Is it normal to be this nervous before a first booking?

It is close to universal and it is almost never mentioned, which is why everybody having it assumes he is the exception. What you are feeling is the ordinary response to an event that has been imagined many times and never tested, and it behaves predictably: high beforehand, sharply peaked in the thirty seconds around the door opening, and largely gone about twenty minutes in. Knowing where the peak sits helps more than trying to talk yourself out of the feeling, which does not work.

Can I say in the message that I am nervous, or does that make it worse?

Say it, in one flat line and without an explanation attached. It is not a confession and nobody is going to handle you differently for it in the way you are imagining. What it functions as is an instruction about pace, and it gets used as one: the first stretch is arranged to be slower and quieter than it otherwise would be. Saying it in writing beforehand changes the arrangement, while saying it at the door only produces a kind sentence back.

What if I change my mind halfway through and want it to stop?

Then you say so and it stops there. Nothing further is asked of you and no explanation is needed. The fee for the time that was reserved remains payable, because those hours were held and she travelled to reach you, and not a euro is added past it. If you suspect in advance that a long session is more than you want, book a shorter rung and add an hour on the day if you are enjoying it; adding is easy and ending early is not refunded.

Can I keep a towel, or keep the lights low?

Yes to both, and asking for them in the thread beforehand is better than asking at the door, because then they are simply how the hour is set up. On the lights, one low lamp rather than the overhead is the version that works; total darkness is a common instinct and an unhelpful one, since it reads as shame and makes moving around the room harder. On the towel, keeping it for a while at the start is completely ordinary and nobody registers it as anything.

Should I have a drink first to calm down?

One, if you want one. Three is a bad trade and guests consistently report it as the thing they would change. Alcohol flattens the hour you paid for, slows everything down and produces a duller version of the evening, which then confirms the fear you booked in spite of. A glass of water, a warm room and sitting down for the last ten minutes of the wait does more for nerves than the third drink does.

How long should a first booking be if I am anxious about it?

Longer than instinct suggests. The first twenty minutes go on arriving, and on a one hour booking that is a third of it gone before anything has settled. Ninety minutes is the honest floor and two hours is the rung most people say afterwards they wish they had taken. The figures for every rung, for one guest or two and one therapist or a pair, are printed inside each profile on the roster, and an extra hour added on the day costs the rung rate.

Nerves Before a Body to Body Booking in Amsterdam

The useful thing to know at the outset is that nervousness before a first booking of this kind is not a signal about you. It is what a person feels when an event has been imagined many times and never once tested, and it behaves the same way before a job interview, a first flight and a difficult phone call. It is high before, it peaks at a specific and predictable moment, and it drops sharply once the thing is underway. Knowing where the peak sits makes the whole sequence easier to walk through.

Step one: the message that has not been sent

This is where most bookings die, and they die of drafting. The message gets rewritten to sound casual, then rewritten to sound serious, then deleted. What is actually happening is that you are trying to write a sentence that pre-empts every possible reaction, and no such sentence exists.

The way out is to write a short factual message with no tone in it at all. Four things: the address and the kind of building, the hour you want and how long for, the format or an honest line saying you have not decided, and anything about your body or the room the hour should be arranged around. Nothing else is expected and nothing else is read.

What you can change here: everything, at no cost. Nothing is agreed, nothing is held, and a thread that stops here stops with nothing owed.

Step two: what comes back

Short answers, in the same flat register you wrote in. Whether the woman you named has room at the hour you asked for. What applies in euro. What the room will need. And the arrangement for the front half, where one is asked for.

Two things the reply does not do, and both are worth knowing in advance because guests brace for them. It does not comment on anything you said about your own body; it uses it. And if the person you named has no room, it tells you that and stops. Nobody else is put forward in her place, because choosing for you is not the house's job. You decide what happens next, and a good many people simply pick another hour for the same person.

What you can change here: the hour, the length, the format, the surface, the person. All of it is still open and none of it is awkward to revise in writing.

Step three: the questions you were going to ask at the door

Ask them now instead. Every question that feels difficult is easier typed than spoken, and asked in advance it changes the arrangement, while asked at the door it merely produces an answer.

The ones that come up repeatedly: whether the first part can be slow, whether you can keep a towel to begin with, whether the lights can stay low, whether you can say stop at any point, whether it is all right to talk or not to talk, and whether you can ask her to leave a particular area alone. The answers are yes, and they are more useful to you as arrangements than as reassurances.

What you can change here: the shape of the first twenty minutes, which is the part nerves actually affect.

Step four: the front half

Where one is asked for, half of whichever line of the profile table applies is settled before she leaves, by card as a rule, with a couple of alternatives for anyone who prefers them. The exact sum and where it goes appear in the thread and nowhere else.

Guests with nerves often report that this step is the one that makes the booking feel real, and a few use it as a last exit. That is allowed and it has a known price: written more than a day before the agreed time, the front half comes back whole. The full scale is on the deposits page, and nothing about a change of heart is noted anywhere.

Step five: the wait

Forty to sixty minutes across central Amsterdam, counted from the moment the hour is agreed. This is the stretch that nerves inflate, and it responds well to having a short list of jobs.

Shower. Put the heating up, higher than you would choose. Clear the floor on one side of the surface. Move the chair with your clothes on it. Put out the towels. Put your phone face up and on silent rather than face down and buzzing. Then sit down, drink a glass of water, and stop preparing, because everything after that point is pacing.

One thing not to do: drink your way through the window. One glass is one thing; three flatten the hour you have paid for, slow everything down and produce a dull version of the evening that tends to confirm the fear rather than dispose of it.

Step six: the knock, which is the peak

The thirty seconds either side of the door opening is the highest point of the whole sequence, and it is worth naming because people expect the peak to come later and are then ambushed by it. It is at the door. It is brief. It is followed immediately by something entirely ordinary: a person taking a coat off, putting a bag down, saying something about the stairs.

You do not have to perform anything in that moment. There is no greeting to get right. Show her where the bathroom is, say the room is warm or that you turned the heating up, and the first minute has passed on its own.

Step seven: the first ten minutes

These are deliberately slow and they are the working part of a nervous booking. Two practical things happen in them. The balance is settled, briefly and without ceremony, because a figure left hanging in the air sits badly in a room that is meant to be slowing down. And she says where her own limits are, in her own words, which holds for the whole visit.

What you can usefully do in these ten minutes is breathe out more slowly than you are breathing in, keep the towel if you want it for a while, and say one true thing if you have one, such as that you are nervous or that it has been a long time. That sentence is not a confession and it does not need a preamble. It is an instruction about pace, and it will be treated as one.

Step eight: where the nerves go

Twenty minutes in, generally, and they leave without announcing it. Guests notice afterwards rather than at the time, which is the honest and slightly anticlimactic truth of it. What replaces them is not confidence exactly; it is that the subject has changed. The room stops being about how you are doing and becomes about warmth, weight and pressure, none of which has an appearance and none of which can be failed.

This is the argument for a longer booking, and it is a practical one rather than a sales point. If the first twenty minutes are spent arriving, an hour has a third of itself taken by the arrival. Two hours has a sixth, and there is still most of the booking left once the arriving is finished.

The particular fears, answered one at a time

Nerves are rarely general. Pressed, most guests turn out to be carrying two or three specific fears, and each of them shrinks when it is said out loud rather than circled.

That she will be bored, or would rather be elsewhere. She arranged this hour in her own week, and a woman on this roster declines an hour she does not want to take, before it is agreed or after, with no explanation owed to anybody. An hour that is happening is an hour she agreed to.

That you will do something wrong. There is very little to do. You are not running the hour and there is no sequence you are expected to know. Where something is needed from you, you will be told in a sentence.

That the silence will be unbearable. It usually is not, and it is not compulsory either. Talking is normal, quiet is normal, and the room does not keep score. If the quiet is the part you dread, say so in the thread and the first stretch will have more conversation in it.

That it will be over before you have relaxed. This one is legitimate and it is the only one with a practical remedy, which is to book a longer rung. It is the single change that most reliably improves a first booking.

The things people wish they had known

That you can say stop, at any point, and that the hour ends there with the fee for the reserved time due and nothing added past it. That you can ask for a change of pace mid-session without it being a complaint. That silence is normal and so is talking, and neither one is the correct choice. That nobody is evaluating the room, the towels or the way you have arranged anything. And that the second booking is a completely different experience from the first, for the plain reason that the imagined version has been replaced by a real one.

The two limits, stated plainly

What a session includes is the therapist's to decide and she says so before it begins; that is not a response to your nerves and it holds for every booking here. And where her comfort or her safety is not respected, the visit closes at that point, with the fee for the reserved time due and nothing added. Neither of those has anything to do with how you look or how anxious you are.

Everything practical about arranging an hour sits on the booking page, the full roster with every figure inside each profile is at the roster, and the vocabulary the house uses along the way is defined in the glossary.

Nerves before a body to body booking: a calm guide from the message to the knock