Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2013; its figures are as of 2013, including more than 250 hired boyfriends listed on Taobao, €55 for New Year’s Day and about €3 per extra hour, along with a 2009 case of a student paying €1,200.
In 2009 a Chinese student paid as much as €1,200 for a “rent-a-boyfriend”, something unthinkable in China until then. The thing is, China not only has a culture of censorship, it is also the cradle of machismo, so a woman feels pressured to show her family that she is settling down and thinking about marriage. In fact, if a woman is over 30 and still has no steady boyfriend, she is labelled defective. “There must be something wrong with her if nobody wants her,” as the old saying goes.
Today we know that hired boyfriends are plentiful in China. On Taobao, China’s answer to eBay, you can find more than 250 of them. For the equivalent of €55, a Chinese woman can hire one of these professionals to pose as her partner on New Year’s Day with her family. Beyond that, he can go with her to the cinema or out for a drink for about €3 per extra hour.
If you ask a Chinese rent-a-boyfriend what clients look for when they hire him, he will tell you they want an attractive, cultured, well-mannered man, purely to show the family that their daughter is lucky in love. In China it is common for people to work far from their home towns and see their families only once a year, so by bringing a “fake boyfriend” they spare themselves 15 days of questions and another 12 months of worrying about what people will say.
Most of these hired boyfriends set only one condition as part of the role they play: they will not sleep in the same bed as the “girlfriend”.
In the United States the idea of a rent-a-boyfriend is much broader. There, it is less about keeping the family happy, and the professional hired boyfriend (who is not a gigolo or male escort) is often very well paid.
Besides being attractive, American hired boyfriends are often skilled at acting and negotiating and can pass themselves off in a variety of professions. Most of the demand comes from women executives who want someone to make them look good in front of their boss or a client.
In many cases these women are married, but they think their real husband would not measure up at a social event with colleagues, their own bosses or an important client. For this kind of service, a hired boyfriend at this level can charge up to €2,500 per engagement, and some are said to have earned as much as $9,000 in a single day.
The first agencies specialising in companions or hired boyfriends have even appeared, and they are neither dating agencies nor do they offer sexual services.
Would this kind of business work in Spain? I’m not so sure…
Featured image: Windmemories, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
