Ben Hamilton
August 22nd, 2017

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From the exchange of business cards, it quickly evolves to the plastic variety (photo: The Arrangement on Vimeo)

The rule of thumb is that you should never date anyone who is less than half your age plus seven, making 2017 the first year that the Macrons have qualified as Brigitte is 64 and Emmanuel is 32+7.

So if you’re 44 (like this writer), the limit is 29 – a little punitive perhaps? Although the younger you go, the more sense it makes. For a 20-year-old, it’s 17, for a 18-year-old, it’s 16, for a 16-year-old … it’s jail time.

Popular with students
But try telling all that to a ‘sugar daddy’, a wealthy elderly man who pays a young woman to be his girlfriend. Numbers are steadily rising thanks to a proliferation of websites promising to hook up interested parties.

Just recently, Seeking Arrangements.com confirmed that 2.5 million of its worldwide members are students seeking a “way to get on top of their student loan debt”.

With such heavy volumes, it threatens to change the dating arena forever.

Street campaigns forthcoming
And now Denmark has its own sugardaddy/sugarbaby site. RichMeetBeautiful, which launched on August 21, is the brainchild of Sigurd Vedal, the Norwegian founder of the adultery website Victoria Milan.

Co-launched in 32 other countries including Norway, Sweden and Finland, the site describes itself as “an online meeting place for mature, successful and economically stable gentlemen who want to meet beautiful young women for a relationship or dates”.

Unlike his adultery site where male members dominate, Vedal is expecting an equal spread of sugardaddies and sugarbabies, who “are intelligent and charming young women who dare to be spoiled, get presents, travel, financial support and mentorship”.

RichMeetBeautiful will conduct various street campaigns in the Danish cities of Copenhagen, Odense, Aarhus and Aalborg over the next six months in its bid to attract 250,000 Danish members by the end of 2018.