It was enough to make me take three years off sugar dating and try my hand at service and desk jobs. I moved in with a guy I'd met at school and spent two years with him in Chicago, letting him pay for rent and food as I worked as a bartender and temped just enough to cover my weed habit. It's funny how the relationship I had that could be most accurately categorized as sugar dating is one where we both were desperately in love. We didn't realize we were trading attention for validation from each other. I helped him feel human in certain ways, and he helped me feel human in others. The aftermath of our breakup opened my eyes to the transactional way that most of the people around me seemed to treat their relationships. My boyfriend and I had fallen into a symbiosis, where we each needed each other's support—otherwise, we fell apart.

We always discussed money at our preliminary "get to know you" date. I priced myself pretty cheap, both because the idea of asking for $1,000 per meeting seemed absurd to me and because I found $500 per meeting got me into a bit of a sweet spot: Men who were able and willing to pay immediately but who were too shy or new or kind to be demanding. I got messages from some men promising thousands of dollars per meeting, but their personalities usually scared me off. My income stream has been steady, and my rate hasn't changed much since I started, but I've never been coy about asking for the money. I rarely had to ask for it once a price had been agreed upon. My experience with sugar dicks is they're either trying to scam you, which you know right away and avoid, or they're anxious to pay right away. Many of them truly believe that they are doing me a favor, and maybe they're also convincing themselves that this isn't really a transaction, but an exchange within mutual attraction and regard. I don't care what they think. If they can't be honest with themselves about the nature of the game, that's their problem—although it often becomes my problem too, when they break it off because they have too many feelings.