn you into a vampire. The vampire wants you to suffer, wants to drag you down to hell with them.
I remember one thing that she wrote, that struck me instantly as one of the most twisted things I had ever read. She said something like "you are a manipulative piece of shit, because all this time you spoke to me while never having any intention to have an arrangement". Which is a way to say "you are manipulative because you had no intention of fucking me for money". Her words felt drenched in greed, in a raging need for resource grab: it all felt desperate and furious. I have wondered a few times what could justify that level of visceral anxiety for money, and ended up thinking that only a severe drug addiction probably justified it.
Things continued with a progression that felt like some kind of descent to hell: she started doing what vampires do, which is to try and hit me where she thought I was weak, to make me suffer. She started writing "what do you think? That I'm interested in spending an evening with you? that any young woman would be interested in spending an evening with you? no one would ever be interested in that unless you pay them money: just try to go to a bar and hit on a woman, see what happens!".
I felt a wave of disgust, and contempt for her. I knew full well that only a few days before these words would have hurt me deeply. But I came out of an evening just a few days before where a girl I had spent the night with, fucking furiously and talking about our lives had sent me a message on her way back saying "I really hope we're going to meet again, and I will never accept a pound more from you". I wrote back to the vampire and just said "fuck off, Eva, I'm going to block you now", and I did.
I had many more arrangements after that, and just tried to be more careful in listening to my instinct when something in a conversation felt off. That served me well, and I mostly stayed out of danger.
But a year and a half passed since I last had an account, and recently I reopened one, and I had forgotten about that experience. Seeking was still the same, an endless source of temptation with scores of women available for what seems like an easy journey into my bed in exchange of a very reasonable amount of money, or sometimes nothing. In a matter of days I weaved about a dozen conversations and started organising evening meetings. The first one went well, and caused me to lower my guard even further. I accepted an invitation by someone I had exchanged only a couple of messages with, of which I had not seen a convincing picture, and that in one of her messages had clearly sent "semi-professional" vibes, commenting on the fact that one could not expect an overnight arrangement to cost the same as an hour with an escort.
Still, something made me curious: the person seemed smart, she made some references to my profile that showed interest in literature, asked me to bring a book instead of an envelope for discretion for the travel money I had promised her (not much, she convinced me she was coming from quite far away and I have no reason to believe she was lying). I invited her for dinner.
When she arrived I was pleasantly surprised. She looked nothing like the very nondescript pictures on her profile, and was dressed sexily and provocatively, under an elegant jacket that she just opened when she sat down at the table with me. A very beautiful Mediterranean girl with perfect olive skin and oval face, a light accent but perfect English. Tall without being lanky, slim but with the right curves, with clear bright eyes and a lovely smile. I was savouring the after dinner, already.
We ordered wine and started talking over our starters. We had agreed that we wouldn't talk money during the meal and we would approach that later. She had given signs of being more careful and discreet than usual (I didn't know her name, she disclosed her number only minutes before the meeting, I hadn't seen her face in a clear enough picture) so I wasn't expecting the discussion to even touch the topic of arrangements during the dinner. But the restaurant was noisy enough that it was clear no one could listen, so after a few platitudes about trips, and holidays, and favourite cuisines, the conversation veered naturally towards Seeking.
I started mentioning my past experience, speaking briefly of how important Seeking had been for me years ago, and how many connections I still retained from my first two spells on the site.
[Continues]
