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" \n Lots of girls are jealous of Abby*, 19, a brunette business major in Louisville, Kentucky, for landing \u2028such an amazing boyfriend. She raves about her amazing connection with Michael, a handsome 36-year-\u2028old doctor who is happy to spend weekends together at the symphony, appreciates her cooking so much \u2028he&amp;#039;s offered to pay for culinary school, and isn&amp;#039;t afraid to commit to a monogamous relationship, even inviting \u2028her to move into his mansion. The thing that those other girls don&amp;#039;t know Abby&amp;#039;s relationship started through SeekingArrangement.com, a site that connects wealthy sugar daddies with attractive young women for mutually beneficial arrangements. In February, a friend of Abby&amp;#039;s who uses the site recom\u00ADmended it to her. Recently out of a long-term relationship, Abby thought it might be something fun to try. I&amp;#039;d never done anything like this or even been on a dating site, she says. &amp;quot;I just thought, &amp;#039;Maybe I&amp;#039;ll get to go somewhere fabu\u00ADlous or on a few fancy dates.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Soon, Abby was inundated with messages from men. Before getting serious with Michael, she met up with six sugar daddies one 40 years her senior and although she dismissed two right away, she continued relationships with the others. The men took her on first-class vacations, put her up in $500-a-night suites, offered to fund her start-up idea, spent several hundred dollars a day on her clothes, or offered to contri\u00ADbute to her college tuition every time she saw them. &amp;quot;I pay for school myself and it&amp;#039;s been a struggle, so the offers are tempting. I currently have about $30,000 in loans and more to go before graduation,&amp;quot; says Abby, who has accepted about $3,000 in cash from three sugar daddies, including Michael. Abby doesn&amp;#039;t consider dating sugar daddies prostitution because she sleeps only with men she&amp;#039;s attracted to. &amp;quot;With the men besides Michael and one other guy, there was a blatant up-front sexual expectation, and the irony is that Michael and the other guy are the only men I&amp;#039;ve slept with,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Even when I went on a three-day trip with one man, I stayed in a separate hotel room. I had no attraction to him and nothing happened between us, so he broke it off when we got back.&amp;quot; Abby&amp;#039;s not the only bright, edu\u00ADcated young woman who&amp;#039;s choosing to become what&amp;#039;s called a sugar baby. According to Seeking Arrangement, there was a 58 percent increase in coed sign-ups last year, and 44 percent of the site&amp;#039;s sugar babies are enrolled in college. The most active schools, according to the site&amp;#039;s surveys, are Georgia State Univer\u00ADsity, New York University, Temple University, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Southern Florida. The women receive an average of $3,000 a month in gifts, meals, clothes, and cash. Seeking Arrangement isn&amp;#039;t the only name in the game, with competitors like SugarDaddyForMe.com, MutualArrangements.com, and more sites that promise high-rollers. With rising student-loan debt and a disappointing job market for millennials, trading time and intimacy for money may not seem so unreasonable. But it doesn&amp;#039;t come without risks, both physical and psychological. In 2011, a Florida judge sentenced a man to life in prison for raping at knifepoint a 22-year-old woman he met on a sugar-daddy site. Emma, a 21-year-old University of Louisville student who is open with friends and family about dating sugar daddies (she says they tell her to live it up while she&amp;#039;s young), has encountered her own scare. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d been talking to a guy in Beverly Hills for months, and I told him I wasn&amp;#039;t comfortable sleeping with him the first time we met. He said, &amp;#039;That&amp;#039;s okay, I just want some company,&amp;#039; and flew me out there,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But when I got there, he tried to push me to get physical, and he wouldn&amp;#039;t take no for an answer. I left early and never talked to him again. I was alone, vulnerable, and across the country from home. It made me wonder what would have happened if I didn&amp;#039;t get it under control,&amp;quot; she says. Emma first joined the site two years ago, after a painful breakup with a cheating live-in boyfriend who left her heartbroken and in debt. Her arrangements start with a mes\u00ADsage from a potential daddy that leads to e-mailing back and forth. If she feels a connection, she gives him her phone number. They text, talk, and then Skype before she agrees to an in-person meeting, since all have involved her flying to the men&amp;#039;s cities. In addition to giving her cash for school, they also pay for designer purses and shoes, new outfits, $500 hair extensions every other month, tanning sessions, and her phone bill. She hammers out the details before meeting, making clear that she won&amp;#039;t have sex the first week\u00ADend they meet and that she requires her own hotel room and telling the men how much cash she wants to spend the weekend she sees them (usually $1,000, although a man recently surprised her with $3,000). Other than the pushy Beverly Hills guy, she&amp;#039;s had three arrangements through the site and gotten intimate with two of the men. One man who pays for her time is married, and although he wants dirty photos and Skype sessions, they&amp;#039;ve never gotten physical because he considers that cheating. &amp;quot;These guys are buying my compan\u00ADionship, not just sex. Sometimes they just need someone to talk to. And when I feel a connection, why not get intimate I&amp;#039;m not a prostitute. I don&amp;#039;t sleep with anyone I&amp;#039;m not attracted to, so it&amp;#039;s more like a relationship.&amp;quot; If being a sugar baby isn&amp;#039;t prostitution, the two unquestionably overlap in the sexual-politics Venn diagram. &amp;quot;Both prostitutes and sugar babies are bought by men willing to pay them to be sexually available, and they&amp;#039;re both damaging acts,&amp;quot; says Kathleen Barry, PhD, author of The Prostitution of Sexuality. &amp;quot;Unlike prostitutes, sugar babies have a delusion about their autonomythey believe that paying their tuition without loans or carrying a Prada bag makes up for whatever they&amp;#039;re giving away. These young women may act with bravado, but they often feel shame. The power inequality mostly benefits the daddy,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;leaving the baby as powerless and dependent as her namesake.&amp;quot; Brandon Wade, the 43-year-old CEO of Seeking Arrangement, sees a wider gulf between sugar babies and prostitutes. He found himself with a graduate degree from MIT and a six-figure income, but he kept striking out with online dating. In 2006, he launched the site as a way for frustrated guys like himself to meet women. (Incidentally, he dated a few women through the site but met his wife when she came in for a job interview.) &amp;quot;A prostitute&amp;#039;s transaction with a customer is linear and nonemotional, while a sugar daddy and baby relationship is more complex. Most resemble a typical boyfriend-girlfriend relationship but with an added financial incentive,&amp;quot; he says. Seeking Arrangement claims to screen user complaints and to use software to cross-reference Craigslist posts and escort websites in order to weed out direct sex-for-cash profiles, and Wade claims to kick off up to 100 alleged escorts per day. &amp;quot;Honestly, if a guy is just looking to pay for sex, there are easier and cheaper places to find it online,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;For our users, sex is never a requirement of the relationship, although it may be aspired to, so the sugar daddy is no different than a wealthy boyfriend who loves to spoil his girlfriend.&amp;quot; Seeking Arrangement&amp;#039;s site refers to sugar babies as goal seekers and codes requests for sex as seeking a passionate princess. Men&amp;#039;s ages tend to fall in the mid-30s to mid-60s range, and their profiles look like standard Match.com ones except these have a line for budget, which is usually marked as negotiable, although some include figures (often $1,000 to $3,000). Some profiles sport a diamond icon, which means the men submitted financial statements verified by the site. The babies&amp;#039; profiles also have the budget line. Some look like porn-star-wannabes with pouty lips and boobs squeezed into too-tight tops, but most look like the girl next door. &amp;quot;You deserve to date someone who will pamper you, empower you, and help you mentally, emotionally, and financially,&amp;quot; the site reads. But many argue that the sugar-baby experience is the opposite of empowering. &amp;quot;Once I met up with a man who seemed fine online, but when I got to the bar, he was drunk and tried to make out with me without putting in any effort,&amp;quot; says Kat, 24, a recent college grad in Chicago who dates sugar daddies and works as a part-time model to supplement her internship. She says most of the men she has met are looking only for sex, not the companion\u00ADship of a partner, because many are already in relationships. &amp;quot;I try to avoid the married ones now,&amp;quot; says Kat. &amp;quot;Really, they pay us to leave. They don&amp;#039;t want us to be that nag\u00ADging, time-consuming, sweatpants-wearing girlfriend.&amp;quot; Kat has heard of the rare sugar-daddy arrangement that leads to a monogamous relationship or even marriage and continues to wonder if she could get a Pretty Woman end\u00ADing. &amp;quot;My mom jokes that I should meet a doctor to provide for me, and this way, I kind of have,&amp;quot; she says. But the chances of meeting a future husband through a sugar-daddy website are minuscule, as is the pos\u00ADsibility of leaving this sort of experi\u00ADence neatly in your past. &amp;quot;Being a sugar baby, even for a short time, can have lasting negative psychological effects,&amp;quot; says Barry. &amp;quot;Sugar babies make themselves commodities in order to earn commodities. The Prada bag he buys you is so you keep being sexually available to him, not because he values your worth as a person,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Doing this com\u00ADpromises your independence at a fundamental emotional level, and you start losing your sense of self. Even if these students feel they&amp;#039;re making their own choices, there&amp;#039;s nothing more regressive and damaging to a woman&amp;#039;s psyche than having to build your experience around pleasing a man.&amp;quot; After graduating from the Uni\u00ADver\u00ADsity of Texas, Marissa, 24, started using sugar-daddy sites and met Dave, a 50-year-old with two kids who traveled regularly to Austin for work. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t remember how we agreed on an arrangement the first night we met, because I&amp;#039;d had too many drinks just trying to cope with what I was doing. Needless to say, I slept over.&amp;quot; In the morning, he gave her an envelope with $200 in cash. Instead of being offended, she was hooked. &amp;quot;After that night, I started spending three nights a week with him he wined and dined me and two of my friends. I grew to like him, but it was exhausting and felt like \u2028a part-time job because I had to be there to entertain him whenever he wanted.&amp;quot; After seven months, Marissa got promoted at work and decided she didn&amp;#039;t need a sugar daddy anymore. Months later, she fell in love with a coworker, and the two started talking about marriage. &amp;quot;One day, I told him the truth about my ex, thinking he and I were going to be life partners. He called it prosti\u00ADtution and couldn&amp;#039;t get over it\u00AAit was a deal breaker for him,&amp;quot; Marissa says. &amp;quot;I was devas\u00ADtated about the breakup, and it&amp;#039;s awkward knowing that he knows what I&amp;#039;ve done. I&amp;#039;m always worried he&amp;#039;ll tell our coworkers.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Trading your body for a high-flying lifestyle can deeply affect how you view relationships,&amp;quot; says Helen Croydon, who wrote Sugar Daddy Diaries: When a Fantasy Became an Obsession about her own time as a sugar baby. &amp;quot;I took small steps in accepting gifts because at first it seemed morally irksome. Nice girls don&amp;#039;t do that. But soon, I was accepting cash and vacations. I&amp;#039;d started to think, &amp;#039;If we&amp;#039;re attracted to each other and he wants to treat me, what&amp;#039;s wrong with it?&amp;quot; After three years of dating daddies, one of the men took her to Paris. &amp;quot;At dinner, I looked around the restaurant at all the chic \u2028French women. They looked like middle-aged wives, not mistresses, yet the men seemed captivated by them they looked at them with a genuine affection that had survived years,&amp;quot; she remembers. That&amp;#039;s when it hit me. I wanted to be someone&amp;#039;s cherished partner too. Instead, I&amp;#039;d made myself the designer mistress, worthy of their money but not their love. I realized it would stay that way as long as I kept putting a price tag on my company.&amp;quot; *Names have been changed. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/advice/a5090/sugar-babies/>