Why Some Women in Their 30s Are Secretly Turning to Sugar Dating
More women are turning to explicitly transactional relationships with wealthy men — sugar daddies — to provide the kind of financial stability this economy just can’t.
When Hannah* a tech worker and restaurant server in Toronto, first made a profile on a dating platform designed to connect people in a “sugar” arrangement, she was 25 and looking to make money on the side. She was working at a “pretty well-known bar,” but it still wasn't enough money, she says. “And I remember telling a friend that we should find a sugar daddy.” (“Hannah” and all the other women quoted in this story asked us not to use their real names.)
Sugar dating has been around for more than a decade, but for those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a mutually beneficial relationship in which one person receives money or gifts in exchange for intimacy or companionship. And so, with this in mind, Hannah and her friend created a joint profile with photos of them together, because they were afraid to go on dates alone. After a few off-putting messages and bad dates, including one man calling her a racial slur, Hannah deleted the account. Then, in February 2025, she was laid off from her tech job.
Pretty quickly, she realized the job market wasn’t the one she’d left. “I wasn’t even getting rejected,” she said. “I was getting… nothing. Like I didn’t exist.” She lasted seven months on severance before deciding she needed a different means of support. And so, she tapped someone in her network — a former manager who had made advances before. What resulted was a consensual arrangement between Hannah, now 31, and her ex-boss.
“He took me to dinner, and he was very sympathetic about my layoff and job search. He had just broken things off with his former sugar baby, and asked if I wanted to go on vacation with him,” she recounts. From there, they discussed expectations and what each could offer — a paid trip and $5,000 in spending money in exchange for companionship and sex during their time away.
Once the terms were laid out, Hannah decided to move forward, and they kept things going once they returned home. Typically, they meet once a week for dates that include dinners at nice restaurants or staycations at a hotel — pretty much what people would do on ordinary dates, she says. Some, but not all meetings include sex, and Hannah’s arrangement also includes her former boss funding her graduate education in architectural design and paying the full rent on her apartment.
Emma Haslett
The new face of sugar dating
For decades, sugar dating has existed in the American imagination as a kind of scandalous side gig for college students and young post-grads who want to trade on their youth and sexual currency for actual currency. However one describes it — older men funding younger women’s lifestyles; transactional relationships cloaked in soft language; a dangerous and anti-feminist gray zone; or a decidedly feminist way for women to take back their power — sugar dating has often been viewed as something that occurs on the fringes of society.
But increasingly, women in their 30s — some with full-time jobs, careers, and advanced degrees — are turning to sugar dating, not because they’re chasing flashy gifts and glamorous vacations, but because they’re confronting an economic reality that makes it hard, if not impossible, to make ends meet.
Hannah, for example, has a decade of work experience with top tech companies, but until she turned to sugar dating, she wasn’t able to save any money. Now, she says, her current arrangement gives her the breathing room to return to school and build savings in a way her previous corporate jobs and side gigs never allowed.
And while the financial support she is receiving from her former boss will only last as long as they keep seeing each other, paradoxically, she says, the income stream feels more stable than a job where she could get laid off at any moment. “It’s the first time I really feel like I have some control over my life,” she said. “I would have never had the time or money to go back to school, and I wouldn't be living in such a nice condo and neighborhood if I didn't have the assistance from him.”
Why now?
The popular site, SeekingArrangement which was launched in 2006 with a focus on sugar dating, but which has since been renamed Seeking and rebranded as a “premier dating site for success-minded singles,” reports more than 52 million users globally, a dramatic rise from its roughly 20 million users in the late 2010s. (For comparison, Tinder has 75 million users.) While the site can be used by same sex couples, the majority of couples comprise a younger woman and an older man. But not that young: Most daters are between 25 and 34.
Jean Halley, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, points to growing economic inequality in the United States, particularly in the last few decades, as a possible driving force. “People are struggling. It’s harder for a lot of those coming out of college in their ’20s to find a decent job, or a job that actually comes with healthcare and a living wage,” Halley said.
For women in their 30s, Halley notes, the economy can seem just as bleak. Many are navigating career plateaus or pivots in a labor market marked by instability, layoffs, contract work, and shrinking benefits, while also confronting a persistent gender pay gap. “If men disproportionately hold the money and women disproportionately absorb the consequences of economic precarity, then arrangements built around that imbalance are less an anomaly than a mirror,” says Halley.
Clear expectations
Ashley* a 30-year-old former exotic dancer in Phoenix, Ariz., turned to sugar dating because she was burned out by the kind of transactional encounters she experienced working in strip clubs in New York City for six years, going from one client to another in a single day. The job, she says, left her with what she describes as “an unromantic understanding of how men tend to behave when money is involved.” And while the pay was admittedly good — Ashley could make as much as $2000 on her best nights — the lifestyle, she says, “felt unpredictable, physically exhausting, and emotionally corrosive.”
Moreover, the job, Ashley said, demanded a kind of stamina that wasn’t only physical (she was required to dance for hours at a time, often alongside women who were much younger than she was), but also psychological, including a willingness to be objectified by dozens of men for unpredictable tips and pay.
So when one returning customer offered to be her sugar daddy, Ashley agreed. While she didn’t see it as a total escape from other forms of sex work, the shift felt significantly less taxing than what she was doing. And then there were the financial perks: “I went from sometimes working for 15 hours at a time to take home $2000, to making that amount after one date,” she says. “Having a sugar daddy meant dealing with one man at a time, on terms that I helped set.” That included her sugar daddy providing an allowance, giving her gifts, and paying a year’s rent on her Manhattan apartment.
Kathleen Davis
A more transparent transaction
To some, sugar dating merely reflects the reality of what it means to be in a relationship today, which is to say, maybe every relationship between men and women has an element of the transactional.
Kelly* a 31-year-old personal assistant and studio manager in Brooklyn, turned to sugar dating during a period of unemployment, and has been doing it for more than a year — at one point balancing two sugar daddies simultaneously. Now that she has a full-time job again, she sees the arrangement as a practical way to add extra money to her savings (and to ease complications, she only dates one sugar daddy at a time).
For someone who cites honesty as the most important factor in her dating life, Kelly finds sugar relationships refreshing in their transparency. When she was dating traditionally, she says, she experienced scenarios where men would tiptoe around their wants and needs, or in situations where they would sometimes try to pressure or guilt her into having unprotected sex. “With sugar dating, before you even meet up, they tell you exactly what they want, and you tell them exactly what you want,” she explains. “And if you're not aligned, then you just part ways and go find someone else.”
One could argue that at least sugar dating gets rid of the fantasy: It doesn’t pretend that money isn’t part of every romantic relationship or that many men aren’t looking for youth, beauty, emotional labor, or validation. It also doesn’t pretend that some women may be looking for security, relief, or a sense of control in an economy where those factors are currently in short supply.
Recent research on women’s dating dissatisfaction has shown that many women do feel they are doing more of the planning, emotional caretaking, and communicating, while men bring less effort, consistency, and follow-through. It’s partly why more women have begun opting out of dating altogether, describing it as draining, unrewarding, and structurally tilted against them — especially with app-based dating, where the demands of filtering, conversation-building, and managing men’s expectations can feel endless.
Halley, the sociology professor, says people in all kinds of relationships — not just explicitly arranged ones — participate in some form of exchange. Specifically, Halley points to the long-standing argument from sex workers and their advocates that the traditional housewife has long provided unpaid domestic and emotional labor, including sex, within an economic partnership. Indeed, a 2023 Pew Research Center analysis found that even in marriages where spouses earn similar incomes, wives still spend more time on caregiving and housework than husbands. And studies on what’s known as the “mental load” in relationships suggest that women continue to shoulder the bulk of the anticipating, planning, and organizing required to run a household.
Against that backdrop, Halley argues that whether sugar dating counts as sex work depends on the specific arrangement. But many participants distinguish it from prostitution by emphasizing the dating framework and ongoing financial support versus an arrangement where a direct fee is tied to a single sexual encounter or activity.
Uneven power dynamics and uncertainty
The women I spoke to for this story were quick to point out the downsides. Sugar dating can blur emotional boundaries, create uneven power dynamics, and introduce another kind of financial uncertainty — one that hinges on how long the sugar relationship lasts. Several women also described the emotional complexity that can come with relationships that exist partly outside traditional norms. And then there’s the stigma surrounding the idea of dating for money, as evidenced by every person I spoke to for this article who preferred to remain anonymous.
There's also the risk of judgment from family, friends, potentially negative professional consequences or pejorative stereotyping. Hannah, for example, has fallen out with her best friend because of it. Her friend, she says, worries that the arrangement might get in the way of Hannah eventually having kids or a family, but Hannah maintains that some of these relationships do end up in a long-term, strong place, romantic or otherwise, “because you’re taking care of each other and spending a lot of time together.”
Kelly acknowledges that sugar dating can be just as complicated as traditional dating. Plus, there’s the physical danger it can bring. “For any woman on a date with a man, there’s a risk of being harmed,” she says, noting that she hears ongoing stories from friends about disrespect and verbal, violent, or sexual assault they’ve encountered in traditional dating scenarios. “I share my location with my friends, whether I’m on a date with a sugar daddy or a guy from Hinge. Being paid doesn’t change that I’m a woman dealing with a man.”
Despite the drawbacks, none of the women I spoke with had an exit date in mind for their current sugar arrangements. In fact, after years of carrying the uncertain emotional and financial weight of adulthood on their own, the clarity that can come with sugar dating offered its own form of freedom.
“It’s a way to have a pragmatic relationship that feels equal in terms of what someone is giving and providing,” says Kelly. “In a day and age where modern dating can seem like women are putting out a lot without being reciprocated, that feels important.”
Deborah Copaken
