My Best Friend Is a Sugar Daddy. What Is That Like?

First, the numbers.

44: age of my best friend, John

150–200: number of women he has dated since August 1, 2016

2: average dates per week

9: most dates in one week

60: number of women he has slept with in that time

48: his oldest partner

17: his youngest partner (her profile said she was 18, officer!)

$12,000–15,000: what John has paid these dates. I don’t mean the price of the outings, the meals and movies and tanks of gas. I mean the — well, it goes by several names. Stipend. Allowance. Per-meeting cost. It is a strange lifestyle, one of transactional affection, torts and tickers, ships that pay in the night, dinner and a movie not as foreplay but fee harvesting. My best friend is, in short, a sugar daddy.

Sugar daddies have been around for ages. The term is an amalgam of “sugar,” a slang term for money, and “daddy,” a reference to an older man, and it dates back to the 1920s. The last few years have seen a rise in interest in sugar culture. A Google search for “sugar daddy” turns up nearly 2 million results, with “sugar baby” yielding another 3 million. Articles about sugaring have appeared in Vanity Fair, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, and the…