Amsterdam · 23 therapists
The twenty-three therapists who take a room with two people in it
Twenty-three women work with the house, all of them twenty-one or over, and each keeps the hours she chose for herself. A room with two people in it is a different booking from a room with one, and every name here takes them.
The grid above is the whole roster rather than a shortlist for Thursday. Twenty-three is the number on the books; how many of them have a free evening on any given date is smaller and moves as a week fills up.
Nobody here is put on a rota. Each woman sets her own evenings, which is why a Tuesday and a Saturday in the same week answer with different names, and why an evening pinned down on Monday has more names behind it than the same evening asked about at six that day.
Asking for a date, or asking for a person
These are two separate questions and a working week goes smoother when they are asked separately. An evening in the middle of next week is easy to fix. One particular woman on that evening may or may not be, and finding out slowly costs you the evening you were trying to protect. A message giving the date, the hour, the length and whether the name is fixed settles in one exchange.
Languages across the roster
English appears on all twenty-three profiles, which matters at the end of a day one of you has already spent working in a second language. Spanish is on six, then French, Italian and Portuguese on three each, Russian on two, and Czech, Romanian, German, Hungarian, Dutch, Serbian and Ukrainian on one apiece. Five women carry three languages or more. If the evening would go better in something other than English, say so and the reply will tell you which names that leaves.
Where a journey to your door begins
There are no premises, so nobody sets out from an office. Every journey starts where she lives, and four districts hold the roster between them: Amsterdam Centrum with seven, Oud-Zuid with six, De Pijp with five and the Jordaan with five. In a city this compact that usually puts a name within reach of wherever the working half of the trip has booked you.
That is also the reason the arrival window never shifts. Forty to sixty minutes from an agreed booking to a knock, the same in every central district, and the same on a Friday as on a Monday. A room at a Schiphol airport hotel sits outside that window and is arranged on its own terms, with the length of the journey settled in writing before the hour is fixed.
What a profile carries
Her age, her languages, the district she starts from, the techniques on her file and her photographs, each one of her and published with her agreement. The figures repeat on every profile because the tariff does not change from one name to the next. Reading one woman's table therefore tells you what any other name on the grid would come to. It is laid out by length and by arrangement, a single guest first, then the two of you sharing her, then a therapist each, with the eight hour block closing each column. Nothing is added for an evening, a weekend or a journey inside the ring.
She chooses which bookings she takes and may decline any of them without giving a reason. She decides what a session includes, states her limits before it starts and may end a visit at any point. Every name here is twenty-one or over, and so is everyone in the room.
Booking a name from this page
Put the name in the first line, with the date, the hour, the length and the address under it, and say whether there are two of you and whether you want one therapist or two. The reply says which names are free at that hour. If one of you saw someone on a previous trip to the city and remembers the name, that is enough to work from. The booking page lists the five facts a first message needs.