“I’m Looking for a Sugar Daddy”

How a Running Joke Changed my Financial Perspective

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

As unemployed twenty-somethings without a direction in the world, Ella and I needed to earn money. We had a big plan but a heavy handicap.

Big Plan: We wanted to be married. A year from then. Two years. Someday.

Marriage costs quite a lot of money, just for the wedding itself, then a small honeymoon, yet most of it for the life after the day, the living together, the house and home. To make things harder —

Heavy Handicap: We had no steady source of income, being unemployed. We were both pursuing a professional degree with the support of third parties, the studies of which ate up a lot of our time. And we had a toxic — albeit non-violent, still very painful — kind of relationship.

So, naturally, just like others, our solution was money. We didn’t have that.

Now, we had to come up with ways to generate some bucks:

1. Sell.

Ella had some old clothes and extra bags. I had an old portable game console and a couple of cartridges, two guitars sitting in their cases, and a skateboard under my bed frame, gathering dust. We had a very short list.

The income wouldn’t be enough for us. And that’s if we’d be able to sell everything.

2. Work.

I had a freelance writing gig I wasn’t attending to anymore.

“Why don’t you try again?” Ella asked me.

“I’m out,” I replied. I was sick of it — the grind, the repetition, how a creative endeavor could be so stripped of soul. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“Then, you have to look for a new job,” she pointed out the obvious.

“I’m trying.” And I would for a few days, before losing myself in the day-to-day and forgot the whole thing. I was expecting a job to be given to me. I wasn’t interested in looking for it.

I was comfortable. I was fat and getting fatter, my laziness being fueled by chips, choco wafers, and juices.

This wasn’t going anywhere.

3. Look for a Sugar Daddy.

I chuckled at the thought.

“Why’re you laughing?” she wondered.

“No.” I caught a look at her defiant face. “You can’t be serious.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” she explained. A girl on a forum said that most older gentlemen weren’t looking for a sexual or physical connection. They mostly wanted intentional listeners. Companions.

My head spun at the thought.

“Eventually, it’ll lead to something you don’t like, and you can’t back out anymore.” The faster, the harder, the more final I shut the thought down, the easier and the quicker Ella would move on from it, so I thought.

“Then, what do we do?” Ella trusted me. She waited for me, even when I didn’t feel like moving or deciding.

I just gave her a sigh, leaving her question hanging in the air.

I was uncomfortable. I didn’t like thinking, nor talking, about it.

She let it go, for the time being.

Sometime later, I caught wind of good luck / the invisible hand gave me an opportunity / God made a miracle: I found a job, or rather the job found me, just how I wanted it.

A friend started working at a company that was looking for writers. And lo and behold, she remembered that I was a writer. So, she told me to apply and probably put in a good word behind the scenes. The hiring process didn’t take a week.

I had a job the coming Monday.

I thought I won the lottery / found gold / became God’s new favorite. The pay was good. The hours were good. The workload was sweetly within my skill set.

I thought this was the solution to our needs.

Not quite.

As I was cheering for my newfound source of income, Ella was sinking deeper into a pit of melancholy. And although she wasn’t formally diagnosed, we both knew what her illness was.

It didn’t get easier with personal circumstances in her life weighing her down or probably were the cause of her deep, profound sadness.

I did all I could, immature as I was, to distract her. Food. Movies. Quick getaways. Food.

My income dwindled.

She noticed it too, how I was throwing away perfectly good money, all for momentary flights of happiness. There wasn’t any joy to go around, just distractions. Her burdens were only getting heavier.

She tried to turn us around, tried to make us better:

1. Save a set amount of money every month.
2. Talk to me, slowly, properly, in words my boyish mind would understand, about our burdens and our Big Plan.
3. Fight for herself, despite the world against her.

And it worked at some level.

We were able to save up for the Big Plan, and so many others chipped in through their gifts. It was wild. It was amazing. It was joyous. We wouldn’t have that day, any other way.

Then we had our little honeymoon, without having to scrimp on anything. We didn’t splurge, but we didn’t hold ourselves back that much either.

By the time we got back home, we still had enough to start.

Until we didn’t.

Married life was a great undertaking that challenged our very beings. Add to that, our financial situation where all our wedding money almost completely vanished, a job I worked on wasn’t being paid, and my main salary just enough to get us by.

Ella worsened by the day.

I was in utter disbelief at our situation.

At some point, we just had to go back to the drawing board:

1. Work.

I had to get a second job. Or Ella had to work; she had the time, having stopped schooling for a semester.

But again, I was too disinterested to take things seriously, to realize the straits we were in, to admit that I didn’t know how to manage finances, much less completely take care and be responsible for another person.

I didn’t care to look for another job myself. I didn’t care to look for a job for Ella. I only looked because she was already mad at me for my laziness. So —

2. Look for a Sugar Daddy.

“We should both do it,” I suggested.

“They don’t have to know about us,” she conspired.

“We just use them, suck them dry, and reap all the benefits,” I finished.

She scoffed at my acceptance of the prospect. I was finally getting it, even if not completely yet. At least I was starting to.

I’d like to say next how I finally got it, how I’ve become the man I vowed to be when I married Ella, but I’m not yet that man.

Our financial situation has gotten better. Her illness hasn’t. We’re still getting by, not having any savings, but a little bit happier for the better.

The moral here? There isn’t one. Just a lesson, for myself, and it could be for someone else too: that money will never be enough, even if we did each find a Sugar Daddy of our own.

For as long as we didn’t settle for enough, we’d always need more, we’d always want more.