The Sugar Baby

CULTURE

An Elegy

By Nolan Reed · July 16, 2026 · 6 min read

The most nerve-wracking point of the first date is when I tell her I’m married.

We met on Seeking. She’s sitting across from me now in this Italian restaurant, all of 5’3”, 105 pounds. She’s telling me how she works in retail. She draws and is working on a picture of Aphrodite, who she worships. She has an anxiety disorder. I think this is all very cute and Zoomette-like, and it’s hard to focus on her words; I’m already imagining how I’d pick her up off the floor, her legs wrapped around me. It would be so easy, like picking up a baby bird. But first I have to tell her that I’m married.

Seeking dot com is a website for sugar babies and Johns. I use it because I want to cheat, but I want to keep things compartmentalized. This is how I justify it. I do my job at home, I’m a good husband and dad, and I keep my contemptible little diversions entirely discreet. The money helps with that. It helps to set expectations.

Contrary to what you might think, there are many girls on Seeking dot com who don’t primarily want money. Obviously, there are professionals, 30ish women with expensive handbags and blown-out lips and tits. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about girls who want to date, and they want just a little bit of “help” here and there. In my experience, girls outside of the major cities will be satisfied with surprisingly little, what amounts to a few hundred dollars per month.

What the sugar baby wants most of all is to not feel like a prostitute. They want to want it. If there’s real attraction and you can be even just a little bit charming, these kinds of girls will be relieved that you’re not one of the creeps or Indians or old guys they usually have to sift through.

Without overhyping myself, I’m in my 30s and fit, and while I’m no Clavicular, enough women in my life have told me that I’m handsome that I believe them. So my strategy is to skip the overly polished profiles, look for signs of authenticity, and try to establish some basic attraction first. Sugar baby rizz arbitrage.

This girl across from me in this Italian restaurant is so fucking cute. She has a voice like a silver bell, like the opposite of vocal fry. A shy girl behind a mass of curly brown hair. She picks daintily at her seafood pasta. Full lips, like truly full with youth, lips that have never seen a filler needle. I want to not fuck this up. For some incomprehensible reason, when girls ask why I’m on Seeking and I tell them I’m married, they’re usually surprised at this. I’ve never had an angry reaction, but I’ve been gently scolded. I always appreciate this, actually. Sluts with morals. It’s very important to me, for some reason, that I tell these girls the truth up front. Just so we all know where we stand. Most fuck me anyways.

A lot of dating is supposedly like this now. Every hot girl in the city has an email job and a $4,000 apartment and a mysterious benefactor. The SF e-girls charge their clients thousands an hour now, a kind of modern-day geisha optimized for tech, conversant in AI alignment and the latest gossip. There was that Trump admin staffer girlboss who got outed by this guy after he dropped tens of thousands on her. They met on Seeking, and he claimed he was just looking for a normal relationship, a laughably quixotic farce. The taint of sex work has even seeped into my placid world of conservative suburbia. A few years ago, a family we know found their au pair (like millions of other girls) was doing OnlyFans. A scandal. The point is that these are nice middle-class girls. The nicest girls you ever met. Belle Knox and Amelia Wang were pioneers.

So, over drinks at this cocktail bar, she asks me why I’m on Seeking, and I tell her I’m married and need discretion. She tells me she’s looking for something nice and mutually beneficial. Later, when she puts her hand on my thigh when I tell her about my cousin’s schizophrenia, that’s when I know I’m in. Zoomer girls love mental illnesses.

The sex is so good. It’s so fucking good. At my place, we kiss on the sofa, and I pick her up and carry her to the bed and tear her clothes off, and my dick is an adamantine spire for her frail ED body. She rides it and calls me daddy, and I tell her I’m afraid to break her, and she says no, she wants it. So I give it to her. She cums again and again. I need this so bad. I need to be a machine, a sex god, the best fucking tool in the entire world.

When we’ve been seeing each other for weeks and I’ve given her a copy of one of my fuckboy books, she gives me small gifts: a copy of The Little Prince, some magic rocks, a little drawing. I’m moved by these. We go to museums, cook dinner together in my company-paid Airbnb. Whenever I see her, I make sure to send her home with grocery bags of treats. Ice cream and yogurts and croissants. I want her to eat more. Later, we both get tested. That first time without condoms, I looked her in the eyes and asked her if I could cum inside her. She whispered that yes, she had wanted me to, and it was like falling off a cliff together. Please never stop fucking me, daddy. I never will, baby. Never.

We play our parts so well. The divide makes it easier. She has her world, and I have mine. We meet for sex and money and just a little bit of affection. There’s something ideal about this. Men and women shouldn’t be friends. Only lovers.

All this—it’s not unreal, but I know it’s impermanent. I’ll stop traveling to that city, or she might get a real boyfriend. She might get tired of me. Or I of her. I might become afraid that, like a heaving tide, this subsurface relationship might threaten to rise and overwhelm me and my life. I’m prepared for these soap-bubble moments to burst. I’m prepared to walk away at any time. But this floating world remains.

I know where the doors are. At any moment, I know I could slip through and find myself there, in this liquid purple world of desire and sleaze, this world that more and more now seems to be expanding to fill the rotten subbasements of conventional relations between the sexes. Maybe one day we’ll all find ourselves there, men and women. And maybe we’ll find that we like it better.