*Written by a member of the Her Campus VCU Staff, but has been left anonymous to protect identies of those involved*
One day I said to a friend, “You’re such a sugar baby,” just to point how spoiled I thought she was. I was right, and I don’t think I was prepared to be. I had always heard about sugar babies but had never met one before. I know what you’re thinking; I go to one of the top 20 universities for sugar babies, but she’s the first one I’ve met.
In my gut I always knew something was off about her constantly traveling every other weekend to places no one knew about. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. She would leave for weekend vacations to different states on short notice with no luggage and come back bearing extravagant gifts. I just thought her parents were well off. Things only became questionable when I started to notice how often she went to health services right after coming back from her trips.
She entered into the sugar baby world by accident. She just happened to bump into an older gentleman at a bar who offered to buy her a drink, and like any other struggling college student she seized the opportunity for a free drink. They talked for some time. He asked her in a low shameful voice if “ she wanted to be his sugar baby?” At the time she thought it was just playful conversation coming from a drunk, but he was serious. He stressed to her how lonely and detached he was from his wife. He told her how wealthy he was, and that he just wished he had someone who was appreciative to spend his money on. He failed to mention he also had two children, one of which was the same age as her. Taking just a few minutes to think about his proposal she responded with uncertainty in her voice that she would. They exchanged numbers and went their separate way for the night.
This encounter at the bar wouldn’t be the last time that this man would play a financial role in her life. In the next few weeks he reached out to her on several occasions asking if she needed groceries, tuition or pampering money. It went from him directly depositing funds into her account, to him wanting to see her in person in order for her get the cash. This slight change marked the beginnings of him craving not only her mental attention but also her physical touch. I remember one time in particular when she actually took a trip to Miami at his request and came back with two brand new suitcases. One suitcase was filled with all designer clothing and the other with money. She would refer to trips with good payouts as “great hauls” when the money outweighed and overpowered her feeling so unhappy.
She was using the money she earned from being a sugar baby to pay her school tuition, but all of this came at a huge cost to her education and physical health. She missed a lot of school, barely completed her assignments and constantly lied to professors about why she wasn’t in class on exam days. Slowly her schoolwork took a backseat because if she wasn’t on a plane to meet one of her sugar daddies, she was in her bed back in Richmond recovering from jet lag. In addition to her grades falling, she physically began to deteriorate. She would spend two to three hours at a time in the gym, and she ate less often and smaller portions all because her sugar daddy wanted her to be skinner. At one point she even supplemented vitamins for food. Sluggish and barely getting through the day she still managed to keep her close family at bay.
She told her parents that she had a real job up at school to help pay for textbooks and food. She’d only lied to them to help ease their minds and to make sense of the two and three hundred-dollar deposits they saw added into her account. She went as far as setting up a direct deposit system where she would only make deposits on the 1st and 15th of every month.
A huge part of me loved and maybe even admired her on-the-go lifestyle, because her life had become so flashy and ostentatious. The lifestyle wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, she had a man who was pulling her in every direction for different reasons. One moment he wanted companionship; another time arm candy and sometimes just sex. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being or wanting to be a sugar baby or sugar daddy at all. She was dedicated to her education, however, her sugar daddies demands became so extensive that funding her education unintentionally caused it to suffer.
*A sugar baby is slang term that can be used to describe a young man or woman who receives “spoiling” in the form of money or lavish goods in exchange for providing companionship.
(photo taken from Seventeen.com)