Gold diggers, please stay away from me. The modern man feels compelled to add this disclaimer to his dating profile. It is a grave fear among dudes with extremely light wallets. Without a single glass in their kitchen and only two T-shirts to rotate between, they seem worried about being robbed of the gold they don’t have. But we all must listen to them and stay far, far away. It’s because they are exactly what they fear. Gold diggers who dug so deep that they haven’t been caught in centuries.
Contrary to the popular understanding, this kind of greedy dating isn’t a female-only sport. All genders dabble in it and only one gets the bad name. The Hinge man who cries about paying for dinner dates comes from a long line of opportunists. What happened is that once upon a time, his people (men) won the ultimate lottery. They got beautiful women to cook, clean, and think for them. Generations passed, turning ordinary men into lucky lords: rich or broke, they entered the world with one guarantee — a woman’s lifelong service. Housekeeper, life coach, mommy, ghostwriter, she could be anything all day, every day. The husbands struck gold. And whatever he asked for in dowry.
The modern man has hit the patriarchal jackpot. He swipes through an app and finds himself a rich, successful baddie who does everything his unpaid mother did for his father — and then clocks out to bring home an enviable paycheck. Now, the uber-cool guy also wants to date older women; they come with wisdom, cash, and connections. But nobody calls him a gold digger. It is a label reserved for the second sex. These days, she is often an independent woman who won’t wash her partner’s undergarments and expects him to have a stable job and a healthy investment portfolio. Haw, right? How could she be so demanding?
She pays, he stays
I could barely hold back a chuckle when a 27-year-old London-returned girlboss at American Express told me she pays for her boyfriend’s cigarettes. Then she told me about the time he bought an iPhone and made her pay the EMI. “At the end of the day, he picked me because I am capable of taking care of him, so I don’t get to complain,” she said, without sarcasm. Then she spent the next hour doing exactly that, complaining. “I have a feeling he doesn’t love me.” Well, he doesn’t need to.
Each item at her guy’s rented apartment in Gurugram is hand-picked and paid for by her. Even the car he drives was bought by her. I’m not such a hater that I cannot applaud the man’s hustle. But I won’t.
What pisses me off is that he has everything up for taking in a man’s world and a rich woman to pay his bills. He has too much gold, and he didn’t even do much digging.
This Gurugram stud, who, by the way, is a drummer of a failed band, is worse than my millennial mausaji. He at least gives half the rent, half his kid’s school fees, probably 10 per cent expressions of his emotions, and then expects my full-time working mausi to be food-giver and caregiver seven days a week. The riches that he landed on were given to him in exchange for something tangible, not “good morning baby” messages. As a gold digger trained in Brahmanical gender roles, he at least pays for stuff (half of the stuff) while exploiting my sweet aunt.
Also read: Slow-burn is the sizzle that dating apps can’t replicate. The thrill of the ‘will they, won’t they’
Learn from sugar babies
The Gen Z variety shamelessly pillages through the fat wallets of their significant others without offering a Rs 10 toffee. They are not always straight men. A study conducted this year by the Behavioral and Social Sciences Institute in Austria confirmed that non-heterosexual, Left-leaning men are the best at gold-digging. They scored higher than Right-wingers and Centrists. It also linked this greedy behaviour to dark personality traits like narcissism, sadism, psychopathy and wagera, wagera. But I won’t get into that because the researchers surveyed only 351 people. My gossip channel is considerably larger, and it hardly matters that all of us are a little gone in the head. The larger point of the paper is this: gold-digging is not a female-only sport. It is, in fact, gender-neutral.
All the closeted gold diggers can learn a thing or two from sugar babies. They openly put it out there that they are looking for a sugar mommy or sugar daddy. There is no pretence of loving and only the intention of taking. When I met one of them and asked him what he wanted from me, he didn’t feel shy about saying “an internship”. In return, he said he would give me everything I wanted. Is it even possible? I haven’t seen a woman be quite so lucky.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)