Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove, I want to state up front that I understand the question that I’m asking sounds like it has an obvious answer, but I promise the context changes things. Ok, here goes…
How do you know if the stripper actually DOES like you and sees you as more than a customer?
Here’s the short version: a couple weeks back, a friend of mine was having a hard time after a break up, so we all decided to go to a strip club to have some beers, see some naked ladies and generally forget our troubles for a while. Most of the night was unremarkable, except I had a nice, but brief conversation with one of the dancers about the music she was dancing to (mostly Type-O Negative and goth industrial).
Well, last week, I was bored, lonely and a bit horny, so I decided to hit the club by myself. I was surprised when the dancer (“Nyx”) remembered me and came over to sit with me. Over the course of the evening, we talked about mutual hobbies (she likes ren faires and TTRPGs, I like painting minis for fun and back boardgame kickstarters just for more miniatures), music, books (she’s into Romantasy and the ACOTAR books, I like LitRPG) and cartoons from when we were growing up. Outside of when she had to go onstage for her sets, she spent the entire time just hanging out and talking to me. I even asked if she needed to go get some dances, but she said she was fine. I think over the course of the night I spent $50 on her – one dance and paying for a couple of drinks for the both of us. She insisted on buying one of mine at one point too.
Before I had to leave for the night, she made a point of putting her number in my phone under her real name (not her stage name) and having me text her so she could have mine. Since then, we’ve texted a couple time (she initiated), usually about inconsequential stuff like a tiktok video about crows.
I know the cliches and all that, but this doesn’t feel like dancer/customer interaction. I don’t want to get ahead of myself or be like every other horny idiot, but I feel like this is different. Am I absolutely out of my mind for thinking that this is an exception to the “the stripper doesn’t actually like you?” rule? Am I going to be making an ass of myself if I keep this going or ask her out on a date? Should I just assume this isn’t real, or is there something I should do instead? I never expected to be in this situation. Help?
Love In The (Strip) Club
Straight talk, LITSC: we say “the stripper doesn’t like you” because most of the time, they don’t.
This is less of a hard and fast rule and more of a reminder that guys already tend to mistake politeness for flirting and to not connect how someone in a service industry who works for tips has an incentive to maximize her tips by any (legal) means possible.
It’s one thing when you’re talking about a bartender or a barista; it’s another when you’re talking about, say, shot-girls, go-go-dancers… or strippers, for that matter. Those are people you tend to find in environments where you’re even more likely to read things wrong.
A strip club in particular is a specific environment, and that environment is (theoretically; I’ve been in some truly sad and depressing strip clubs) where things are chaotic and heightened. Alcohol is flowing, the music is pounding, lights are flashing, boobs are everywhere, sex is in the air and people are varying degrees of horny.
It is, in short, a place designed to get people amped up and hornt up – a perfect incubator for a lot of bad decisions. And there are few times when a straight man is less likely to be thinking clearly and more likely to make some poor choices than when a pretty, half-naked woman is grinding in his lap and flirting with him for dollars.
Dancers, in particular, are incentivized to find regulars – someone who’ll come to the club specifically to see them and spend money on them instead of whomever happens to be on stage or sit with them first. Cultivating a relationship with a customer, giving him encouragement to come see her is a part of the game; giving him a number (not necessarily her number – Google Voice is a thing and burner numbers are cheap and plentiful) increases that feeling of connection and allows her to send little flirty come-hithers. So, even if a dancer gives you her number, that doesn’t mean much. It’s not significantly different than texting with someone after subscribing to their OnlyFans account; it’s basically customer service.
Now all that having been said: dancers are people, the same as anyone else. Some are relentless mercenaries with a vicious take-no-prisoners grindset while others are more relaxed and laissez-faire about the whole thing. While many, if not most, are going to make maximizing their nightly income a priority, everyone is fully capable of deciding that maybe a customer is cool and nice and they like them. It’s certainly not impossible for them to feel like this person might be a good friend, and they can have warm-fuzzy feelings for people they met while at work. So it’s not impossible that Nyx thinks you’re a cool dude more than an ATM with legs.
And honestly, her behavior definitely sounds like she enjoyed talking to you. She put off getting paid to hang out with you, didn’t milk you for drinks and otherwise made it clear she was enjoying your company for its own sake. Likewise, sending texts that weren’t explicitly or obviously about when she would be working and trying to get you to the club seems to suggest that she likes you as a person.
So I think you can assume that, yes Nyx likes you as more than a customer. I think it’s safe to say that you have a burgeoning friendship, at the very least. Whether that means there’s more… that’s another question entirely, and it’s one that’s a little complicated by the nature of her work. Flirting with a dancer in the club means next to nothing, functionally; it’s an unwritten part of the job description. Flirting with her over text is, likewise, not a reliable indicator, simply because of the financial incentives.
On her side of things, there’s also the fact that a lot of guys want to bang dancers and think they want to date them, but aren’t prepared for what dating a dancer would actually mean – in terms of lifestyle, hours, etc. So there’s a lot of incentive on her end to view interest from guys she met at work with great skepticism… moreso than she would if she weren’t a dancer and you weren’t a customer.
As a result, things that would serve as potential signs of interest as more than platonic friendship should be seen with great skepticism, especially early on, simply because the potential for a false positive is high on your end, and as ‘dudes be lying’ situation on hers.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means that you have to recognize that this is a situation where the signal to noise ratio is absurdly low and weighted towards the “noise” side of things. As a result, I think your best bet is to assume “friendship” before you assume “potential date”.
I talk a lot about why “dating slow” is a good idea, and I think it especially applies here. Taking time to get to know each other outside of a dancer/customer context will be good, if only so you both have a baseline for each other’s personalities outside the club. It’ll be easier for both of you to recognize any flirting as genuine when you have more context to work from. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t flirt, but I’d keep it light, breezy and infrequent – a “one ping only, Mr. Vassily” sort of situation, where you send out a ping and see what comes back.
In terms of how to proceed… honestly, I’d say start with being texting buddies and see what happens. Seeing her at the club isn’t the worst idea in the world, but you’re going to have to remember that you’re seeing her at work, and that means a) time with you is time when she’s not getting paid (if you’re not buying dances) and b) the environment affects things.
What I would not do, at least not right away, is ask her out on a date or to see her outside of the club. If she proposes something, that’s one thing, and you should feel free to accept. But your asking first gets a little too close to typical Club Customer behavior, and runs the risk of falling back into that dynamic.
However, if the two of you have been vibing for a while and you feel like a) you know her well enough to have a grip on when she’s in Dancer Mode vs. off-the-clock and b) you feel like you know yourself well enough to know the difference between motivated and dickful thinking vs. clear thinking… there’s nothing wrong with saying something along the lines of “hey, there’s a Dungeon Crawler Carl release party this weekend, would you care to go?” and see what happens.
So the TL;DR of it all: yes, she seems to think you’re a cool guy and at the very least, you have a potential new friendship in the offing here. Take things slow, get to know each other and do your best to keep a level head, and you’ll have a better idea whether there’s a potential for more.
Oh, and as a pro-tip: if you’re unsure if you’re thinking clearly about whether you’re reading too much into things with her… crank one out and then go back and see if you feel the same way. Sometimes a little post-nut clarity can force the blood back to your brain and clear up some ‘mixed’ signals.
Good luck.
Dear Doctor NerdLove: when I met the woman I’m seeing (I’m 29 and male, she’s 28 and female), we both agreed that we were non-monogamous and possibly polyamorous. She, at least, knew for a fact that she (I’ll call her “Allie”) was poly, while I was open to the possibility that I could love more than one person, even if I hadn’t yet. We made it clear when we started dating that this was an open relationship, we talked about how we were going to handle questions like other partners, how much we shared about dates, what was or wasn’t allowed (barriers for sex full stop, regular STI testing and disclosure of results, discussions if one of our partners had something like herpes but not an automatic disqualification), what kind of relationship we were going to have if feelings entered the chat and so on. I feel like we did everything as right as we could to set ourselves up for making an ethical, non-monogamous relationship work.
Obviously I wouldn’t be writing in if everything were great. Mostly it is, but there’s one weird problem: I don’t think I’m non-monogamous. Or if I want to be honest: I don’t think I was ever non-monogamous in the first place but I thought I was.
In my last serious relationship (pricing rings and talking about diamonds over other stones serious), the sex had started to fade to nothing and I had realized that I wasn’t happy being with her, but didn’t want to leave. We eventually did break up (long story, mutual decision, no hard feelings and remarkably amicable, really) and I thought that perhaps the issue was monogamy. So for a year or so I called myself non-monogamous and that was that. I had a number of casual partners and people I had affection for but nobody I could say I was in love with.
With Allie, it’s different. We’ve been together for long enough to get through the honeymoon period and unlike anyone I’ve dated prior to now, I am in “bad poetry and gushing to all my friends” love. But I’m also not interested in anyone else. Not romantically, not sexually. I have no interest in going out and finding other partners; she’s the person I want, end of sentence.
Having been in various types of relationships before, I can say that this isn’t the same as with my ex or the casual connections I had, where my interest in other people was always there. With Allie, it’s not that other women don’t exist or that I don’t find them sexually attractive, it’s that I don’t feel attracted TO them. It’s more an academic feeling of “yes, under other circumstances, I would want to sleep with her.”
This is why I’m beginning to think that I’m not actually non-monogamous, I was just a cliché – the guy who was “looking for short-term but open to long”, and my non-monogamous-ness was more my being single and not wanting to commit or be “locked down”.
Allie has noticed that while she’s been dating and has a couple of play partners that she sees occasionally, I haven’t and she’s worried that this is a problem. We haven’t talked about my possibly being monogamous, but I have told her that I’m just not interested in other people the way I am interested in her. While she doesn’t have another romantic partner, she knows that she’s fully polyamorous and that there likely will be someone she loves like she loves me, and she’s worried that either I’m going to resent the other person or that I’m going to feel upset that things are unbalanced.
I will be honest, I’ve never been in a situation where someone I’ve been seeing has been committed to me AND another person, just other sex partners, so I don’t know how I’ll feel. I’m not bothered by her seeing her other partners, and I don’t anticipate being upset by her loving someone else too, but obviously there’s no way to know until it happens.
Is it possible for me to be functionally mono in a poly relationship and still make things work? Are we just doomed and should break up now? What do we do?
Don’t Want More Than I Got
Here’s the problem with your question, DWMTIG: it’s not really an either-or kind of situation. It’s certainly possible that you were unwittingly the sort of clichéd dude who says he’s non-monogamous so that he can keep all his options open and see multiple people without having to commit, until he met the “right” person. It’s also entirely possible to be non-monogamous and just… not want to bang other people.
I think the issue here is that you’re getting hung up on labels and treating them as absolutes, rather than as conditional descriptors. Being non-monogamous doesn’t mean that you’re permanently hornt up and always on the lookout to add to your harem/polycule/rotation/whatever; it just means that you don’t make sexually exclusive commitments with someone. Similarly, being polyamorous doesn’t mean that you require multiple concurrent romantic partners, it just means that you have the capacity for it.
Neither, for that matter, are you stuck with that label for life once you apply it. Sometimes it may just be something that’s right for you at a particular stage of your life, but not later on. Someone who mostly had monogamous commitments at one point and later became non-monogamous wasn’t necessarily wrong or lying about who they were before; it may have been circumstantial or just their understanding of who they were before. With more experience, perspective and self-knowledge, their understanding of themselves has changed and grown. That can work both ways; someone who was non-monogamous can find that perhaps this model of relationship doesn’t work for them at this stage of their life. That doesn’t invalidate who they were before; it just reflects who they were at that time.
There’s also the fact your present circumstances are permanent. You may only want Allie for now, but that may change in the future. Or it may not. There’s no way of knowing, really, until the future gets here.
What I would suggest is to not let the label or identity be so restrictive that you feel trapped by it. I think it’s fair for now to still call yourself non-monogamous, even if for the moment you’re choosing not to date or sleep with other people. You aren’t in a monogamous relationship after all, since Allie still has other partners. Since you seem to still be cool with that, I don’t think you really have a problem on your hands.
It’s understandable that Allie is worried. One of the biggest cliches in the ENM community are dudes who get bitter and resentful when their female – or femme-bodied – partners have more success than they do and throw a tantrum about it. But if it really is the case that you’re happy with her as your only partner and you’re satisfied with the time you currently have together (since her having other partners and time being linear means that this takes time away from time with you), then I don’t see any reason why things would have to change. You’re happy, she’s happy, and trouble isn’t on the horizon. Yeah, you don’t know how you may feel if and when she has another romantic partner, but that’s going to be true even if you were a dyed-in-the-wool, certified poly guy. Poly and ENM people still get jealous or feel neglected or otherwise get in their feels about things. But part of being ENM/poly means addressing those feelings, not letting them fester; I think it’s entirely fair to say that you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it.
My advice? Tell Allie that she’s all you want and you’re happy with things as they are. You simply don’t feel the need to go seek out other potential partners right now. If that changes in the future, then you still have the option to do so. But until that day – a day that may never come to pass – you’re satisfied and you aren’t asking for her to change or to restrict herself to just you.
The other thing I think you should make clear is that you (the general “you”, not you specifically) don’t need things to be balanced, you need them to be equitable. You, specifically, don’t need to have exactly as many partners as Allie does in order to be happy or satisfied in your relationship; you just need to be happy and satisfied with your situation. If that means that she’s your only partner currently while she has multiple, that’s fine… as long as you’re fine with it, too. To get upset because you’re not (currently) on the market or trying to find more people to fit into your social calendar is to borrow unnecessary trouble from the future, for no reason.
In other words: don’t make trouble where there isn’t any. If you’re both happy with things as they currently stand, then great, blessings on you both. Take two, they’re small.
Just keep the lines of communication open and clear and be up front if – if – those feelings change.
Good luck.
