Social companion in Amsterdam, out with the two of you.

Origin

Paid social company is among the older jobs a city has, and for most of its life it has been unremarkable. Households across eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe employed companions, nearly always women, whose work was conversation, cards, walking out and being present at other people's evenings. Mid-century New York had the walker, the man who took society women to openings and dinners their husbands would not sit through, and nobody thought it worth commenting on. The thread through all of it is that a third person changes a room and that the change is worth paying for. What is new is only being able to arrange it from a phone twenty minutes before you leave.

How it goes

The work is reading a room and then reading the two of you inside it. She arrives already knowing what the evening is, because you will have said, and she takes her cue from how you introduce her, which is the one thing worth deciding between yourselves beforehand. A first name and nothing after it is usually plenty, and nobody in this city asks a second question. In a room where the two of you know people she stays close and lets you do the talking; in a room where you know nobody she opens the conversations and hands them over. She does not drink more than the table is drinking. Photographs are the one firm thing: she stays out of them, so mention it early if the evening has a camera in it, since that is simple to arrange at the start and awkward at the door.

What to expect

Give us the evening rather than the hours: what it is, where it starts, roughly who is in the room, and whether it finishes at the venue or back at your place. Confirmation comes back in about ten minutes, and the name in it is picked against your description rather than taken off the top of the roster, because a gallery evening and a boat with twelve people on it want different company. Language is worth raising at this stage, since the roster covers French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch among others, and a room running in one language is much easier to walk into with somebody who has it. She meets you at the venue or at your door, whichever you asked for, twenty to thirty minutes after the booking settles anywhere in the centre. The hours run from her arrival rather than from the invitation time on the card. Payment is taken at the start, cash in any major currency, card, or crypto, and the evening can carry on at your hotel or apartment afterwards on the same clock if that is how the two of you want it to finish.

Who it suits

Couples on a city break with one night they genuinely want to spend out rather than in. Two people at somebody else's party, where arriving as a pair means being handed to the same three conversations all evening. An anniversary the two of you would rather mark somewhere with noise in it. It suits people with no interest in explaining who she is, because in a room of any size nobody asks, and it suits evenings that would otherwise be over by half past ten.

Afterwards

A third person changes the arithmetic of a night out, and that is most of what is being bought. Couples stop reading as a closed unit, conversation stops circling the same two people, and evenings that would have run out of road at the second bar keep going. There is the plainer pleasure too of walking into somewhere with somebody the room turns to look at. What people mention afterwards, though, is how much easier the whole night was than they had braced for, and how little of it got spent thinking about the arrangement.