Ahmed is a young man working as a ‘professional boyfriend’ in the intimate economy surrounding the tourist industry in Sousse, one of Tunisia’s main tourist destinations on the Mediterranean coast. He and most of his friends and colleagues are also harraga, ‘burners’ in Arabic, a term describing young men burning their documents and yearning for Europe. By performing love to female tourists and by migrating as their spouses, young men in Tunisia embody late modern individualized and consumerist lifestyles, while providing for their families at home. They also embody their ‘mobile orientations’, a term I coined to refer to how migrants inhabit a desired subjectivity by entering the socially available arrangements of objects, discourses, mobilities and affective practices enabling their agency. For Ahmed and his peer group migration is not a possibility, but an existential necessity to become successful men according to the values set by the neoliberal social ontology. By analysing the forms of intimate labour and the mobile orientations they engage in, I problematize the presumption of exploitability of local people within public and academic debates about ‘sex tourism’. In this article I discuss the heuristic opportunities and predicaments posed by my auto ethnographic experience as a tourist who became an ethnographer and filmmaker. I also reflect on the choices I made while analyzing my ethnographic findings and editing my filmed material during post-fieldwork reflections.