How would a sugar daddy describe you to a friend in week twelve, after the novelty has gone and nothing about the evenings is new any more? Most of what makes someone good at this shows up there, in a message answered the same evening and in arriving on time when nobody would blame you for being late. Trust is established from the very first chat and meetup, and the small things you do in the weeks after keep it there.
What Is a Sugar Baby?
A sugar baby is one person in a relationship built on companionship and honesty with a mature and established partner. Past that opening line the phrase covers a great deal of ground, because seven distinct kinds of relationship have been documented under this one name.
One person has a standing Thursday dinner with a sugar daddy who wants company and nothing else. Another is two years into something neither of them calls dating. Both of them are sugar babies. People who have been doing this for years police that point among themselves. Telling someone they are sugaring wrong is considered bad manners.
Since a sugar baby who suits one connection may have nothing in common with a sugar baby who suits another, no one is good at this in the abstract. A description is most of what anyone has to go on for the first week or two. On a platform with a member base as large and active as Private Sugar Club's, two descriptions built from the same vocabulary can stand for entirely different relationships.
What Do Sugar Daddies Look For in a Sugar Baby?
Ask people in these relationships what they are hoping for and the answers come back to an absence of drama and a companion worth talking to, well ahead of anything about appearance. Loyalty and curiosity are indistinguishable on the page no matter who is writing them down, so a list of traits tells a sugar daddy nothing about the person who wrote it. Sugar daddies in these relationships often cannot tell how real the warmth shown to them is, because a month of attention and a year of it look identical from inside the first two weeks of either one.
Something a sugar daddy told you three weeks ago, picked up again in week eleven without being prompted, answers that doubt in the only way it can be answered. Answering those small everyday attempts at connection predicts a relationship's chances better than almost anything else you can point to. Did they mention a stressful meeting at the end of the week? Send a message the morning of it, or call afterward to ask how it went. Get to know their professional and personal life without prying too much.
How Reliable Should a Sugar Baby Be?
Being 40 minutes late for the fourth time, or taking three days to answer a message that needed one line back, is what usually ends one of these connections. It rarely comes to a fight first. Because a sugar daddy notices when a two-hour reply habit turns into a two-day one, punctuality does more work here than any personality trait.
Keep a sugar daddy waiting twice and they have learned how much of a priority they are in your week. The next time you suggest an evening, they will hear the suggestion differently from the way they heard the first one. Plenty of people come to sugar dating for control over their own time and then find themselves expected to be free at short notice for a trip or an evening event.
You can only be reliable about a schedule you agreed to in the first place. Freedom that was never defined turns into being on call. Two evenings a month and being reachable on a Sunday are different commitments, and a sugar daddy who thought you had agreed to the second will read a declined Sunday as a change of heart. Ask what a normal week is expected to look like and say what yours looks like, before either of you is annoyed about it.
How to Talk to a Sugar Daddy for the First Time
Week six is too late to start describing what your week looks like. The first message one of you sends is where that begins. A message that ignores what a sugar daddy wrote about themselves tells them you did not read it. Opening with nothing but a request for another way to reach you does that in a single sentence.
What to Say in a First Message
Read their profile carefully and make a note of what they like. Then say what caught your attention. Naming one specific thing proves the profile was read and gives the other person something to answer.
Mention the city they wrote about or the thing they said they cannot stand, and they have more to answer than a paragraph about you would give them. Openers built as a challenge, along the lines of impress me or take your best shot, hand the reader nothing to reply to and put the work of starting the conversation on them.
Follow-Up Questions That Keep a Conversation Going
You find out which kind of connection a sugar daddy has in mind by asking a second question about something they said a moment earlier, then going one step further into it. A person answering a question says it more directly than they would in a description.
The questions come in rounds, spread across days. You learn where a sugar daddy grew up on Tuesday and what they nearly trained as by Friday, and by the weekend you have a picture of a person, put together without either of you treating it as an interview.
Suggesting a voice or video call before a first meeting gives each of you a way to confirm the other is real. You also hear the person behind the description before you meet them.
Describing Yourself as a Sugar Baby
What you write about yourself proves nothing until the first meeting, when the person who read it meets the person who wrote it. 71% of people who have used dating platforms say it is very common for others to lie about themselves to seem more desirable, so every description is read with a doubt already attached to it. When you walk in as the person your description promised, the reader has been handed something they have learned not to expect, and no adjective in the text could have done that for them.
Discretion in Sugar Dating
Does your sugar daddy want this kept away from colleagues, or is that not a concern for them? Plenty of people in these relationships never raise discretion at all, in either direction, so each of you can end up assuming an answer the other has not given. Is there anybody in your own life you have already decided to keep this from? The answers change how you plan a first meeting and where either of you is willing to be seen. Week one is an easier time to ask than month four, when one of you has already guessed wrong.
Sugar Relationships That Last
You will have a bad week at some point, and a sugar relationship keeps going when you do not have to perform through it. Staying bright through your own bad news takes something out of you every time, and a person doing that for months starts losing track of which parts of the connection are theirs. It also breaks what a sugar daddy agreed to in week one, which was a person who would say when something was wrong. If something is bothering you or making you uncomfortable, speak up. Be open-minded if your sugar daddy raises a need or a concern in return.
People who have done this longest accept that being selective means longer stretches on your own. Waiting out a slow month is harder than turning down any single conversation in it, and the connections that do start have less to work around. There is no specific formula for how long these relationships last, and the week-one answers only help for as long as they go on being true. Put into the relationship what you would put into a romantic one, and let the weeks after it carry the rest. Three months in, a sugar daddy has a record of the evenings that happened and the messages that arrived, and they are answering that record when they suggest the next one.
Dr. Emily May
Dr. Emily May is an AASECT-certified sex therapist and writer at Private Sugar Club. Her work has been featured in Men's Health, Lifehacker, Metro, The i Paper, Playboy, and Ladbible.
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