Wanted: a sugar daddy (or two)

The way it works is that sugar daddies (rarely mummies) pay subscription fees of up to $70 a month while sugar babies (largely young women) join for free, and the age-old exchange is played out over and over – youth and looks for wealth and experience, a world of brazen, mutual exploitation.

Wade’s headquarters is a nondescript building in a sunbaked business park close to Las Vegas airport, where the 45-year-old turns up for work every morning in sneakers, with a backpack. His employees seem a young, happy bunch – as the site’s spokeswoman, Angela Jacob Bermudo, 25, assures me, “We’re well compensated here.” Wade also has offices in the Ukraine and Singapore, with plans to open in Los Angeles and New York over the next two years. He has two other websites on the same theme – whatsyourprice.com, which lets girls charge for their first dates, and misstravel.com, in which men pay women to go on vacation with them.

The UK has been key to Seeking Arrangement’s exponential growth. British membership has grown more than 32 per cent in the past year, to 530,000 members. And half of these are students. So that’s a quarter of a million UK sugar baby students making, according to Wade, £2,000 a month on average. It’s not quite the $10,000 (£7,200) every two weeks that’s the most lucrative arrangement that Bermudo has heard of, but still. And Wade is currently actively boosting the numbers – he’s offering students free premium membership (increasing their visibility on the site), if they can show proof of college enrolment.

“Students are our natural market,” he says. “They’re young and single; they have flexible schedules to go on dates in Dubai and wherever. And in Britain, their expenses have gone up. When your government gave the green light to universities to raise their fees, we saw a big uptick in our membership.”

Isn’t he simply making a fortune by capitalising on the financial hardship of young women?

Wade looks apologetic. “This is the society we live in,” he says. “I wish it wasn’t. In the US, after students, our second biggest demographic is single moms, because of all the child support the fathers aren’t paying. With Seeking Arrangement, at least they can support themselves. In my day, women used to strip to pay for college – now they have more options. And sugar daddies can benefit students in many ways that are not financial. If you’re dating anyway, why not date someone older and more successful who can add value to your life?”

Naturally, these are the stories that Wade prefers – those of ambitious students who seek both the mentorship of older, successful daddies and an elevated social network. Some even want help with their business plans. A leg-up in the job hunt, as opposed to a leg-over in a posh hotel. After all, Wade claims, sex isn’t necessarily on the menu – scores of student profiles insist that a physical relationship is off limits.

Lucy Waddington, 19, says she just wanted help with her bills when she signed up. A creative writing student from Surrey, she saw a documentary where, “One girl got, like, a car, a holiday, a house. And I thought, why not? If she can do it.” Her first date was with a lonely middle-aged IT consultant, who was going through a divorce. He paid her £1,000 to accompany him to dinner. “It was so easy! He just gave me an envelope of cash at the beginning,” she says. For their second date, she received £500, and he offered her a job writing for his websites. But she had second thoughts at the last moment. “What if he wanted more and I was stuck there working for him?”

One of the site’s ironies is that it makes it harder for male students to date, because girls like Waddington are increasingly seeking out sugar daddies, and yet it was just this difficulty that exercised Wade so severely that it led ultimately to him creating Seeking Arrangement.

Wade tells the story of being 16, at school in Singapore, and seeing a girl he liked but was too shy to approach. His father gave him some advice – the way to overcome fear of rejection was to just go for it. Even if he was rejected, he’d know what it was like, and it wouldn’t be so scary next time.

So the young Brandon practised his lines: “Hello, I’m usually very shy. I don’t do things like this, but I really like you …” And then his chance came – he saw her in the cafeteria. “I walked up to her, stepped on her foot, tripped and fell,” he says, his Singapore accent creeping through. “When I stood up, the only words that came out of my mouth were, ‘I am shy.’ That’s it! I turned completely red, sunk my face into my hands and I just stood there while she laughed at me.”

A star student, he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering and do an MBA, but didn’t so much as kiss a girl until he was 21. And even then, it did nothing for his shyness. “She was a friend and one thing just led to another,” he explains. “So I was still fearful, because I didn’t make the first move. I was still the guy at parties in the corner, alone.”

Wade and his wife at a Seeking Arrangement social event in New York

POLARIS/EYEVINE

For all his terror around women, Wade was fearless in other arenas. A few years after graduating, he raised $10 million for a Boston dotcom that had 60 employees at its peak. When the market crashed, he launched a mobile start-up, creating apps long before the iPhone, but that failed, too, so he left tech altogether and started a “duck tours” business in San Francisco, ferrying tourists around in refurbished amphibious vehicles from the Second World War. By the time that business also fell apart, he was 33 and approaching his second divorce.

“Yes, it was a tough time!” he laughs. “Three failed businesses and two divorces!”

With two marriages under his belt, it doesn’t sound like he had much trouble meeting women. But that’s not how Wade sees it. “For my first marriage, I was 25, much too young. I was desperate, so I just rushed in. That lasted two or three years. And I met my second wife when I was setting up an office in the Ukraine, but after a couple of years, the spark was gone and I was looking elsewhere.”

So Wade returned to the dating pool and bitterness set in. Why was it so hard for him to find love? “It still affects me,” he says seriously. “I don’t think I’m ever satisfied. I think that I still have to prove myself, or that perhaps I’m still not loved or wanted.”

It was Wade’s mother who sparked the idea for Seeking Arrangement, a company that revived both his business fortunes and his personal life. (She works for Wade in his Singapore office.) She had long complained that Wade’s father was “stingy” – she’d come from money, while he hadn’t, so he would sooner save up than buy her gifts. And she warned Brandon not to make the same mistake. “She said women like to be spoilt. Girls will flock to you when you are successful and generous – you just have to show them.”

So Wade trawled the Craigslist personals, trying to find a way to show his generosity. And he found that women often used the phrase “seeking arrangement” in their posts. So he met two of them, and asked about their experiences – strictly market research, since he couldn’t afford an arrangement himself at the time. And a month later, he had coded the site, bought the domain name seekingarrangement.com and was ready to launch. He ran a robot program that plastered posts all over Craigslist, in every city in America – “You could do that in those days” – and within a week, he had registered 2,000 profiles. After a week of free subscriptions, he started charging $10 a month. And within three weeks, his site was profitable.

The way sugar dating took off is a sign of our times. Wade cites income inequality, austerity measures, the decline of marriage and our vapid consumerist culture.

But for Seeking Arrangement in particular, success came via two business decisions. First, Wade got proactive about PR. It’s why he surveys his members so frequently and issues provocative studies to the press – his list of “Top Sugar Baby Schools” always makes headlines. “People needed to know that this was real,” he says. “We had real women on our site.” (This is a world plagued by fakes. The cheating website Ashley Madison was exposed as featuring tens of thousands of fake profiles sending winks to hapless subscribers.)

Second, Wade built a community – he launched the Let’s Talk Sugar blog, and hosted parties and “Sugar Baby Summits” where sugar babies could share information. “Just like dating, sugar is a game, and you need to know the rules of engagement,” he says. The blog reads like a Cosmo for hustlers, full of tips about “how to please your daddy” while squeezing him for dollars. There are stories such as “How to upgrade your arrangement”, “Use your charms”, “Pour on the compliments” and “Remember, an arrangement is so much more than just feeding a sexual appetite”. Exactly the kind of pointers an old-school madam would give her working girls.

Is Seeking Arrangement just thinly disguised prostitution? Wade adamantly disagrees, not that he has anything against prostitution. In fact, he plans to follow the example of the legal brothels in Nevada. “They have weekly STD testing so everyone is safe,” he says. “I want to bring that best practice to dating websites.”

But Seeking Arrangement is not sex work, he argues. Up to 4,000 escorts and call girls are banned from the site every month, “in order to maintain the integrity of the dating pool”. He uses image search technology to scan escort sites for matching profile photos, and also face-recognition software, in case the photo is different.

Sugar babies also distance themselves from the p-word. Profiles typically stress the importance of chemistry, and prohibit “pay per hour” arrangements. But on the continuum between the pure love of the troubadours and the cold transaction of the sex worker, doesn’t sugar dating often veer perilously close to the latter?

“Men just assume that’s what you’re there for,” says Leila (not her real name), a 23-year-old sugar baby from Richmond. She’s had several arrangements over three years – often two at a time – to supplement her income as a clerk at a property development company. But she receives dozens of requests that are indistinguishable from prostitution. The American businessman, for example, who, on their first date, offered her $2,500 for a threesome. Or the fetishist who wanted to be treated like a dog, walked on a leash and abused, for £1,000 a week. She’s lost count of the Arab and Asian playboys who pepper her with obscene demands. “They get desensitised,” she says. “Women will do anything for them because they pay so well.”

Every time she turns an offer down, she learns where her line is drawn – “It’s like, how much of my soul will I sell?” For now, her two arrangements are fairly typical – a lonely old man who walks with a cane and just needs the companionship, and a flash Middle Eastern businessman who flies in every week or two for dinner and sex. But she calls the latter “dating”, because the businessman is attractive and she doesn’t get paid by the hour: it’s a monthly allowance (£2,000). “I’m not flying to Dubai for one night with a stranger. That’s just straight prostitution,” she says. “I’m more like a mistress.”

Remarkably, Wade himself hasn’t always had a wonderful experience on his own sites. His first arrangement was with an 18-year-old whom he spoilt so thoroughly that she fell in love and started to spy on his emails. (This is the main distinction he makes between “love” and an “arrangement” – the degree of possessiveness.) As for whatsyourprice.com, he finds the premise a turn-off – paying women to go on a first date. “When they said, ‘Are you going to compensate me for taking time off work?’ my response was, ‘So your time is more valuable than mine?’”

But for Wade, this no longer applies. He may be rich now, but he doesn’t live a sugar daddy life. Rather, he’s married for the third time. He met Tanya during a job interview, when hiring for his Ukraine office. Once they got together, he transferred her to Vegas where she worked for two years before they tied the knot. “She needed a green card,” he explains. “Otherwise why get married? After two divorces, I wasn’t in a rush.”

He insists it’s a real marriage, though. “We go surfing together; we have the same interests,” he says. “But every couple has its issues.” He laughs and falls silent. It seems Tanya has left Seeking Arrangement and moved to New York, where she wants to work in fashion. “I would like to move to Los Angeles … Let’s see!”

When I suggest that a financial transaction can make it difficult to know whether love is real or not, he agrees. “It’s true, that poetic innocence is lost on the surface. But that’s dating – it has always been superficial. All about looks and money. True love takes time. It’s like a sword forged in the fire. We just help to break the ice.”

He relishes these arguments. He has them all prepared. I propose that his sites have a corrosive effect on society – that if first encounters are mediated by cash payments, something democratic is lost and inequality widens. Neither Lucy nor Leila have any interest in having a traditional boyfriend, a relationship – not while the money’s flowing. “Now that I’ve had a taste, I’d never date an average guy,” says Leila. “I’m addicted to arrangements. But I’m young – I want to enjoy life to the max. I can settle down later.” And yet what’s “later”? There are women on Seeking Arrangement who are in their forties and fifties.

“But a lot of girls quit because it’s not for them,” says Wade. “They decide that true love, even with a poor person, brings more happiness than being doted on with gifts, because their language of love is not gifts, but touch or service, or other things.” What’s important is the ability to experiment, to choose, and above all – this is Wade’s most passionate defence – to negotiate dates upfront. “Seeking Arrangement is like a pre-nup for dating,” he says. “If people put all their secret desires and needs on the table, that breath of honesty can lead to love. You can stop playing games and let the feelings flourish.” He argues that it’s time to be pragmatic about money – it causes so much strife in relationships, why not be open about it? Sure, there may be bad apples on Seeking Arrangement – gold-diggers and egotistical rich kids – but that’s life.

“My lawyer got married a few weeks ago,” he says. “It was beautiful.” He’d found this lawyer through Seeking Arrangement because he wanted someone who understood the site. He was a Harvard lawyer, with good ratings, up and coming. But his first marriage had failed. He had four children.

“And these children were there celebrating his new marriage. It was amazing. And it all started with a WhatsYourPrice date when he gave her $200.”

THE SUGAR BABY
Lara, 27, is an MBA student at Royal Holloway, University of London

‘He sends me £1,000 a month to cover my student loan and pays my rent and day-to-day expenses’

Lara, 27, photographed by Jude Edginton

“I started using Seeking Arrangement three years ago. I was nervous at first. I didn’t know what to expect. But you can’t let the men see fear. You have to be in control or there is the risk of being taken advantage of. That’s true for both sides. Nobody wants a carrot to be dangled and to not get the carrot.

“I’ve had around ten sugar daddies. My first was a fortysomething Scottish divorcé. For our first date, I wore a dress with a scoop neck. It was modest – I didn’t want to turn up all tits and ass. We went for drinks and he asked me if I wanted to go out for dinner. Of course! It was that or baked sweet potatoes at home. Afterwards we got on the Tube together but we didn’t kiss – I just got to eat a posh meal for free.

“When I moved to London I was shocked at how expensive it is. And I still have £40,000 of student loans to pay off. That’s why I signed up. And I thought it would be fun to go to some really nice restaurants and maybe get some shoes.

“Some guys on the site are as awkward as teenagers. They don’t know how to talk to girls. I look for men who want to be really generous. There are diamond-level sugar daddies, which is pretty much a certified 70-year-old rich dude. But I don’t care how much money they have; I just care how generous they are with it.

“I have guidelines. If he is posing with a really expensive car, it’s probably not his (a lot of people on there lie about how much money they make). And I always start dates early, around 6.30pm. If we met at 8 or 9pm and went for drinks then dinner, it would be 1am when we’d finished and my options are limited. How do I make a getaway? What is the assumption?

“You can avoid being seen as a gold-digger or a prostitute by making sure you see eye to eye on expectations. I think most of the men expect to have sex with the sugar babies eventually, but on the site it says you shouldn’t sleep with someone until you have established ground rules. I have drunkenly made out with some of them, but I’ve never had sex with a sugar daddy.

“Most of my arrangements have lasted some weeks. It takes a while to build up the kind of rapport where you can just go out on a spending spree. While we’re out, you say, “Isn’t that nice?” and he’ll buy it for you. Or, “I’m cold,” and he’ll buy you a scarf. You might get shoes and handbags, but sometimes it’s just little conveniences, such as topping up my Oyster card. The most expensive gift I ever got was a £3,000 sculpture. I liked it in a gallery and then he bought it for me for my birthday. I also mention stuff on WhatsApp and they get that for me. And there’s never any question about who’ll pick up the dinner bill.

“Some of my guy friends get mad and say men are not just for money. But I don’t feel bad. I encourage my girlfriends to use it. They always ask if it’s just a bunch of weirdos or if they all expect sex with you, but I tell them you can get what you want out of it.

“If you’re looking for an actual relationship, you can find one. I am now going out with one of my sugar daddies. He’s 36 and works in finance. He sends me £1,000 a month to cover my student loan payments. He pays my rent and all my day-to-day expenses. I could do nothing and be OK. He also paid for me to spend a month each in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Greece, and for my yoga teacher-training course. He’s not showy. I didn’t even know what car he drove until he picked me up in it one day. It’s an Aston Martin.

“Meeting people online is normalised now. It’s standard to use online dating and rightmove.com to find housemates,

to use couchsurfing.com and Airbnb. Seeking Arrangement is just another way to meet someone. It’s a dating site where you don’t have to pay for anything – and you get a goody bag. It’s no big deal.” INTERVIEW BY MONIQUE RIVALLAND

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Hair and make-up Enzo Volpe using Sisley and Pro Diva Styling