Valentine's Day is upon us, and people all over the world will be celebrating in their preferred way. Some like to go out for a meal with their significant other, some like to prowl the town for a fling, others like to carry on with their lives and completely ignore the day's existence.
But for some people, tonight will be all about one thing and one thing only - the strip club.
If you're not one of these people, you may wonder what kind of clientele head down to strip clubs on Valentine's Day and what the atmosphere is like on the 'most romantic day of the year'.
Well, wonder no more, because a stripper who worked in the industry for almost 20 years has revealed all.
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Buffy - who anonymously presents the podcast Strippers in the Attic with her stripper best buddy Heaven - is not a huge fan of Valentine's Day on a personal level, but from a professional perspective, it was always a shift to look forward to.
"It's actually great," she told LADbible.
"So Valentine's Day, I would make really good money on because you get all the lonely hearts come in there, to sort of drown their sorrows a little bit.
"It's definitely my favourite sort of customer, which is like old, lonely and probably widowed. And so those are really just excellent, excellent money.
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"And then also you get people who are just having fun, people who just kind of thought, 'F*** it, let's go to the strip club,' people who have just got divorced... people who are about to get divorced after that evening."
It might seem like a strange environment to be in - heartbroken widowers, celebrating divorcees and scantily clad women, all under one roof - but it was nothing Buffy wasn't used to.
She explained: "I'm going to say that it doesn't lean too far from a strip club anyway, because generally, in a strip club you have these kind of groups of people.
"Some people are there because this is literally their only form of socialisation, because they just are unable to talk to women in any other scenario. Some people are super lonely.
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"Some people really are there just to let off steam, so you kind of get that - but Valentine's I guess it's a little bit on steroids, because of the fact that it's supposed to be a day that, if you were in love with somebody, you would spend it with that person. So I think maybe it highlights how people feel a little bit."
And while for many customers a visit to the strip club is a transactional way of celebrating/commiserating, others try to bring a level of romance into the exchange - in their own weird ways.
Heaven recalled: "I remember getting Valentine's cards. So the week leading up to Valentine's Day, although I never worked in the club on actual Valentine's Day, I would get an array of cards.
"You know like the really horrible ones with teddy bears on, they're just like really gaudy, really awful."
Buffy added: "I remember one guy used to bring me a card every year, and it would just be like some weird teddy bear heart picture, and then it would just say 'Bob'."
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Who said romance is dead, eh?
You can listen to Strippers in the Attic here.
Topics: Sex and Relationships,
Jake Massey