Try not paying your lawyer or your mechanic and see what happens. They may send you demand letters, get a collection agency to call you endlessly, take you court, put a lien against your house or your car or make a report about you to the various credit bureaus.
But if you don't pay me, what can I do? I could try to let others know what's happened. The chances are that I know more about you than you think. But will I? Probably not. Because in a conflict between me and a client, the man suddenly turns into a fine, up-standing man, a pillar of the community, admired by friends and strangers and a fine example of all that it is to be kind, conscientious, thoughtful, charitable and deeply good, not to mention the best and most faithful husband in the world. At the same time, I will rapidly turn into a lying, conniving, home-wrecking, desperate, likely drug-addicted bit of trash with nothing going for me but my probably-fading beauty and thinking too much of myself to do anything but lie down on a soft bed and expect men to shower me with $100 bills. Even more important than all of that, if I go after the guy who decides not to pay me, I have to "out" myself, not Samantha Evans, but me. Realistically, after that, my landlord could evict me and my ex unquestionably will act to take away the children that he refuses to support now. :tresmauvaisehumeur:
Okay... I'll calm down a little bit.
Let's put it this way. We screen our clients. We do the best we can to decide whether a prospective client is safe for us to see. Not just to see, but to have into our homes, into our beds and into our bodies. Those of us who don't have a pretty well-developed intuition don't do very well in this business, but none of us is perfect. We all take calls that we wish we'd turned away, sometimes. We're concerned about compatibility, for sure, but mostly we want to know that we're safe, that we don't have to worry that we're going to be harmed or outed publicly.
A client's first meeting with a companion is the last step in the screening process. How that meeting goes will determine whether she's willing to see him again.
If you show up and don't pay me before things get underway, you fail my screening test. Period.