Getting to know you

I'm lying on the floor side by side with my personal trainer, his lean muscled body only inches away from mine. "Squeeeeze those buttocks," he's going and I dutifully squeeze, and I also think, if this man weren't gay, which he is, how much more intimate a relationship could this be?

That's such an easy question to answer. It could be as intimate as Madonna and Carlos Leon, Vanessa Feltz and Dennis Duhaney, and any of those sleek, sunbedtanned women who hang out in the bar with the trainers after hours at my gym.

In short, it could be a full-blown affair.

Is anyone surprised? Take a healthy, toned, testosteronecharged young man and dress him in a tight-fitting vest and shorts. Put him in a private, enclosed space with a woman who is a) feeling insecure about her face, her age, her body and her powers of sexual attraction, or b) feeling superfit and charged with endorphins. Take her clothes off too. She may start the relationship behind the safety of an oversized T-shirt and tracky bottoms but if he's any good she'll move from layers to Lycra. Devote the undivided attention of the young man to the woman. Make him the Pygmalion to her Galatea, the architect of her sculpted body. I promise you that, even as her abs and gluteus maximus tighten, if there's any sexual spark there, her knees will weaken and her insides will melt.

The personal trainer is simply the latest reincarnation of a perpetual phenomenon, the man who attracts women by paying them professional attention. Men being what they are, bless them, with so much on their mind, like global warming and whether a Swede should manage England, they forget to look at their women as often as they should. Women need attention and there are certain categories of men who can be guaranteed to give it to them. The power of this male attention is in inverse proportion to the vulnerability of the woman in their care.

The most potent, and the most toxic, is the attractive doctor. There wouldn't be such a taboo against doctors being involved with female patients if the situation - unclothed woman intimately examined by good-looking, caring and attentive man - weren't so charged. If you want to get off with your doctor, change lists and find out what he does in his spare time.

In the days when girls had chaperones they used to fall in love with their dancing masters or singing teachers. I had a friend who used to look forward to her singing lesson as the high spot of the week. It was the way they discussed her diaphragm and worked on her breathing technique together that felt as deeply intimate as any sexual assignation, quite apart from the release of hitting the high notes.

Then, there's therapists. Once you've used up a box of Kleenex in front of them there is little to hide. It might seem unreasonable to form a passion for a man who's seen you with runny mascara and a shiny nose, but you could fall in love with him out of sheer gratitude for the fact that he doesn't get up and go to the pub at the first sign of tears.

Personally, I've always rather liked heterosexual male hairdressers. I've had my hair cut by girls and it's good, but the way an attractive male hairdresser takes your hair in his hands and frames your face, staring at you with an intensity unmatched in normal life, is worth the tip. This may be why Lulu and Gloria Hunniford married their hairdressers - they'd found those rare men who like and are interested in women.

We're talking about powerful women, you notice. The more armoured a woman has to be at work, the more relieved she will be to find herself in the hands of a man who just wants to look after her. A colleague of mine found herself hankering after the chiropractor who tenderly relocated her shoulder, and if he was anything like the two gorgeous Australians who sometimes rebalance my pelvis, I don't blame her.

But I've never had care like the care I get from my personal trainer. Not only does he make me go running when I don't want to, for my own good, he makes me take vitamins and brings me delicious fruit cocktails that he's whipped up in his blender. Better still, since he is also a masseur, if he sees me looking particularly stressed and wiped-out he does a good back massage too. He may be gay but he's given me a hint of what a perfect man could be like, someone who makes you feel both looked at and looked after.