Brandon Wade never had an easy time of it when it came to dating. Being smart, but socially awkward, he was given some sage wisdom during a particularly painful phase of his life.
“My mom was telling me when I was growing up, ‘Study hard and when you’re successful and have the resources, if you’re willing to be generous, a lot of women will make themselves available to you,'” Wade says.
Thus was the inspiration for his online dating website, Seekingarrangement.com, where wealthy older men, whom Wade refers to as “sugar daddies,” can find young, pretty “sugar babies.”
Before you recoil in disgust, Wade wants to remind skeptics that the concept isn’t as cynical or as new as it may appear.
“If you look at a lot of the Eastern cultures, specifically India and China, [there are] arranged marriages. A lot of it is about being practical in a certain sense,” Wade explains. “Chemistry isn’t really developed until much later, when two people have really spent a lot of time together. Obviously, love grows from there.”
Wade says that his site is catching on, with 1.2 million members and the ratio being about 10 ladies for every man. Women can join for free and men pay $50 a month to use the site.
Prostitute or sugar baby?
“Prostitutes have to give up self-worth,” Wade says. “They have to sleep around with people they don’t want to sleep with in order to get what they want, which is money. A prostitute is very sleazy — whereas a sugar baby is very glamorous. When she’s looking for a sugar daddy, she does not just accept any sugar daddy. They make sure that there’s chemistry and that it’s someone that they would actually want to be with to begin with.”
