Thursday, November 12, 2026.
What a study of paid sexual exchanges tells us about the questions we ask at home.
“Did you ever sell sex?”
“No.”
“Did anyone ever pay you for a sexual photo?”
She puts her fork down. “Once.”
At this point one person thinks he has caught a lie.
The other thinks she has answered two different questions. Dinner, which until now had been a perfectly adequate roast chicken, is over.
I made up the couple.
The researchers did something remarkably similar, though they had the advantage of asking the questions in a survey, where a person can reconsider an answer without having to watch somebody’s face change.
What the survey counted
Lara Gerassi and colleagues surveyed 2,935 U.S. adults ages 18 to 34. As Eric W. Dolan reports in PsyPost, 8.3% said yes to a single question about exchanging sex for money or drugs.
A ten-item measure asked about a wider range of paid activities, including sexual messages, photos, and in-person acts. On that measure, the weighted lifetime estimate was 36 percent (Gerassi et al., 2026 , Dolan, 2026)
Some of that gap may come down to what people hear in the phrase exchanging sex.
Some comes down to what the longer list actually includes.
A person can give an accurate answer to both questions and come out on opposite sides of the tally.
There is something else worth sitting with.
Among respondents who reported at least one of these experiences, roughly 22% first had one before age 18, and 65.5% reported coercion at some point.
Those are figures about the people who reported an exchange.
They tell us how much can be hidden inside an apparently tidy category.
The survey also found associations with trauma and mental health difficulties. Its design leaves open how those experiences unfolded in any given life. Gerassi et al., 2026
The researchers were studying paid sexual exchanges. The kitchen-table question is mine.
What happens when a couple has to work out which part of a disclosure belongs to their relationship?
Related reading
What the receipt can tell you
The internet supplied a payment button. Couples were apparently expected to write their own terms of service.
Partners still make agreements in the language available to them.
“We’re exclusive” may have seemed perfectly clear when they said it.
Then a partner learns that someone paid for a custom photo and that there were messages beforehand. One partner hears custom and pictures a private erotic exchange. The other hears paid and thinks of a customer.
The receipt can establish that money changed hands. It has remarkably little to say about either interpretation.
The questions I suggested in Every Affair Begins With Permission get more specific here.
Does exclusivity cover private sexual messages?
Does it matter if they’re part of a paid exchange? If someone also hid what went in or out of a joint account, there’s a separate question about financial secrecy.
What did each partner understand the other to have promised?
There can be real grounds for hurt even when a boundary was implicit.
And when someone knew exactly how their partner would understand an agreement and deliberately kept the exchange secret, discovering a vocabulary problem at dinner is awfully convenient.
But there is a question I would ask before taking testimony about the terms of the marriage.
“Were we together then?”
Imagine she says, “It was just a photo.”
He asks whether they were together. She says, “No. I was seventeen.”
In the space of a sentence, what he thought was a story about their relationship becomes a story about a part of her life he has never heard. He may still have questions. He also has a choice about which one to ask next.
“Did you want to send it?”
She might say yes. She might say she was proud of the photo. She might say that someone had been threatening to send another one to her parents.
And she might look at her plate for a long time because she can see him waiting for her to say something that will make him feel better.
That last possibility is why I’d be careful about asking for more detail in a joint conversation.
When someone seems afraid to answer freely, I’d offer a private conversation and assess safety before pressing ahead.
If the exchange happened during the relationship and involved a broken agreement, there will be work to do around trust.
If the disclosure concerns coercion, the soul telling it deserves some say over how much they tell, when, and to whom.
Back at the table, he could ask who paid. I’d have him notice that she still hasn’t picked up her fork.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Dolan, E. W. (2026, November 12). Paid sexual exchanges are far more common among young adults than once thought, new study suggests. PsyPost. https://www.psypost.org/paid-sexual-exchanges-are-far-more-common-among-young-adults-than-once-thought-new-study-suggests/
Gerassi, L., Inman, E., Eng, C., & Walsh, K. (2026). Prevalence of sexual acts and materials provided for financial compensation among young adults in the United States. The Journal of Sex Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2026.2752099
If a disclosure has left you and your partner having the same painful conversation on repeat, you can explore affair recovery and couples therapy or contact me for a free introductory call.