Friend for an hour: Who and why rents relatives and companions
"With whom will you celebrate?" - a question that every Russian regularly hears about New Year's Eve since the beginning of December. Only one answer is considered to be correct: “with a noisy group of friends” - all the rest will make the addressee confused. But if loneliness is really a burden for you, it can technically be avoided - to hire friends. Services and applications that will help you choose your buddies exist from scratch and work in Russia. The most popular of them is "Rent a Friend". For a modest fee, you can choose a friend to your taste and, if you pay regularly every hour, have fun.
Russian-speaking journalists managed to test the service for themselves back in 2010 - Elena Nuryaeva described her evening with a man, more like a coach for personal growth, in a column on The Village. Service seemed to her frankly stupid. The columnist "Snob", Elena Egereeva, was more fortunate: when she got to London, she rented student Victoria, who showed her the city, turned out to be a pleasant person, and then became a constant nurse for her child. Anyway, the interest in "friends for rent" in the world is still growing. We understand who uses the service and how ethical it is in principle "live rent".
Scrapbooking and GQ Guys
Hire friends invented in Japan, but the idea quickly picked up around the world. Most often, the service is used to search for friends in the evening. In one of these, called Friends for Money, they say that their clients are mature women who like to go to the cinema with a company, but their husbands hate cinemas, scrapbooking lovers and men whose friends refused to play basketball at the last moment. they had to buy new opponents on the Internet. Many are looking for companions for dinner in unfamiliar cities or people who will make a company at a concert where real friends don’t want to go - the list goes on and on. As a rule, students, housewives, retirees or freelancers are broke.
Buy, by the way, you can not just a friend, but a representative man, to take with you to the party. Such options are offered by the service "Rent a Gent" - at its disposal there are 200 men "in the style of GQ" throughout America. An hour of rent will cost about $ 200 - expensive, but reliable. In principle, this fits the definition of an escort, albeit without a sexual component. In general, all services of this kind emphasize the platonic nature of the relationship between the client and the customer, and prescribe a clear regulation, where the handshake is acceptable, and the friendly embrace is no longer.
If the desire to "rent a friend" has arisen in a foreign country, where the culture is extremely far from the native, and about the food in the restaurant is unknown about nothing, you can use the service "Rent a Local Friend". On the main page, you are offered to choose your arrival city, dates, language you speak, and basic interests like “food” or “architecture”. According to the plan, a new acquaintance will show the city, reduce to a decent restaurant and tell a little about the main attractions. In general, it will perform the function of a guide, but without the appropriate education, but also a raid of formality. Does it make sense if you have a million offers with ratings of restaurants and travel blogs on hand, and you can drink wine with a new acquaintance from Tinder, paying only for alcohol, it's up to you.
Births and broken hearts
What guides customers who are looking for friends in their city? One of the "professional friends" says in an interview with News.com that the wishes of customers can be very different. A young migrant offered to marry her immediately to extend a visa, and a 50-year-old man asked to come with him to the divorce court to annoy his ex-wife. Of course, there were options and simpler when customers asked to portray their girlfriend at a big wedding. And the CEO of the company "Rent a Friend" Cott Rosenbaum admitted that he once paid a man to perform in his place at an important event - Rosenbaum wanted to get into the birth of his wife.
People hire friends to go shopping, guys rent girls to get tips on looking for relationships or just to have dinner. Recently, dating apps are not limited to Tinder for romantic dates and Pure for one night sex. MeetUp, Nextdoor, Skout and about dozens of other applications work on the principle of geolocation and at the same time are focused on finding friends, not partners. However, some people prefer renting.
Miyabi, 27, has been working as a friend for money for several years and believes that this service helps people in difficult situations: "A lot of people are good at communication on the Internet or at work, but not in private life." Miyabi herself is from time to time rented by the parents of young girls so that their daughters can communicate with a pleasant older girl and discuss problems during the teenage crisis. Her colleague, Yumi, was also asked for pretty intimate things: one man paid her for the opportunity to discuss the health problems of his parents by mail, another read her a novel that he wrote ten years ago and did not show it to anyone. One client broke up with a girl a year ago, then pursued her, so he received a warning from the police and calmed down only after paying meetings with Yumi.
The girl talks about her experience of renting a friend in Japan (this, of course, a parody)
In Japanese, there is the word "Gaman", which translates as "manifestation of endurance in spite of difficulties and hardships." "Haman" very clearly reflects the ethics of the Japanese (this is the third country in the world in the number of suicides). Expressing emotions is not very common, not only in front of colleagues, but in front of the closest ones. "With us, rented friends, people can talk about their feelings, not thinking about how real friends will react to this," explains Yumi.
However, the fact that friends for rent are more popular in Asia does not mean that Europeans and Americans are more successful in building social ties. The modern world recommends not to load relatives with problems, but to immediately go to a psychologist - it’s enough to recall the famous episode from “Sex and the City”, where Kerry complains to her friends about a difficult parting, but she is told that friendship is not really necessary in order to whine about their problems. Or it reminds of “emotional service” - in which relationships in a couple or with a friend, where someone takes on a large emotional burden, are perceived as a form of bargaining. If you think rationally, a paid friend turns out to be cheaper than a psychotherapist, removes responsibility from a partner, and generally saves relationships with real friends from awkward situations and overloads.
However, the friendship lover for money lurks another danger - the second meeting. Columnist of The Guardian Tim Dowling writes how during a meeting with a paid friend he was seriously worried about whether he really liked him. Many clients experience this neurosis: the majority leaves in doubt and never checks, smiled at them for money or sincerely. But some still try to ask for a free meeting and, as a rule, they face disappointment, which only reinforces their insecurity. One day, Miyabi agreed to portray a bride for a lonely boy who was very much questioned by her parents - as a result, the client was left with a really broken heart and told relatives that she preferred a career to him.
Rented babies
If "friends for rent" took root in the West, playing the role of budget psychotherapists, guides without a diploma, or simply silent lotto rivals, in Asia the people selling industry went much further. During his career, Miyabi had the opportunity to cry at other people's funerals, to portray as a guest at someone else's wedding, and together with twenty colleagues to pose for instagram girls from senior classes: it was important for a schoolgirl to look cool in social networks. Buying friends for happy group photos is one of the fastest growing destinations. Ishii Yuichi, the founder of the Japanese company Family Romance, tells how one of the businessmen paid a lot of money to take out five of his employees to Las Vegas - all for the sake of photos on instagram.
Company Yuiti - the elite in the world of renting friends. All its employees are professional actors and are able to cope with almost any task. True, there is one rule: one person can not have more than five families in the work at the same time, many of them represent the dead or disappeared relatives. To Yuichi himself, several mothers at once pay to play the role of the coming father for their children. A man walks with them to amusement parks, talks about personal problems, and in the end looks at them crying, persuading him to stay. There is one legend for everyone: Dad found a new family, so he can only see them on weekends.
Yuichi works as a fake husband - for example, for women who hide their homosexuality from their parents. “A fake wedding will cost two million yen. The point is not only to buy a groom, you need to pay all the dummy guests. Friends, relatives from the groom — everyone is played by our employees,” says Yichi.
Video tutorial on how to be a "local friend"
"In Japan and China, it is much more important to have a full family than in the West. Therefore, it’s common for them to rent a missing family member for a wedding, for example, to have a fake uncle make a beautiful toast," Scott Rosenbaum tells about colleagues ’experience. During his career, Yuichi managed to apologize for the client-official before the leadership (according to local tradition, he had to kneel before an angry boss), played more than one wife’s lover: “Usually, after a betrayal comes up, husbands demand a meeting with a lover who time could disappear. Therefore, I portray the yakuza to scare my husband and avoid the consequences. "
One day his company encountered a pregnant client whose father was dying, but the child was in no hurry to be born. "Then we just gave her a baby for a couple of hours so that her father looked at his grandson before he died," says Yuichi. Its employees often eat in front of people suffering from anorexia, and the company sees nothing wrong with that. Yuichi believes that his company makes society more balanced, giving people what they don’t have - fathers, brothers, partners - at least for a while.
Compensation of tradition and ethics
Clay Kogut, presenting his new application for renting Ameego friends, said: "With Uber, we rent a stranger's car, with Airbnb we rent a stranger's house, and with Ameego the stranger himself is quite logical." At the same time, the problem is not only that the take-over of the economy comes to the point of absurdity, but the degree of alienation of people from each other is growing for a million reasons. It’s worth thinking about how people who rent themselves feel, how ethical it is to sell good location and emotional resources (even the word “resources” itself sounds terrible in this context). Friends for rent admit that they feel bad after each going to work - from the inability to help everyone at once, from the need to give up free meetings, and just the unpleasant feeling of the image of someone’s missing father.
The modern Internet offers a million ways to find friends: groups on Facebook, the same notorious tinder or meetings on interests organized by local communities. Of course, this contributes to the fragmentation of attention and the transformation of the choice of a partner in a hike in the supermarket, but even on a date through Pure, we still have to make efforts to please the person. To pay for friendship, whatever one may say, is a defeatist position, indicating not only the laziness of a particular person, but also the sad state of his affairs in principle.
People renting is an amazing postmodern tool that supports the rapidly collapsing traditional way. We divorce, but at the same time we close the hole in space from the disappeared spouse by a dummy person. We don’t want to go to the movies alone, but instead of learning how to do it alone, we rent a stranger. We can not tell friends the truth and do not solve this problem with a psychotherapist, but simply buy new friends. And is it worth it to secure friendship in money and pay for self-confidence and relationships by the hour.
Photo:bluebat - stock.adobe.com, shishigat - stock.adobe.com, kwanchaichaiudom - stock.adobe.com
