“Oooh… duh. Well that makes sense,” I say aloud, feeling a little dumb that I didn’t make that correlation before my last message.
Ha! No. Not marijuana. Like… houseplants. There are variegated monsteras that go for over $400, and that’s just for one rooted cutting!
I send before thinking about whether he’s going to understand a word that just came out of my fingers. But if he does, that would be a good sign, right? If he speaks plant language?
I didn’t realize regular old flowers and bushes could be so expensive. I have a couple of ZZs, and they never die as long as I remember to water them every couple of months. Lol!
I wilt a little that he doesn’t speak my language like I hoped. But to be fair, I didn’t understand any of it before a few months ago either, so I can’t be too judgey.
Albos are so NOT regular flowers or bushes. You know those big green leaves with the slits in them that are printed on all sorts of shirts and pillows and such? That’s a monstera. Very common. But the albos are variegated, a mutation that makes it not just solid green. They’re green and white, and a lot of the little bastards like to revert to a solid green after a while. They’re slow-growing, which means they take a long time to propagate. Which also means demand for them is high and their availability is low.
“God, I’m such a nerd. Talk about not having any game.” I roll my eyes at myself.
After a solid five minutes with no reply, I figure I lost him with my lesson in botany, so I click back to my Fetlife profile.
I go ahead and click the Save button, deciding I can always go in and add stuff to my page whenever I want. I’m curious to jump in to the search bar to see what my fellow kinksters have to say about these dating sites.
After falling down a couple of rabbit holes, I discover a few of the sites I joined earlier are not the kind of place I want to do research nor meet new people—marked only as hook-up sites, a place for people who want sexual encounters with no interest in getting to know the other person. Which also makes the sugar daddy aspect seem way too much like prostitution, so I jump back onto those sites and terminate my profiles. Then I go into my new email address’s inbox and click the Unsubscribe button on those sites as well so I don’t get confused.
Back on Fetlife, I find a couple sites that had not popped up in my Google searches, and also a few dating apps, including one that’s specifically for people in the alternate lifestyle community. A lot of the members commenting about the app had great success and are still in relationships with the people they met on it. And although this particular app has nothing to do with the research I’m doing on sugar babies and daddies, I can’t help but feel excitement over a safe place for my likeminded people to mingle openly.
After seeing there’s no way to join it on my computer, I grumble as I grab my phone and go to the App Store to download Feeld. I go through the same process as before, filling out the form and making my profile. When I’m in, I go to the menu to start my exploration.
I’ve never been on Tinder, seeing as I’ve been married the last decade, and it came out after I was off the market. But everything I’ve heard about it reminds me of what I’m seeing on this app. It says it’s going to show me profiles one by one, and either I can click the heart to indicate I’m interested in the person, or I click the minus sign to say I’m not. Or I can just swipe through all of them without choosing either button, just to see what’s out there.
This app is also proximity-based. It shows people who are within whatever parameters you set, starting with the ones who are closest to you, and it actually tells you how many miles away they are. On all the other sites, you could narrow down your search by location, but the closest it would tell you was ten miles. This app seems to me like a good way to accidentally run into people you know. So surely people on here wouldn’t be anyone who wants to keep their identity secret. Otherwise, they’re running a big risk of someone they know easily coming across their profile with a simple swipe of a finger.
I glance up to see my inbox icon bouncing at the bottom of the laptop screen. I set down the phone next to my magically empty wine glass and lean forward to open my mail. “What… the fuck?” I breathe, seeing there are at least a hundred new emails from users on all the different sites I joined. “What the hell did I sign up for?”