Why People Use Sugar Daddy Sites and the Psychology Behind It

People use sugar daddy sites for financial, experiential, and social reasons, according to a scoping review of the research published in Current Psychology in 2026. The reviewers screened 2,825 articles on sugar dating and found 27 that met their criteria for inclusion. Those 27 studies are a small evidence base, and most of what follows comes from a handful of them and from related studies.

Motives in the Research Literature

The 2026 review found that motivation was the main subject of the existing research. The reasons participants gave fell into 3 themes. Financial motives were the first, and experiential and social motives were the other 2.

The review also examined how much control sugar babies felt they had. Across the studies, sugar babies overwhelmingly reported agency in their relationships, and they also reported continued stigma and shame about taking part.

Seven Relationship Types in One Study

The sociologist Maren Scull of the University of Colorado Denver interviewed 48 women who identified as sugar babies and published her results in Sociological Perspectives in 2019. She sorted their relationships into 7 types: sugar prostitution, compensated dating, compensated companionship, sugar dating, sugar friendships, sugar friendships with benefits, and a type she called pragmatic love.

Scull found that only 1 of the 7 types amounted to prostitution. In her sample, 40% of the women had never had sex with their partners, and many of those who had described authentic connections. Scull reported that some of these relationships last for decades.

Stated Expectations Before a First Meeting

Srushti Upadhyay's 2021 paper for the Journal of Sex Research analyzed 90 sugar baby profiles and 108 sugar daddy profiles, along with discussion forums used by both groups. Users described sugar dating as casual and mutually beneficial, and they saw it as distinct from conventional romance.

The profiles set out expectations about the length of the relationship and the level of discretion each person wanted. A sugar daddy website puts those expectations on the profile before 2 people exchange a message, a step that conventional dating often leaves until later. The users' description of sugar dating as casual fits with that early statement of terms.

A 2024 study by Lena Gunnarsson in Sociological Perspectives, based on interviews with Swedish sugar babies, looked at the emotional side of that setup. The women associated emotional rewards with the defined terms of sugar dating. Gunnarsson described the approach as a defensive tactic that reduces the vulnerability women face in modern relationships, and she traced its roots to the insecure conditions of intimacy in general.

Personality and Attitudes Toward Sugar Relationships

The largest study of attitudes toward sugar relationships was published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2024. Norbert Meskó and nearly 100 co-authors surveyed people in 87 countries, in 37 languages, and kept 69,924 of the 118,324 responses after quality checks. Acceptance differed by role. Women were more open than men to the role of the younger partner, and men were more open to the role of the older partner. Acceptance was also higher among people with traditional views of gender roles and among people open to casual sex.

At the country level, the same global study found higher acceptance in countries with a higher Human Development Index, which argues against a simple poverty explanation, and higher acceptance where gender inequality was greater and social welfare was weaker. At the individual level, higher scores on Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy predicted greater acceptance. These are measures of attitudes in the general population, and most of the respondents had never used a sugar daddy site.

Attachment and Motivation

A 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology looked at attachment, the pattern a person shows in approaching closeness with a partner. The researchers surveyed 2,409 Hungarian adults, 1,980 of them in a younger group with an average age of 21 and 429 in an older group with an average age of 49.

Among the younger participants, acceptance of sugar relationships was linked only to extrinsic motivation, a focus on outside rewards. Among the older participants, acceptance was linked to avoidant and anxious attachment and to extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, although not to self-esteem. Attachment avoidance, a discomfort with emotional closeness, changed the strength of those links in both groups. The older group was mostly men and the younger group mostly women, so the 2 age groups roughly match the 2 sides of a typical sugar relationship.

Sugar Daddies' Accounts

One of the few studies to interview sugar daddies was published in the Journal of Sex Research in 2022 by the Swedish researchers Lena Gunnarsson and Sofia Strid, who drew on 9 interviews and 37 questionnaire responses from sugar daddies in Sweden. The men described a quest for mutuality, saying they wanted the women to enjoy their time together for its own sake and wanted emotional closeness in the relationship and in sex.

The authors described a tension in the men's accounts between the economic side of sugar dating and that ideal of mutual enjoyment. In the men's own descriptions, sugar dating was somewhere between a business exchange and ordinary dating, and the part they said they valued was the relational one.

The women's side of the same pattern appears in later interviews by Upadhyay, now a doctoral researcher at the University at Buffalo. In reporting by ABC News in Australia, she said that many sugar babies described the older men they dated becoming interested in turning the relationship into a romantic one. Some younger participants also said their partners had helped them find internships and taught them how to invest.

Stigma and Self-Presentation

In her 2021 study, Upadhyay found that both sugar babies and sugar daddies described deliberate ways of distancing themselves from the sex industry in how they talked and wrote about sugar dating. She described sugaring as a discreet option, short or long term, for people who want to avoid the stigma attached to commercial sex work.

A Small Field of 27 Studies

The 2026 review drew on 27 studies, and its authors listed what those studies lacked. Most used narrow samples and almost none looked beyond heterosexual pairs. Almost none involved the people who take part in sugar dating in designing the research. Many of the women behind Scull's 7 types had never intended to find a benefactor and met the men at work or on a catering job. Until more research exists, the reasons any one person signs up for a sugar daddy site are better learned from that person than from the literature.