I Thought This Job Would Make Me Hate Men. What Actually Happened Surprised Me.

At the beginning, I was afraid of this job.

Not because I was scared of getting on a plane, meeting a stranger, or walking into a hotel room alone.

I was afraid of what the job might do to me after a year. After two. After dozens of encounters.

I had the same image of it that most people probably do.

Sex. Money. Hotels.

And somewhere in the back of my mind was that familiar social judgment: this is beneath you.

I thought that if I stayed in it for too long, something in me would go numb.

That after everything I saw, I would start hating men.

That I would stop trusting them.

That every married man would become another piece of evidence that relationships do not work, fidelity does not exist, and people are much worse than they pretend to be.

But my biggest fear was probably about myself.

That one day I would look in the mirror and think:

What are you actually doing?

That I would start to disgust myself.

The job did change me.

Just in the opposite way I expected.

The more men I met, the harder it became to see them in black and white

Maybe that is the biggest paradox.

I thought this work would make me think worse of men.

Instead, I started understanding them more.

Not excusing them.

There is a difference.

Understanding them.

Because when you know someone only through one thing they have done, it is very easy to put them into a category.

Unfaithful husband.

Rich egomaniac.

Workaholic.

Man having a midlife crisis.

But then you spend six hours with that person.

Or two days.

And suddenly there are a hundred other things attached to that one label.

He tells you about his father.

The company that almost destroyed him.

His child.

The woman he may still love, even though they have not known how to talk to each other for years.

Something he is afraid of that, according to everyone around him, a man like him should never be afraid of.

And suddenly, you are no longer looking at a category.

You are looking at a person.

He may still do things you disagree with.

But you realise people are much more complicated than a single sentence about them.

The biggest surprise was not the sex. It was the conversations.

If someone had asked me years ago what this job would give me, I definitely would not have said that it would change the way I think.

But that is exactly what happened.

I found myself sitting across from people I probably never would have met in my ordinary life.

People from different countries.

Different cultures.

People running companies I might otherwise only have read about.

People with enough money to live in a completely different world of possibilities.

And, at the same time, with problems that money could not solve.

When you spend an entire evening with someone, the conversation rarely stays on weather and wine.

You start talking about business.

Money.

Power.

Relationships.

Divorce.

Children.

Decisions that made millions.

And decisions they have regretted for ten years.

And I listened.

Not because I was taking notes.

But some sentences simply stay with you.

I learned that people who “have everything” are still looking for something

This probably changed my idea of success more than anything else.

I used to have a simple equation in my head.

More money = more peace.

More success = more confidence.

More freedom = a happier life.

Then I started meeting people who already had everything other people put on their vision boards.

Money.

Companies.

Cars.

Houses.

The ability to wake up in the morning and decide they wanted to be on the other side of Europe by dinner.

And I realised something slightly uncomfortable.

You can have everything you are currently working towards and still feel lonely at night.

You can manage hundreds of people and still have no idea what to do in your own relationship.

You can look completely confident and still privately question the decision you defend in front of everyone else.

You can buy almost anything.

But you still cannot simply buy peace of mind.

Money solves an enormous number of problems.

It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

It just cannot solve everything going on inside a person.

My relationship with my own sexuality changed too

This was probably the part I expected least.

I assumed that working in an environment where sexuality is so present would eventually make me numb to it.

That sex would become less personal.

That I would emotionally detach from it.

That did not happen.

Instead, I started paying much more attention to myself.

What I like.

What I do not like.

What attracts me.

What exists only as a fantasy and what I would never actually want in real life.

What I do because I genuinely want to, and what I might do only because I feel it is expected of me.

I started understanding my own body and my own boundaries much better.

And strangely, I feel that my sexuality is healthier, more confident, and much more mine than it used to be.

I no longer see sexuality as something that simply “happens between a man and a woman.”

I see it as part of myself.

Something I get to make decisions about.

Something I can be curious about.

Something I can enjoy without feeling that I need to apologise for it.

And also something I can say no to at any moment.

Maybe that is why intimacy means something different to me now.

It is much less about what is technically happening and much more about whether I feel comfortable, safe, and like myself while it is happening.

This job completely broke some of my old opinions

I used to divide a lot of things into right and wrong.

I still do, in some ways.

But now I can see much more space in between.

When you spend your whole life around people who live similarly to you, it is easy to believe that your way of seeing the world is simply the normal one.

Then you sit across from someone who grew up in a completely different culture, with a completely different relationship to marriage, work, family, money, or sex.

And suddenly, their way of thinking makes complete sense within the life they have lived.

I do not have to agree with it.

But I started asking why much more often.

Why does this person think like this?

What happened to them?

What would I think if I had lived their life?

And how many of my own “strong opinions” only existed because I had never really known anyone from the other side?

That does not mean I have fewer boundaries.

The opposite.

Mine are much clearer now.

I just stopped believing that you can understand a person in five minutes.

From the outside, this work looks much easier than it is

Dresses.

Heels.

Hotels.

Flights.

Dinner.

On Instagram, you could make it look like a very beautiful life.

But between a photo from a five-star hotel and reality, there can be a twelve-hour journey, an airport before sunrise, a man you have never met before, and a situation you have to read within seconds.

You learn very quickly to read a room.

A tone of voice.

A look.

The moment the atmosphere changes.

When to continue.

When to stop.

And when to simply leave.

Being beautiful is not enough.

There are plenty of beautiful women.

Expensive clothes are not enough either.

Those can be bought in an afternoon.

What is much harder is knowing how to move naturally around people who are very good at noticing when someone is pretending to be something they are not.

And most importantly, you need to know who you are.

Because without that, boundaries become very difficult to protect.

Of course, not all of it was beautiful

I do not want to turn this work into a fairy tale.

There are encounters I would gladly erase.

Men I never want to see again.

Moments when I was exhausted.

Situations when I thought: no amount of money is worth this.

And moments when I had to answer one question very quickly:

Where is my line?

But some of the most uncomfortable experiences taught me one of the most important things.

You do not have to defend your “no.”

You do not have to write an essay explaining it.

You do not have to convince someone that your reason is good enough.

Sometimes “no” is the entire sentence.

And strangely, the job I thought might make me lose respect for myself taught me to demand more respect for myself instead.

And what about the fear that I would start hating men?

It never happened.

If anything, the opposite did.

I saw men in moments when most people probably never do.

Without status.

Without an audience.

Without the need to look perfect.

And I realised that many of them carry things the people around them know absolutely nothing about.

That does not automatically make them good people.

It does not remove responsibility for the choices they make.

It just means that the space between a “good” person and a “bad” person is often much larger than I once wanted to believe.

And paradoxically, this work did not make me more cynical.

It made me less naive, but also more understanding.

Sometimes I wonder who I would be if I had said no back then

My life would probably be calmer.

More predictable.

There would definitely be fewer airports.

Fewer suitcases packed at the last minute.

Fewer situations where I had no idea what was waiting behind the next door.

Maybe it would be simpler.

But I also think it would be much narrower.

I would know fewer kinds of people.

Fewer worlds.

Fewer ways of living.

And I would probably still believe many things I no longer believe today.

At the beginning, I was afraid this job would turn me into a woman I could not respect.

Instead, it forced me to understand what I actually need in order to respect myself.

It taught me to understand men better.

To understand my boundaries better.

And, unexpectedly, to understand my own sexuality better too.

That is not what I thought would happen when I started.

If these stories make you curious about the woman behind them, you can get to know me a little better here.

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