The dangers of being a ‘sugar baby’
A dating website that matches students with mature (and wealthy) suitors is recruiting in British universities. Alec Fullerton reports
When a van bearing a mobile billboard made its way through the cobbled streets of Cambridge last week, urging university students to earn a bit of extra money by becoming “sugar babies”, it raised more than a few eyebrows. Rich Meets Beautiful, a Norway-based site promising potential sign-ups “romance, passion, fun and 0per cent study loan”, is reportedly on a UK-wide mission for 100,000 new recruits from five UK university towns.
You might imagine, a poorly translated slogan aside, a pair of scantily clad models would get little traction among the country’s student elite. But you might be surprised. Last year, 58,000 students purportedly signed up to another such site, Seeking Arrangement, which promises salvation for those crippled by “the crushing weight of student loan debt”. The site’s major “Sugar Baby University” marketing drive apparently brought their global user base to 10million, with Cambridge University, where Rich Meets Beautiful pitched up, ranking 13th on their list of fastest-growing sign-ups; Exeter and York also make the top 20.
In theory, its premise is brazen, but innocent enough: a bright young thing arranges to spend time in the company of a more mature “sugar daddy” or “sugar mama”, with the expectation that they will receive some kind of financial remuneration – slap-up dinners, a shopping allowance or even a five-star holiday – in return. In practice, though Seeking Arrangement has a strict no prostitution policy – “sex is never a requirement, only an aspiration” reads a blog on the site – it seems fair to assume users might expect more than sparkling conversation for their money.
The promise of an opportunity to form what the site bills as a “mutually beneficial financial relationship” was enough to intrigue Emily*, now 23, when she was a cash-strapped secondyear student at The University of Birmingham. She says: “the plan was to say ‘oh yes, let’s go on a date… but I don’t have anything to wear’, and then I’d try to get them to buy me a new dress or just give me money,” she explains. “Then I’d go on the date, have a good time and call it quits.”
She realised quickly that her expectations were unlikely to be met. “It’s difficult to describe, but it was objectifying and condescending,” she says of her online correspondence with suitors, whom she found, by and large, unwilling to part easily with their cash. “Even though it seems like a potentially efficient way of funding your studies, I think it would be very difficult to actually find such a situation.”
But who is exploiting whom, here? Are websites preying upon welleducated but cash-poor young students? Or are sugar babies using their esteemed academic institutions to take advantage of lonely, wealthy suitors?
For Fiona, a 21-year-old master’s student at Cambridge who signed up to Seeking Arrangement, cultivating an online persona – in which she invested “a lot of thought, because I really wanted the money” – around her scholastic prowess was crucial.
“I crafted this image surrounding my elite university,” she says. “The website literally plays off the student fetish. I never really felt bad about it, though. I was just playing the game.”
Like Emily, she found the experience rather less glamorous than she had hoped. “We’d go for an initial coffee date, no money would change hands and they’d either ghost me [cut off all contact] afterwards or immediately ask for sex. I’d decline and that was that,” she recalls of her six months on the site.
“I found it really hard to actually find men who wanted to go on dates, as the website describes,” adds Fiona. “After talking on the site for a bit, you’d often move to WhatsApp and it would usually end up with them asking: ‘Can I have other pictures of you?’, clearly referring to nudes.” After she told them she wasn’t comfortable with that, the conversation would often come to an abrupt end. “During my whole time using it, I didn’t earn a single penny. I felt cheated.”
Unsurprisingly, the reality of sugar babying doesn’t quite correlate with Seeking Arrangement’s version of events. They claim that “the allure of the so-called ‘sugar baby lifestyle’ is indisputable”, stating that “babies” receive average monthly allowances of £2,580. While this might be the case, not one of their users that I spoke to had managed to earn a single penny using their website – and in my own experience of signing up as an Oxford student (for reporting purposes), messages from older wealthy types of both sexes led to no kind of financial reward.
Hard luck, you might think, given these students’ willingness to take potential suitors for a financial ride. But how did Seeking Arrangement reach their thousands-per-month allowance figure – undeniably attractive to financially vulnerable students – in the first place?
“We send surveys to sugar babies and sugar daddies so that we can gather data from both sides, in order to track average allowances,” a spokesman for the website told me. The site’s founder, Brandon Wade, an MIT graduate, hails its role in helping students with the cost of £9,000-peryear tuition fees: “In the years that we’ve started tracking student participation in the UK, we’ve noticed a significant number of students who previously left university to save
‘The whole time using it, I didn’t earn a single penny. I felt cheated’
money, [being] able to continue pursuing their degrees.”
“Seeking Arrangement is a dating site, it is not a service and it doesn’t target any specific group,” a spokesperson adds. “It is attractive to many students because it is a way to combine dating (which they are likely going to do anyway) with elevating their lifestyle (which most people want to do). If someone does not want to be involved in sugar dating, the answer is simple; don’t sign up for the site.”
Emily deleted her online sugar dating account after a few weeks, but didn’t give up on the project altogether, searching for wealthy older suitors in “posh clubs” instead. “I had the most amazing experiences,” she says of her real-life ventures in Mayfair. “I’m a big foodie, so I got to go to £500-per-meal restaurants, like Hakkasan in Mayfair and The Ritz.” One of her sugar daddies also secured sold-out tickets to Harry Potter and The Cursed Child, at a cost of several thousand pounds apiece.
She is now in a relationship with one of them, a City worker more than a decade her senior, and admits that “he still takes me out, but it’s not like, ‘I pay for this, so you do this’, it’s because he loves me”.
A sizeable allowance in return for a couple of steaks with a lonely CEO a few times a month? To would-be sugar babies, that doesn’t sound too bad. But they may find that putting off that essay in pursuit of someone else to bankroll their studies rarely results in a sweet deal.
* Some names have been changed