Dear Jana,
I know this is going to sound paranoid, but I can’t shake the feeling something odd is going on with my wife’s obsession with Dubai.
She’s 28, very attractive and popular on Instagram and recently started going on these solo ‘luxury getaways’ there.
For context, I’m an older gentleman on my second marriage. I won’t dance around the topic: we did meet on an ‘arrangements’ website but our love is genuine and we’ve been together for five years. She is wonderful with my adult children, too.
Back to those holidays. She’s staying in five-star hotels, going out on superyachts, taking photos in infinity pools. But she’s never with anyone else in the pictures and she won’t tell me who her travelling companions are. She claims it’s all part of her ‘healing era’ and says I need to stop being jealous.
Now, I pay for parts of these trips – her flight over and maybe a week in a hotel. But she always stays longer and ends up in different hotels or Airbnbs. I know she doesn’t have the means to pay for these herself.
A friend of mine who’s done business in the United Arab Emirates says I need to ‘watch her’ because she might be a high-class escort. I couldn’t bear the thought. I love this woman.
An Older Gentleman.
A man who is worried about his young wife’s luxury trips to Dubai asks Jana for her advice
My dear, dear Older Gentleman.
Let me get this straight. Your 28-year-old, drop-dead gorgeous wife is skipping the usual hippy-hoo-haa healing spots like Byron Bay and Bali, and instead choosing to realign her chakras in one of the richest cities on earth?
And you’re just supposed to sip your coffee and say namaste?
Please. If she were truly meditating by the pool, she would be tagging a wellness retreat, not uploading fancy thirst traps that scream ‘money, money, money!’
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a bit of self-care. But we’ve all seen Eat, Pray, Love and it usually involves a bongo drum, chanting under the full moon and the occasional mug of matcha.
Not five-star hotels. Not superyachts. Julia Roberts didn’t realign her soul on the back of a 100-foot Sunseeker.
This sounds a little less like spiritual awakening… and a little more like high-end hospitality with ‘benefits’. I’m sorry to say this, but I think your friend is right.
I won’t say outright that your wife is part of an elite escort ring… but I’m also not not saying it.
‘Julia Roberts didn’t realign her soul on the back of a 100-foot Sunseeker,’ Jana says (this is a stock image posed by a model)
What I can say for sure is you have a gut feeling. And guts are rarely wrong.
So, is there a gentle way to ask your wife if she’s on an all-expenses-paid sugar sabbatical? Not really.
But you could try something like: ‘Darling, I love that you are healing, but can you help me understand how you are funding all these five-star trips?’
Or, if you want to be more tactful, throw in a white lie like: ‘One of my businessman friends says there is a way to claim wellness retreats on tax. Would you mind if I took a look at the receipts?’
I know, I know. I am a smart cookie.
I would also like to say this: it’s not ‘paranoid’ to have your head screwed on. As much as we would like to ignore what’s in front of us for the sake of peace, sometimes you must recognise brazen and suspicious behaviour when you see it.
So really, the question isn’t what she’s doing in Dubai – it’s whether you’re okay being the stay-at-home husband while she lives her best, er, sponsored life.
I’m sure your children would want better for you.
Dear Jana,
I’ve been seeing this guy for about three months and it’s been going so well.
He’s sweet, attentive and great in bed… but the other night over drinks he told me he used to be a ‘pick-up artist’ in his late teens and early twenties.
He studied ‘The Game’, went to seminars on how to seduce women and even kept a spreadsheet of his conquests. Now, this was the late Noughties before that whole scene became a cesspit of Andrew Tate-style misogyny, but I was still shocked.
He swears he’s changed. He says he was a shy teenager who lacked confidence and wanted a girlfriend, and those methods gave him the tools to approach women. When he realised how manipulative and toxic it was, he threw in the towel.
But now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Did he use those tactics on me? Was I ‘negged’ and didn’t even realise it? Did he just play the ‘nice guy’ because it works better than the ‘bad boy’ these days?
I’m genuinely falling for him but now I’m wondering if I’m just another chapter in a well-practised routine.
Can a reformed player really change, or am I just the latest one to get played?
Jacqui
Oh Jacqui,
Pickup artists, reformed or otherwise, make my skin crawl. I’m all for personal growth, but men who once treated women like data entries don’t deserve a round of applause just because they’ve stopped using words like ‘target’, ‘closing’ and ‘negging’.
He may have lacked confidence when he picked up The Game. But he also lacked respect for women if he started using those tricks.
‘I used to be a pickup artist’ is not a cute confession to drop over cocktails like it’s a quirky gap-year story. It’s less ‘I backpacked through Europe’ and more ‘I used to study how to emotionally manipulate women’.
For me, the biggest red flag isn’t that he used to do it; it’s that he told you.
Sure, some may say he gets points for ‘honesty’ but now he’s left you questioning every sweet gesture he does. It’s what I like to call a ‘brain f**k’, or, as therapists say, ‘your nervous system responding to a perceived threat’. And I say listen to it.
I mean, change is possible. But true transformation doesn’t come in the form of casually dropping a bomb about his past and expecting praise.
Has he shown any remorse for the women he seduced using these methods? Or was he trying to subtly brag about his old ‘skills’?
Sorry, no matter how much of a ‘nice guy’ he is today, it’s still giving red flag.
A woman asks Jana what to do after discovering her boyfriend was once a ‘pick-up artist’
Dear Jana,
My boyfriend recently told me he wants to explore an open relationship. He said it would ‘bring us closer’ and that monogamy is outdated.
But when I asked if that means I could sleep with other people as well, he looked shocked and said, ‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t.’
So… open for him, closed for me? How is that fair?
He insists it’s not about control, just biology and that men were made to sow their seeds in more than one spot.
I don’t know how I feel about it.
Anonymous.
Oh, for the love of God. That’s not an open relationship; that’s a slippery sleaze trying to disguise what he’s asking for as ‘sexual enlightenment’.
Pull up a seat and let me translate what he really meant: ‘I want the thrill of sleeping around, but I’d prefer if you just stayed home, made me a sandwich and waited patiently for my texts.’ Dickhead.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking monogamy is outdated – hell, sometimes I agree on a particularly horny day – but expecting you to remain monogamous while he, er, sows his seed isn’t progressive; it’s just plain selfish.
And don’t get me started on the whole ‘men are wired to breed’ nonsense. What is this, a David Attenborough documentary?
If he wants a ‘modern relationship’, then he needs to get on board with the idea that open relationships only work when there’s mutual respect, clear communication, and equal rules. Not some caveman logic dressed up as sexual evolution.
So, no, you’re not being prudish.
What he’s asking for is absurd, and I wouldn’t waste another second stressing over it. Kick him to the kerb, because there’s no fixing stupid.
