The Day We Realized We Were More Than Just an Arrangement

Lucia, 59

Looking back on my life, I can see how being a spoiled party girl took my relationships away, one by one. When I was very young, I had lots of friends, and my parents had lots of friends, and everything from that time was all about excess and lavish parties and music and food.

I went to private school, and despite my abysmal grades, I got into the Ivy League that my parents wanted me to go to (I’m sure they pulled some strings somewhere), and I proceeded to spend every moment of free time not studying.

I saw college as nothing more than a formality. My parents had made it very clear that they would take care of me for as long as I allowed them to. They wanted me to pursue things that made me happy: dancing, becoming an actress, and fashion. But having to work and provide for myself was never discussed.

Well, then, my parents passed away in a car accident just after I graduated. I don’t remember much of that time. It was a blur of very dark moments and reckless coping mechanisms.

I’m very lucky to say that my parents had a finance manager who was actually a decent human being. He had known me since I was a baby, and he took on the role of stand-in caretaker for the time being. He sold my parents’ businesses and dealt with the life insurance mess. He talked me through my options so that I could be set up for life instead of burning through my inheritance within a matter of years.

I told him to do whatever he thought was best.

Eventually, I did come out of the fog, and when I did, I realized I was alone. All of the “friends” that I had met over the years didn’t know how to deal with me. Or, I had pushed them away while I was in my party phase. My aunts and uncles lived far away and hadn’t checked in on me in months. Friends of my parents had tried to reach out, but many were uncomfortable with my wild lifestyle, and so they stopped calling.

I needed some way to spend my time, so I went back to dancing, which was something that I had always enjoyed and excelled at. And I was actually able to sustain myself financially from dancing without touching what my parents had left me.

Over the years, there were some friends, but not many, and they always left after the friendship had turned sour. Same with men.

As I went through my late 40s and 50s, I started to date sugar babies, younger men who were also pursuing a career in dance and theater. It helped immensely with the loneliness. But I knew to keep them at arm’s length. Many of them wanted to leverage their relationship with me to get ahead in the entertainment world. Some of them found out by looking me up online that I had a fortune and was living beneath my means. Usually, I could see the signs of these kinds of men, and I would entertain them for a few months before ending things and moving on to the next.

Now I can see that I was just scared, deep down, of people leaving me. So I made sure to put myself in the control tower and decide when and how a relationship was going to end. On my terms.

But when I met Arthur, I stopped being able to control everything. And it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

Arthur, 25

I met Lucia because she was actually my roommate’s sugar momma. I would watch her pull up outside and honk the horn until Emilio came down. And I couldn’t fully see her from the perspective of our window, but I could see enough to know that she was stunning and classy.

Her relationship with Emilio turned out to be tumultuous. Not that it surprised me. I could barely stand Emilio; he was a terrible roommate and was simultaneously dating many women.

One day, Lucia pulled up downstairs and honked, but Emilio wasn’t home. He had told me the night before that he had called it off and had gone to stay the night with another girlfriend of his.

I didn’t want Lucia to just sit there and wait, so I went down. She looked a mess, like she hadn’t slept all night. “I’m not used to people breaking up with me,” she said. But even so, she was friendly towards me and a lot softer than I expected. I asked her if she wanted to come up for a coffee, and that she didn’t have to worry about Emilio coming home; he wasn’t likely to be back for another couple of days.

And that’s how my relationship with Lucia started. It was friendly at first. Our conversations flowed easily, and we saw the world in a similar way.  Pretty soon, when she would pull up downstairs, it was to pick me up, although she didn’t honk anymore. I had told her that I didn’t enjoy being summoned like that.

Emilio was salty initially, but I think he was ultimately relieved.

“Good luck,” was his last word on the subject.

Over the next few weeks, I wondered whether things would turn into a sugar relationship. There was definite chemistry between the two of us, and I’ll be honest, I was prioritizing seeing her over picking up extra shifts at the restaurant where I worked, so I could have used a little bit of extra help, money-wise. But I didn’t want to ruin the rapport we were building. I was worried about offending her.

Thankfully, Lucia brought it up. She said that she didn’t do romantic relationships, only sugar relationships. So, if we wanted to keep seeing each other, we would have to talk about an allowance.

I was at once relieved but also unsettled by the potential change in our relationship. I liked Lucia, and I could tell that she liked me. But from what I had heard from Emilio, I know that things could get messy when money was involved. I worried about her becoming distant and resentful. And then eventually dropping me.

So I told her how I was feeling.

“I’m not going to say that the money won’t be helpful,” I said. “But I don’t know if I want to be your sugar baby. I don’t want money to make it hard for us to form a genuine connection, you know?”

At this, Lucia kind of retreated; I could see it in her body language.

“I don’t know about all that,” she said coldly. “Let’s start with the allowance and then see how things go from there.”

So I went along with it. But I could tell after only a couple of weeks that Lucia was putting strings on the allowance that hadn’t been there before. She started to demand more of my time and got mad at me when I wouldn’t respond to her messages while I was at work. She would make snide comments about me only being with her for the money, and I would remind her that we had started seeing each other before there was any money involved.

It was driving a wedge between us, and I felt like Lucia was doing this all on purpose, even if it wasn’t entirely conscious.

So I did what apparently no other sugar baby had done before: I confronted her about it. I told her that I felt like she was using the money to try to control the relationship instead of seeing us as equal partners. I told her that she was using the money as an excuse to deny that we were developing real feelings for each other, and that was scary. Vulnerability is scary.

“You’re self-sabotaging,” I told her bluntly. “Because it’s easier to push people away than have them leave on their own.”

I thought she was going to storm out, but she didn’t. She seemed to melt.

“Are you going to leave on your own?” she asked.

I pulled her into a hug and told her that I hadn’t wanted to, before things had changed between us.

I told her, “I feel like I have to be honest and tell you that this kind of toxic relationship isn’t for me. I want what we had before, but this isn’t a good dynamic for either of us.”

We talked for many more hours about what would need to change for us to continue seeing each other. We agreed that the allowance had to go, at least for now. Lucia would pay for us to go out to dinner and on vacations, and I would have to focus on finishing my degree and getting a better-paying job.

It was a tough couple of years, but we made it through and have created a life together that is quite beautiful. Now, we’re looking at getting married and even potentially starting a family together with a surrogate. We’ve had many talks about what money would look like in a marriage, and we have both agreed that it would be better to keep things going as they are and instead focus on leaving something for our kids.

Overall, we were able to get to a place where we realized that money will always be important. But our connection was even more important. It took a while, but we were able to figure out a way to be more than just an arrangement.