My experience with the dating market in Hawaii was simple: women were selling themselves for rent. That was the game. You’d go on a date, maybe four. I’d drop a hundred and fifty bucks on sushi and a movie with some beautiful Hawaiian woman—the kind that’s beautiful to touch, beautiful to smell, beautiful to taste. Then she’d get me back to her apartment, her condo, and she’d start walking me around like a goddamn real estate agent.
“You know, it only costs forty-six hundred a month,” she’d say, all casual-like. “If you can’t afford your half, maybe we can split it three ways? I have a friend…” I remember one time just saying “no,” flat out. I was ghosted before my head hit the pillow. The next guy in line, I assume, took over the lease.
Then there was the young Ukrainian woman in Waikiki. All fire and ice. Liked my “alpha male” bullshit, she said. A few dates in, we end up at her place. We get done with the lovemaking, our bodies still sticky with sweat and desperation, and as we’re lying there in the dark, she pops the question. Not “will you marry me?” No. “Would you consider moving in with me?” Her rent was damn near five grand a month.
That was Hawaii. The dating apps were just a glorified roommate search. Everyone had to hook up to survive. This wasn’t about love or starting a family anymore; we were in our late forties, our fifties. The game had changed. Now it was about finding a little more “substance.” And by substance, I mean goddamn rent money.
One girl I dated, she actually claimed she wanted a “relationship.” Threw me for a loop. It wasn’t what I was looking for, so I let her go. Six months later, we talk. She’s hooked up with some Filipino dude. I had to ask her. “How do you go from me to… him?”
“He agreed to pay my rent,” she said, plain as day.
It almost makes you sick. So you’re not planning on marrying the guy? He’s not the spiritual partner you dream of? No. You just settle. Because of the rent.
It wasn’t just in paradise. In Phoenix, there was a masseuse from Thailand who worked one of those “happy ending, tug-and-pull” joints, a real neon-lit parlor of sad promises. She stayed at my house for a while. I wouldn’t give her a key—told her it was against the “landlord’s policy,” a landlord that didn’t exist. She cooked me food that stunk up the whole place with fish oil, but the food was good, and the sex was good, so I put up with it. That didn’t last long. Not after she “upgraded” her business model and started doing private massages at her male clients’ homes.
Then came some broken blonde chick. Didn’t contribute a dollar, but she provided all the necessary services. The house was clean, my clothes were folded. She got a key. Took all my weekends for damn near a year. It was a clear and simple exchange, understood without ever being spoken: room and board for what was under the hood, two or three times a day. It wasn’t love. It was just business.
And you can say it’s me, that I’m a predator, that I seek these people out. Sure. But at my age, you meet a lot of people. It’s a numbers game. And I’ve seen enough weird encounters to understand the sad physics of our society. The script they’re all using is that of a real estate agent. The only commodity they have left that they think has any real value is the one thing they try to hold back, to create scarcity.
I’ve seen this power dynamic play out at a strip joint a thousand times. A beautiful woman will do almost anything when there’s a dollar bill in front of her. Doesn’t matter if the guy is fat, ugly, or old. She’ll do things for that dollar. The waitress who always touches the alpha at the table for an extra tip. The little mind games of life. It all comes down to a simple question: Who brings the value to the table? The person who has the money, who can pay for sex, pay for laundry, pay for a clean house, pay for a babysitter? Or the person who just controls the sex, and that’s it?
Maybe it just gets sadder as you get older. We’re not twenty anymore, running off to San Francisco with some new boyfriend. We’re not twenty-one, getting married because he’s a doctor or a lawyer. Maybe it’s just more obvious now. The dream we all invested in ten years ago isn’t really working out, is it? It’s like the landscape around Sedona. You don’t see the real structure of the place until years of erosion wash away all the soft shit. Then you just see the bare, red, rocky truth that’s been there all along: that there’s always been this kind of exchange between men and women. Not all of them, no. But most of them. And for some reason, the person who contributes the least to the lease is the one who thinks they control the relationship.
It’s an unspoken conversation, but I remember my mom doing the exact same thing. I see their faces, hear their voices, and I have flashbacks of my own mother, still in my memory, stealing money from the pockets of men she’d just slept with while they were passed out on the floor. It’s just a raw, unfiltered look at things. I’m sure there will be some backlash for saying it, but there’s a lot of truth to it, and it can’t just be me.
Now, I’m in Tucson, Arizona. The goddamn armpit of this great state. That Filipina girl is coming over today. And I’m going to ask her, straight up. “What am I getting for all this?” It’ll be a private conversation. And then I’ll have to make a decision if that’s a commitment I want to make. And I’ve got this other girl from Pennsylvania, just divorced, needs a place to stay. We’re going to have to have the same goddamn conversation when she arrives. “What do I get out of this? Are the dishes going to be done? Is my laundry going to be folded?”
It’s the male side of the coin, isn’t it? The quiet, grubby ritual of it all. Like walking into a massage joint, paying the sixty bucks to the bored woman at the front desk, and then making that clumsy, unspoken negotiation for the “extras” with the girl behind the closed door. Or picking up some “parking lot lizard” at a truck stop, making that awful, polite small talk while she’s buckling her seatbelt, the both of you pretending this is anything other than what it is.
There’s a sense of shame in it, a pathetic weight that pulls a man’s soul down a few inches. And society, oh, society has its verdict ready. They see a man paying directly for release and they call him unmanly. “Look at him,” they whisper. “Pathetic. He has to pay for it. What a goddamn loser.”
But here’s the part of the equation they always conveniently forget to solve. Here’s the question that makes them all choke on their cheap wine.
If that’s the judgment on the man for buying, what in the hell do we think about the woman who’s selling?
If her body is the commodity, if the only currency she has left to trade for rent money is what’s between her legs, then who is she? A victim? An entrepreneur? Or just another player in the same damn dirty game, backed into a corner and using the only weapon she has left to survive another month?
And then you have to ask yourself, what’s more pathetic? The people making these offers? Or me, for even having this goddamn discussion? Am I the bad guy in this movie? Or is this like that whole Me Too movement, where they agree to everything at the time and then complain about it afterward because they feel bad? Is that what’s going to happen to me? Inquiring minds want to know.
I’ve been riding this online dating train since it first left the goddamn station, right after my divorce. I remember the shame of it back then, logging on, not wanting to post your picture. Felt pathetic, like you needed a goddamn application to get a date, like you weren’t good enough to do it the old-fashioned way. Now? Now it’s the only game in town. The bars are full of ghosts staring at their phones. It truly is the only way to meet people.
And let me tell you, I’ve seen the changes from my spot on this wave. All this transactional bullshit I’ve been talking about, this wasn’t how it was, not until the last six years or so. I first saw it clear as day in Hawaii, and I knew why. The rent there was so fucking high it could give you a nosebleed. The women had to adapt, had to turn themselves into a business just to keep a roof over their heads.
But now I’m back on the mainland, and the same damn sickness is everywhere. Rent, inflation… the whole economy is squeezing people dry, and it’s hitting the dating market in our fifties like a goddamn hammer. Our “value” as human beings has depreciated with age, while the value of a dollar has gone straight to hell with inflation. It’s a real eye-opener.
So yeah, generalizations are generally true. That’s why they’re goddamn generalizations. And the one staring us all in the face now is this: romance is a luxury, a game for the young and the rich. For the rest of us, the ones with scars and mortgages and a clear, cold view of the end of the road, it’s not about finding a soulmate anymore.
It’s about finding a goddamn roommate who can help pay the bills before the lights go out for good.
