No Need to Rent a Friend, Be a Friend Instead

 

Some cultural changes in America make me shake my head, others bring tears to my eyes.

One tear-producing example was mentioned in a book I was reading recently about neighborhoods: renting friends.

My research of the trend-led me to an article in Vox Magazine by Jean-Luc Bouchard with this headline: “I paid $47 an hour for someone to be my friend.”

Bouchard’s article began this way: “In an uncharacteristic display of concern, my brother had called to tell me to be safe. My brother was worried about what seemed to me an ideal Saturday afternoon: My friend and I were taking in a movie, walking through some of New York City’s loveliest neighborhoods, and enjoying cactus tacos at a food hall. It was a perfectly pleasant series of events that I’d calculated to last 180 minutes, because my friend was a stranger I found online and I was paying for the company by the hour.”

My first reaction was that this is bananas!

This idea began in Japan two decades ago. In Japan the platonic companionship market employs full-time staff who manage thousands of freelance rentable “actors and actresses.”

The size of this industry did not go unnoticed in America. Entrepreneur Scott Rosenbaum founded RentAFriend in 2009 to fill a hole he perceived in the market for platonic company. “Before RentAFriend,” he wrote in an email, “if you had a wedding to attend and weren’t dating anyone, the options to find someone to go with you were slim.”

RentAFriend is a bare-bones site built to show paying customers a list of potential rentable friends they can get in contact quickly. RentAFriend is explicit about friends offering “platonic non-sexual non-physical friendship only.”

The list of recommended platonic activities range from going to a museum or movie to less obvious activities like a friend to be your tour guide in a new city, or come with you to a work event or wedding that you do not want to attend alone.

Author Bouchard found a match at https://rentafriend.com. Similar to an array of available dating apps and connection apps like Vina, Bumble, Bumble BFF, Peanut, Meetup, and Meet My Dog. Apparently, platonic companionship is now a product that can be bought or sold.

In the Vox article, Bouchard detailed her experience. She even admitted that the whole outing cost her $141.69 -- $20 an hour for friendship, plus the website membership free, movie tickets and food.

Are we now so lonely that we have to rent friends?  I will let readers answer that question themselves. But I will offer this advice: your small community or neighborhood includes people just like you, seeking connection and friendship. Get up off the couch, go take a walk, hit a community event, attend church, join a club and grow those friendships naturally.

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Does this article make you interested in taking the Engaged Neighbor pledge? Five categories and 20 principles to guide you toward becoming an engaged neighbor. Sign the pledge online at http://engagedneighbor.com.

Contact the blog author, David L. Burton at dburton541@yahoo.com.