CAN’T BUY ME LOVE?
Bestselling author and journalist Helen Croydon has stirred controversy for claiming that all relationships are, in essence, a “form of prostitution”.
Croydon, a leading relationships commentator, says that behind every long-term relationship there is a quid pro quo arrangement that “needs to be satisfied” for a sexual partnership to work.
Prostitution, she argues, is only one extreme of a “sliding scale” of relationships, where the arrangement is based on the exchange of money for sex.
On the other end of the scale – marriage – the process of exchange-for-reward is still there, but money has been replaced with another currency, which the writer describes as “emotional capital”.
She is now calling for a “major re-evaluation” of relationships, pressing for a policy of “sexual honesty” that could, she claims, rid society of a harmful and repressive system of taboos.
She expressed her outspoken views in a column for The Erotic Review and interview with YouTube channel Joy TV about her critically-acclaimed book Sugar Daddy Diaries: When a Fantasy Became an Obsession, which hit the shelves earlier this year.
She said: “All relationships are an arrangement. There is no line between relationships and prostitution – they are all on a sliding scale.
“We all have – subconsciously or consciously – a goal in mind for a relationship. We give up a lot for a relationship in terms of time and freedoms and we wouldn’t do that unless it didn’t benefit us in some way.
“That something may be that we don’t want to be on our own. It may be that we want a child. It may be domestic practicality. There is no such thing as selfless romantic love.”
Croydon, a former ITN journalist, writes for UK national newspapers and women’s magazines, is a popular columnist for The Erotic Review and has appeared as a relationships commentator on several TV and radio shows, including Channel 5’s The Vanessa Show.
She hit the headlines in March this year following the serialisation of Sugar Daddy Diaries, a confessional memoir about her year-long exploration of cash-allowance based relationships.
Uninspired by naïve and needy guys her own age, Croydon joined dating site sugardaddie.com to seek out an older and more confident lover.
She was thrust into a world filled with Prada shopping trips, fine dining, first-class travel and fascinating, powerful men who desired the company of younger women without the usual strings attached.
Croydon freely admits that she accepted gifts from her online dates and says that though initially concerned by the morality of such relationships, she quickly came to see them as more straightforward, honest and psychologically healthy than ‘conventional’ romances.
She told the interviewer for YouTube channel Joy TV: “In the sugar daddy type relationships that I had, the man is saying ‘I don’t have the time or emotional ability to invest in you but I still like you, and I still want to keep continuity with you, so to compensate for what I can’t give emotionally, I will give in material rewards’.
“People invest emotional capital into their partner. It’s things like being on the end of the phone in the middle of the night when something goes wrong, or giving up your Saturday. In the case of a transactional cash-for-sex relationship you replace emotional capital for money.
“There is nothing wrong with admitting that there is a pragmatic motivation behind our relationship. Relationship psychologists site evidence that in most relationships there are practical motivations that drive it.”
Croydon adds that relationships are “far less likely” to fail if partners identified the key benefits from the outset.
The claims look set to draw a sharp response from members of the public, both for and against.
Married Helen Baxter, a housewife from Greenwich, London, said Croydon’s comments were “a step too far”.
The mum-of-two, 34, added: “Like a lot of women, I am married with children. This doesn’t mean I’m out for what I can get from my husband, or vice versa – it’s about love, plain and simple.”
Young professional Jenny Williams, 25, however, supported Croydon. She said: “It’s about time someone had the nerve to say what most men and women are secretly thinking. Love is a fluffy term meant to hide the truth that we are, at heart, selfish. That’s no bad thing – it’s human nature.”
