Anything You Pay For Is Better
It was evening. We were seated at an ocean-view table at a beachside Miami hotel restaurant, lingering over dessert. Across from me was Gloria Gomez, a svelte twenty—three—year—old Cuban, her black hair drawn into a bun held high on her head with a large gold clip. She had a wide brow, large brown doe eyes, and a sad smile. A rising star in hotel management, she was smartly dressed in a gray, thin-striped tailored suit and white floral scarf. If her family had “lost everything” when they fled Cuba, as she was to tell me, there was no trace of that loss now. Gloria did not aspire to the millionaire life of Norma Brown overseeing a busy traffic of servants tending to her many homes, although that would have been fine. Rather, she was making the case for paid service as a permanent extension of personal life—hers and everyone else’s.
I may be at the extreme, but it seems to me paid services are always better than help you can get from family or friends—given what paid services can do and given what family and friends can’t. I couldn’t turn to my own family for help, and I
know many others who couldn’t turn to theirs. So we’re always going to need to pay for services. The more the better, I say. The only sad thing is that we can’t all afford them.
Listening to Gloria, I realized that nearly every person I’d spoken with looked upon paid services as a source of expertise and a way to compensate for lack of time. But no one had made the case for the market as a whole-scale replacement for the village, especially not with Gloria’s tone of resolve.
I asked her why she thought families and friends did such a bad job of meeting people’s needs:
Well, take the family I grew up in. It fell apart. It didn’t work. Maybe my parents didn’t love each other enough. But the closer you inspect any family, the more you see how poorly things work out. Enclosing family members in a small space is terribly bad for the people inside.
I wish my parents had had marriage counseling. Actually they both needed individual therapy, too, my mother for her narcissism and my father for his manic depression. Maybe then they could have handled their divorce better. As it was, their divorce was devastating for all their four daughters. It’s why we’ve never been friends with each other as adults.
Although Gloria was attractively dressed in civilian clothes, I began to imagine her as a war-weary veteran in green and brown army fatigues on a corpse-strewn battlefield. She’d survived a war. She was a determined peace advocate in her new marriage and vowed to be an attentive mother to the children she hoped to have. But this resolve grew out of a dark view of family life. It was with calm conviction that she continued:
Most families are places of deep injury. You can’t really rely on them for the kind of help you need to grow up happy and
well. If we can afford it, I’d very much like to hire a lifetime counselor to guide my marriage from beginning to end, and I’d like a personal therapist besides.1 I asked her what services might interest her, if she had children:
I’d like to hire an overnight sleep coach, a potty trainer, a birthday planner, someone to drive the kids to soccer and dance class and anything else that needs to be done. That way, I could always be the loving mother they come home to.
All Americans were in the same boat, she felt, drifting helpless and alone, without a tow in sight: “I really think families can’t be happy by themselves. They need help from experts, the more the better.”
Gloria remembered her mother, a gifted engineer, not as a shining role model balancing love and work but as a self— absorbed career woman for whom family definitely came second:
My mother was a career girl before it was fashionable. And smart, too. But she was hugely self—centered. She didn’t nurture Dad or us; she just disappeared into the office and came home, her briefcase stuffed with engineering reports. The family shattered around her. I only knew that when I grew up I didn’t want to be anything like her.
Gloria’s father was affectionate with his daughters, but after his small air-conditioning repair business and marriage both failed, he fell into a deep depression from which he never reemerged. It was Gloria’s nanny who really loved her, she said: “Anna-May was with me until I was eight and was the only person in the world who gave me unconditional love. Without her I wouldn’t be who I am today.”
What about friends? I wondered. In the absence of family, could a person turn to friends?
No. The way it is with family, that’s how it is with friends. You can’t turn to them because they have the same kinds of problems you do. They’ve gone through the same emotional meat grinder you have. They need all their energy to take care of themselves.
I asked her what she would look for in a friend and she said:
You need someone to talk to, someone you can be completely honest with, and someone who will ask nothing whatever of you. Friends have problems of their own. And they have their own opinions. You need a blame—free zone so you can really look at yourself. And for that you have to pay.
Besides, if a friend helps you, the help is never free, she thought, adding:
Friends are very entangling. My friend Carmela is a kind, outreaching person, but she’s had a recent breast cancer scare and her insurance company is contesting the medical bills. Meanwhile, her husband’s just lost his job, and she needs a lot of support. You have to pay for help one way or another, so you might as well pay for it with money.
So what did she imagine it would feel like to have a true friend? Gloria answered:
A real, true friend should focus on your needs and be a truly gifted listener. She shouldn’t give advice that fits her but not you. A really good friend is a person who doesn’t make demands
on you, and such people are very rare. Frankly, if a friend can’t listen in a skilled way or stop herself from loading you down with her issues, the biggest gift she could give you is money to hire a psychotherapist. I may be extreme, but I don’t think families and friends can help each other much.
There was also no time in America’s golden past when family and friends were any better, Gloria felt sure. In the past, when family and community were all you had to turn to, you had fewer options. So people in the past, she felt, lived more unhappy lives.
Gloria’s view was, indeed, extreme. In Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, the sociologist Claude Fischer tells us, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans relied heavily on friends not only to “discuss important matters”—a modern measure of friendship—but also to borrow tools, raise a barn, get the hay in before the rain. Scholars disagree on whether the average number of “close friends” has suffered a recent decline from three in 1985 to one in 2006, as one research team claims, or remained the same, as Fischer states or—counting Internet friends—actually expanded.2
But by any account, the importance of close friends remains uncontested. The many people I had spoken to who had hired love coaches, wedding planners, and gestational surrogates wove friends in and out of their stories. The lovelorn Grace knew her new Match.com beau, Marcel, was “serious” when he praised her to “all his friends.” Grace’s twelve—year—old daughter, who claimed three hundred Facebook friends, looked forward to meeting her own future beau through off—line friends. Many busy professionals—the household manager Rose Whitman, for example, had friends as busy as she, but that didn’t mean they weren’t in touch and on call. It was by talking to a San Jose friend who had a New York friend that Joann Mills found her beloved Nolan.
Have these friendships changed, though, if we no longer turn to them to help us find a mate, put on a wedding, or potty train our babies? In this context, it seems more true to say that while
friends haven’t disappeared, the market has reshaped friendship as it has so much else. Friends stand beside people like Grace and Laura as they search for the right babysitter, coach, or therapist, and they stand by people like Evan Katz or Rose as they coach and assist. Rather than disappear with the advance of the market, friends now assemble alongside it, as we buy and sell its wares.
It is possible to discover friends in the market. Joann Mills found a good friend in Nolan, for example. But friendships-for-hire are, by definition, different. Liz O’Mally, a forty-two-year-old curly-haired Irish American Boston high school counselor, intentionally set out to acquire new friends. She had recently lost Janet, her “best friend in this life,” in a car accident. “She’s irreplaceable. But now I have three paid mothers—my therapist, my masseuse, and the trainer at my gym”:
I see my therapist once a week. For pain in my lower back, I see my masseuse every other week. Twice a week, I’m the first to arrive at the gym and always find “my” trainer free. I’ll be going to all three until they die or I do. I plunk down the money; I don’t think a thing about it.
It was to these helpers that Liz had turned with a very personal problem. Married for fifteen years to a man she described as a “wonderful father” but with “very different interests,” Liz had developed a strong crush on an “exciting” older teacher who had guided her step-by-step to the publication of her first article. She e-mailed him three times a week and invited him to lunch several times a year. He was married, however, and kept a proper distance, signing his short e-mail messages “Best Wishes” or “Best,” not “With affection” or “Love.” Liz was deeply preoccupied with her dangerous wish for a response from him. Were Janet still
alive, Liz would have turned to her. Now her paid confidants advised her. The trainer was encouraging her to imagine that when James signed his e-mail messages “Best, James,” it meant “he’s interested but he can’t express it.” Her masseuse advised her to “be hopeful but go slow,” and her therapist was helping her look more closely at her marriage.
Such intimacy between service provider and client can last a long time and is not unusual. Life coaches hired to help clients meet agreed-upon goals might phone them weekly for three to eight months, help them launch a new career, finish a project, go through a divorce, resolve a dispute, vacate a house, birth a child. In a 1998 survey, Amy Watson, of Houston-based Coach University, found that substantial proportions of clients found their life coaches to be a “sounding board” (85 percent), a “motivator” (78 percent), a “spiritual guide” (30 percent), and over half (56 percent) described them as a “friend.” Although most training programs advise coaches to keep a professional distance, half the clients Watson surveyed said they confided in their coach “as much as in their best friend, spouse, or therapist.” Twelve percent said they “confided more in their coach than in anyone else.”3 Legacy coaches—therapist, mentor, and taskmaster combined; mentioned in U.S. News and World Report as one of the twenty hot job tracks—help clients set priorities and even find purpose in life.4
These client-provider bonds feel like real relationships with one important difference. In Liz’s case, Janet was her friend before Liz ever called on her for help. Her “three mothers,” on the other hand, became friends after she hired them for a specific purpose. She and Janet spent money casually to buy gifts for each other or their children, pay for dinners, or make loans. But Liz’s relation to her providers depended first and foremost on money, which put subtle limits on their intimacy. Liz decided not to tell her masseuse about her husband’s raise “because I didn’t want her to increase her rates.” She also said, “My masseuse listens more than she talks, and probably tells me just enough about herself to make me feel okay talking about my marriage.” Was the masseuse
offering an ear as a part of her paid service? I asked Liz. “Maybe, maybe not.” She wasn’t sure. But her very uncertainty on this point suggested that, in her mind, money was known to buy certain things friends offer for free.
The same ambiguity dogs friends who become paid workers, raising another delicate issue. I spoke to a fifty-year-old full-time hospital administrator named Louise, who remained devoted, long after their divorce, to her older, wheelchair-bound ex-husband. She secretly hired a longtime mutual friend to help him out.
I wanted to pay my friend so I could ask things of her I otherwise wouldn’t feel comfortable asking. Lenny’s bones had become so brittle, he could barely walk. The worst was he didn’t admit he needed help, and resented my offering it, and that drove me nuts. So I hired Christine to take him shopping and to the dentist.
Louise and Christine agreed on twenty dollars an hour, but not on what hours to count.
The first time Christine drove out to see Lenny in his nursing home, she shopped with him for three hours, chatted with him for another two. The commute is an hour each way. I insisted on paying her for seven hours.
Louise and the friend warmly bargained.
“I only want five hours’ worth. You don’t have to pay me for getting there.”
“It’s a long drive. Then there’s gas.”
“Well, okay, but just one way.”
Christine strongly resisted the idea that this was “just” a commercial transaction because that would imply Lenny was not or had never been a friend. And that wasn’t true. Still, being with Lenny now required great forbearance, time, and, in that sense, work. As Christine recounted:
Just going with Lenny to buy two pears and one avocado at the supermarket … wow! When I’m alone, I zip in and zip out. Lenny examines all sides of each pear. He handles a couple of them before deciding which one is best. Avocados, we handle at least ten. One is too soft, another too hard. Then he wants doughnuts, and why aren’t there buttermilk doughnuts? I have to find the attendant to find out why they don’t have buttermilk doughnuts. It takes a lot of patience and the minute I’m impatient, Lenny senses it—not good.
Louise and Christine danced another minuet around telling Lenny that his ex-wife was paying his good friend to be more patient than she herself could manage and to pretend to mutual enjoyment. Part of being a paid friend to Lenny, Christine felt, was to sustain a small white lie: that Lenny was still the same guy he had been a decade back and that getting together was “just as much fun” for Christine as it was for him.
Louise’s daughter strongly disapproved of this white lie. The family was Jewish, and as Louise’s daughter put it, “Christine’s been a wonderful friend to Dad for thirty years. Why is she accepting money from you? I thought she was doing a mitzvah [a good deed]. You can’t get paid to do a mitzvah.” Her mother explained, “Your dad isn’t who he was. He’ll get to the doctor but won’t remember a damn thing about what was said. Christine takes notes. She unpacks and packs his wheelchair from the back of the car, gets him to the bathroom, waits. It’s a lot to ask.” Her daughter remained doubtful. Then Louise put it differently: “Christine needs the money to help her daughter, who’s a single mom. We’re giving her money she needs.” This was fine with the daughter because now Louise was also doing a mitzvah.
Money between friends was fraught with the danger of insult. Christine had, for example, accepted pay to visit the cantankerous elderly mother of another friend. While the elderly mother was delighted with Christine’s visits, her help sorting family photos, her companionship on trips to art museums, she became highly
upset when she accidently discovered that Christine had not been coming out of pure affection. “Oh then,” the mother had declared, “that’s dirty liking.” The friend later told me, “I didn’t have the heart to tell my wonderful friend Christine.”
Christine’s client-friends felt obliged to back-channel the fact that they paid her to do friendlike things. This was yet another way people protected the intimacy of personal bonds from the depersonalization usually attached to fee—for—service. As Louise said:
I’m close to Lenny but I don’t want to take him to the dentist, which makes me feel guilty. Paying Christine relieves me of guilt. But I’m embarrassed to hire a friend, so I don’t talk about it.
Louise’s lie protected Christine from the accusation of not loving Lenny enough or of wanting money too much. It protected Lenny from feeling unlovable, and it helped Louise think of herself as—and be—a caring ex-wife. Other people I spoke with also tried to conceal their outsourcing for a variety of reasons. One hostess invited a large gathering of friends to dinner and served them a delicious store-bought roast lamb, which her friends assumed she had made herself. This proved such a big hit that friends asked her for the name of the butcher and cut of the lamb, shopped at the butcher’s, and promptly discovered her white lie. Lies have a purpose, of course; hers was intended to preserve the identity of someone who “cares enough” about her friends to devote hours cooking for them while also working full time and raising kids. Guests warmly understood, but it took her a long time to laugh about it.
Most people fit services around friendships. But for Gloria, friends you paid were more reliable than the kind that came free. Was
that always true? I asked her. Among help-for-hire, weren’t there sometimes incompetents or frauds, people who did more harm than good? “Sure,” Gloria said. “I once went to a therapist who later lost his license for sleeping with a patient.” She also thought therapists could foster a false need for their services by making a patient feel it was “neurotic” not to hire them.
I was shopping for a good therapist and I was trying out my third. I didn’t like her. So I told her I was quitting. She said, “The reason you’re quitting is that you can’t commit. To deal with your problem, you need to commit to therapy with me.” The symptom of the disease was that I refused to be her client. But that wasn’t true! I just didn’t like her. And her comment was one more reason I didn’t like her. The next therapist I tried was too scattered. I would have stuck with her, but she couldn’t do the job.
But even bad therapy was better than no therapy, Gloria thought. For all the pitfalls, she deeply believed that experts of all kinds could alleviate the fallout from a toxic family:
My mother wouldn’t let my sister wear her wedding dress because my sister was a few sizes larger than she was. My sister felt terribly hurt. Now they could have gotten past that impasse with a wedding planner, a family therapist, or both.
“Family baggage” could spoil any event, especially holidays, so a Christmas planner, say, could be of benefit, too, Gloria explained:
Suppose you had an estranged mother dying of cancer and your two ex-husbands and their new wives and children all coming over for Christmas. It can get very complicated. Plus, what will you feed them? If I’d heard of a great party planner, I’d hire her. Planners help families that can’t manage on their own.
“Would you mention to your family and friends that the planner had helped out?” I asked.
“I might not.” She giggled.
“Would the planner stay for Christmas dinner?”
“Definitely not. She has her own Christmas to go to,” Gloria replied.
“But what if the planner has an unwell mother and two ex-husbands coming to dinner?”
“I guess she’d need to hire a planner, too.” We both laughed. But Gloria wasn’t joking.
More than in the past, business is ready to meet the needs of the Glorias of America. For the last three decades, the consumer market has pursued the strategy of appealing to customers’ emotional desires. In his book Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, Marc Gobe proposes ways of per— suading customers to buy things by appealing to their emotions. Customers seek connection, he notes, citing research showing that while one out of four Americans say they do not have “close friends,” consumers are seeking a “lasting relationship.”5 A successful brand meets that need, Gobe says, by fostering a bond between customer and purchase. In fact, good brands transform goods and services from “mere” commodities into close—if imaginary—friends.
Some services go further still, actually disparaging a potential customer’s real friends. For example, Bob Grant advertises his e-book How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You and Win His Heart—Even If He’s Distant Now, by saying:
The main obstacle women face in their effort to understand men is that they … seek advice from their friends … . By all means, seek the listening ear of a friend if you simply want to unburden and if talking to your friend makes you feel better. But always remember that talking to your friends results in deeper and better friendships with your friends—but does little to improve your relationships with men.
At the same time, some new services boldly advertise themselves as a missing piece of family and friendship: “Rent—a—Mom,” “Rent—a—Dad,” “Rent—a—Grandma,” and “Rent—a—Friend.” One woman started her “Rent—a—Mom” service to offer customers “everything a mother does”—including waiting for the kids to come home for school and baking cookies with them. “When I was married, my husband never appreciated all the things I did,” she explained. “So I figured I might as well get paid for it.”
“Rent—a—Friend” offers a partner with whom one can eat dinner, see movies, sort photos, or go on trips. Such workers are not, like Christine, longtime friends slipped a little money to walk the extra mile; they are strangers who straightforwardly propose to act, for cash, like friends. One online entrepreneur, Holly, who advertised friendship for hire, catered directly to the desire for entanglement-free support:
Ever have a day when you just needed to vent to a good friend and get their feedback to give you another perspective, or to validate your thoughts, or to tell you that you really are fine? What happens if you don’t have the energy to do the other side of the friendship, where you support them in their struggles? And suppose you were starting to feel like their solutions fit them but not you? That’s when you need me to be your rent-a-friend.
Holly continued: “If you are ready to rent my friendly attention for a while, go to the Fee-for-Service.” There, Holly spelled out fees that vary according to the severity of a client’s problem:
| Short & Sweet |
$50.00 |
| Average |
$75.00 |
| Complex |
$100.00 |
Holly’s sample of a “Short & Sweet” problem began, “My husband died of a heroin overdose in April, his second go-round in 5
years with it, but is it normal for me to be so pissed off at him for such stupidity?” Holly’s sample answer started, “I’m sorry to hear about your husband’s fatal overdose. It seems very acceptable to me to experience anger about that, and anger is an early stage in the grief process … .” The “Average” and “Complex” samples described equally disturbing—though more expensive—problems. Shown this ad, Gloria shook her head, “No, charging different amounts for different-sized problems—that was ‘too much.”’ But renting a friend, that seemed like a good idea. Why not?
Though still new and small, such services seem to be gaining ground. Started by Scott Rosenbaum of Stewartsville, New Jersey, a former marketer for dating Web sites, Rentafriend.com now receives 100,000 unique views a month and has recruited nearly 2,000 members. These members pay $24.95 a month to review profiles and photos of 167,000 possible pals. Once hired, hourly rates range from $10 to $160, none of it for sex work. One friend-for-hire, a thirty—four—year—old married mother with a full-time regular job, told journalist Leanne Italie, “If you need someone to work out or just hang out with, I’m your girl. I’m pretty peppy and bubbly if you just need a smile and I have lived a life of someone twice my age if you need an ear and some advice.” She’s trying to buy a house and the extra money helps.6
A deep hopelessness seemed to underlie Gloria’s faith in care she could purchase and distrust of anything she could not. In her charming way, she was a loner—not the self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe, hero to free-market advocates such as Milton Friedman, but the kind of market-dependent loner who might make brand consultants such as Marc Gobe lick their lips.
Were America to move toward Gloria’s dark vision—of frosty family, semihelpful friends, and a growing friendship market—these professional services might well become the new standard. After all, Gloria’s description of a good friend was “one who made no demands and listened without judgment.” Relative to their market competition, one could come to see a sister as a lesser therapist,
a friend as a bumbling coach, and a brother as an incompetent party planner.
In response to the prospect of marketized friendship, Carol Quinn and Anny Beck—two friends—developed “3Lunches,” a free program offering guidelines and training for how to be a better friend in three lunchtime meetings. Such training, they hope, can counter the “expensive therapist mentality and the even more expensive life-coach trend.” Quinn describes the small movement as “generosity—inspired.”7 Told of 3Lunches, Gloria smiled, shook her head, and replied, “Carol and Anny should get trained and paid.”
But one paradox of Gloria’s position seemed to have escaped her. Relying so completely on paid services would require her to work longer hours and earn more money to buy what she felt she needed. These hours would limit the time she might spend hiking, volunteering, or having coffee with someone who might, despite all her reservations, become a friend. That was a problem, Gloria conceded. In the meantime, she was trying to decide between two therapists. As we parted, she gave an ironic—and was it sad?—smile: “I wonder if I should talk it over with a friend.”