A Sugar Baby's Impact: How She Helped Me Discover My Self-Worth

My first (and probably last) marriage pretty much crushed me. We had been together for ten years. Had two kids together. The house. The vacation home. The trips to Europe. On the outside, everything looked more or less normal.

But when my wife and I were home alone together (or heck, even in front of the kids), she could be so extremely hurtful that it was almost impressive. And I know that I wasn’t the best husband ever, and sometimes I might have even deserved it (although my therapist has said otherwise.) But yeah, it was tough. And the only way that I knew how to get through it was to toughen up and let her insults wash over me and do my very best to protect the kids from her negativity.

I’m not big into getting into the details about that time in my life because it still puts me in a funk. And I still have a hard time conveying to my kids how much I wish I had pulled us all out of there sooner. But what’s done is done, and as soon as the divorce was finalized, I felt like I could breathe again.

That’s just it, though. I was just breathing. I was just surviving. I was going to work, and I was coming home and cooking for the kids. I was washing dishes and making sure homework was done. I was fully on autopilot.

Eventually, my buddies started to get worried. They used the Capital D word (you know the one, it rhymes with “repression”) and told me I had to do something different. I absolutely didn’t want to start dating again yet, or maybe ever. And so they told me to start with something easier: how about online chatting?

It did help a little bit, honestly. I had something of a pep in my step for a couple of weeks. But it also felt hollow and superficial. It really did just feel like I was talking to women who didn’t care about me (and I don’t blame them for that, I didn’t care for myself at the time.)

And then, I switched platforms to a sugaring dating site. I didn’t know that much about sugaring at the time, but I was looking for more information on online forums to get a sense of what kind of people were on there. And, it seemed like a more genuine experience than I had been getting without being too emotional either. A perfect sweet spot.

I chatted with different women for a few more weeks before I finally found someone special: Cynthia. She wanted a talk-only relationship, which was more than fine for me. But I didn’t really know what she meant by that until we actually started, you know, talking.

I think I knew that this was going to be different when our conversations started looking something like,

Her: Hey, you, how was your day?

Me: Oh, you know, same as always. I’m more interested in knowing about your day.

Her: Wait, didn’t you tell me that you were going to try out a new personal trainer today?   How’d that go?

Me: Wow, I can’t believe you remembered that. Yeah, I am kind of embarrassed to say that I canceled last minute. I’m just not feeling very motivated to exercise these days.

Her: I totally get that. Do you want to tell me more about that?

To someone who has been in a healthy, supportive relationship, that interaction may seem normal. But to me, it was revolutionary. I hadn’t had a partner show that level of care, really, ever. And because we were instant messaging, I’ll admit that there were times that I felt comfortable enough to cry and talk about things that I hadn’t brought up even in therapy.

I had been so resistant to falling in love again, but only because I didn’t know that love could actually be painless or easy or supportive.

I started to write down little notes of things throughout the day that I would want to tell Cynthia about during our nightly chats. And it wasn’t just all about me. I wanted to know about her life too. Before long, we had inside jokes and knew how to rile each other up (always for a laugh or in a flirtatious way). It was around this time that I got the idea that maybe I did want to meet her in person. When I brought it up to her, though, she was a little bit standoffish, so I let it go.

Still, my friends started to notice that I was genuinely getting back to a version of myself that they knew even before the marriage.

Now, I wasn’t under any delusions that Cynthia was falling in love with me, too. Until one day that I’ll never forget. It was a few months later, and I got a gift certificate in my email to a gym not too far away from me for a session with a personal trainer. It was from Cynthia. I didn’t realize that that was even something that a sugar baby would do: give me a gift. Let alone, one that was thoughtful. She said that it was no big deal because a friend of hers worked at the gym and gave her a good price.

Apparently, she pulled some strings with her friend to find out when I was going to have my session. As I was toweling off afterwards and getting ready to leave, a woman came up behind me and cleared her throat. I turned around to see Cynthia, whom I had only ever seen on a screen. She was holding two smoothies and had a huge smile on her face. And I just knew that she felt the same way about me as I did about her.

Of course, I still have a long way to go before I feel like I’m fully over my marriage and all the damage that was done during that time. But I absolutely didn’t expect that I would end up finding comfort and validation on a sugar dating platform, of all places. But here we are. And I’m still seeing that same personal trainer.