My daddy issues got in the way of me finding a sugar daddy and I feel cheated

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My daddy issues got in the way of me finding a sugar daddy and I feel cheated

Now I’m two-dads-down

My dad and I have had a rocky relationship since the beginning of time. Sometimes this makes me “cool” and “relatable,” and other times it makes me “overly emotional” or “unstable.” It depends on the time and place.

As we’ve learned from millennial social exposes such as Girls Gone Wild and that CNN special about college kids on spring break, girls with daddy issues often have a lot of baggage to bring to the table. Girls like us need an overabundance of male attention, and my student loans must be multiplying faster than a family of rabbits.

Until I found a solution to my quarter-life crisis of unemployment and attachment issues by realizing I could become a sugar baby. The role required minimal talent and I could still carry on with my regular hobbies of doing nothing and sleeping a lot.

Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places…

Lifetime movies, my main points of research for this new life of mine, made the sugar daddy/sugar baby dynamic seem like a relatively easy shindig. Granted, someone almost always dies in those scenarios, but it’s usually the old dude, which meant the odds were in my favor.

Thankfully, we live in the Golden Age of the internet, so it was easy for me to make these dreams a reality. It only took one Google Search and four browser security warnings for me to find a whole plethora of sites targeted towards people with equally questionable morals. But I’m not contour-my-face-every-morning hot, so I did have to click through several sites before I found one that suited my mediocrely suburban aesthetic.

The hardest thing about trying to nab a sugar daddy on a backroads website full of dudes you’d never want to have sex with, is trying to find a picture for your profile. A selfie is worth a thousand words. I look like I’m fourteen in the picture I chose for my account.

I needed one that let people know my daddy issues began at a young age and that I’m naïve and easily manipulated. I also lied and said I lived in a different state, because I didn’t want to risk the chance of running into anyone I actually know and having them tell my mom about my extracurricular affairs.

I went through the five stages of grief while waiting for my profile to be approved by the site’s admins. “Rock bottom” may not be defined as looking for an old man online to pay you for companionship, but looking for an old man online to pay you for your companionship is surely a step along the way of hitting rock bottom.

It turns out the website I used was misleading — some of the prospects were only raking in 100k a year. And while that’s more than I’ll ever make with an English degree, it is not enough for them to be able to afford to take me on a private jet to Fiji three times a year. Most of them were just sunburned dudes from Florida.

About 23 disappointing profiles later, I was (once again) wrought with emotion. It was somewhere between Brett from Kansas and Kyle from Orlando that I began to break down. A lot of these men were divorced and had children, but instead of spending time with their offspring, they wanted to pay to be seen in public with college chicks. When did highly suspect online affairs become more important than seeing your kids? Why wasn’t there a slogan for that, like “Pay your child support before secretly taking a young 20-something to a beach in Newport?” Why was I even doing this in the first place? What kind of male attention did I desire?

The only man that’ll ever treat me right

Each click on an account became a painful flashback to my childhood. Why didn’t my father love me? Why did he leave? All the while I scrolled through the pictures, imagining myself lounging in an expensive penthouse while sobbing to some man about how my father wasn’t there for Christmas when I was six years old. The man would be silently eating shrimp scampi, mentally cursing himself for paying to play non-sexy therapist with a girl sporting poorly applied eyeliner. 

By the time I received a message on the site (it read “wow, nice. you are really somethin else” and the person who sent it didn’t have a profile picture), I was about ready to hit up Dr. Phil, so I could air my hysterics to the rest of the American public. But it turns out you have to pay to access the email feature on the site.

At least I can walk away from this having learned one thing for sure: Both my sugar and biological daddy are still out there, and both of them are probably in Florida.