21 Mar Am I Going to Have to Choose Between Romantic Love and a Sugaring Career? The Fourth Crisis…
(Background for the new reader:
I encourage the reader to back up to the blog entry about the first crisis. This will all make much more sense.
When I write about crisis, in the context of psychological development, I don’t mean crisis as in “a calamity,” as the word might generally mean. A “psycho-developmental crisis” means the central conundrum for a given stage of life. In the past few blog entries, I have been showing how changes in a sugaring woman’s money-attitudes reveal the stages of her psycho-development. I think this is so interesting because we all can learn from the successes sugaring women have in making these transitions.
In the blog entry below, I’m talking about the career development of all who sugar, whether using a multiple client or a sugar daddy model of business.)
The fourth crisis—and remember I mean conundrum, not calamity— begins the first time an escort or other sugaring woman asks herself, “Am I going to have to choose between romantic love and a sugaring career?” or “Can I avoid having to make any trade-off between having the love I want and the career I want?” So you see, this crisis can arise at any point, even before the decision to start sugaring. (Thus the fourth crisis is a fourth type of crisis, not necessarily the fourth in the series, whereas the other three I wrote about do have to come in their sequence).
To a sugaring woman in the position of before having resolved this psycho-developmental crisis, the problem really does look like — she really does experience it as — a conundrum of having to choose. Sugaring women still in the “before” position believe that for solving this conundrum—whether to prioritize romantic love or to prioritize the sugaring career—there are only three strategies to choose from:
- Choose one, drop the other—i.e., sugar or marry for money and the life that becomes possible, or drop the sugaring to make possible a life with romantic love
- Do both, but sequentially—i.e., sugar first then form a vanilla romantic relationship later in life, or
- Have it all—i.e., do both at the same time, either with or without his knowledge that you’re sugaring.
Yes, these are solutions. However any of these is a “first order” solution: It involves no new insight. The mindset that chooses one of these solutions is the same one that conceived the question, “Am I going to have to choose between romantic love and a sugaring career?” In which case, no psychological development has occurred. (That is why I would say it is not a resolution to her psycho-developmental crisis. And that is why, as her psychologist, my job would not be simply to help her choose from among these options.)
If these are first order solutions because they involve no new insight, then what is the missing insight? Actually, there are two parts, the insight and the skill to locate the insight. A sugaring woman has moved from the “before” to the “after” position of this crisis once she not only no longer sees the problem in the form of this question, but also knows how to locate for herself the necessary insight to transform such questions.
Sugaring women, like all human beings, typically prefer one of two strategies for finding that insight. (And the reader might notice that one of these two strategies instantly makes more sense than the other.) The first strategy is thinking-based and the second is feeling-based.
The thinking-based strategy for locating the insight happens by the sugaring woman asking herself, “What is the premise of my crisis-question?” In the case of this crisis, the question, “Am I going to have to choose between romantic love and a sugaring career?” has a two-part premise. The two unexamined expectations are:
Premise one – If I do not have money I will be endlessly unhappy; if I do not have romantic love, I will be endlessly unhappy.
Premise two – If I choose wrong today, I will be endlessly unhappy in the future
In this case, the question really means, “What must I do not to suffer?” And then she sees, neither a romantic relationship nor money insures one will not suffer later in life. Thus the crisis which seemed so obvious and unavoidable from her “before” position now looks like a misunderstanding of the real issue, from her perspective in the “after” position. She will feel differently about the issue because she sees the issue differently, and she sees the issue differently because she has grown psychologically.
The feeling-based strategy for locating the insight happens by the sugaring woman asking herself “What is it I fear? And how is that driving what I think I want? Is it to never regret my choices? To never feel lonely? To obtain some promise from the universe that one day in the future I will not unrelentingly regret the choice I make now? ….In this case the original question has also transformed, thus leading to psychological development.
The fallacy is the belief, “I will only be happy if…”
In other words, the resolution is the realization that this choice does not determine whether or not she will be happy or lonely in the future. [Her fear of unhappiness is what is driving the original question to begin with, and it is only by examining that fear and its root causes that she can resolve the underlying crisis. In that realization, she has bridged the gap from the “before” position to the “after” position.
Escorts and other sugaring women who have resolved this crisis have learned two things. First, life’s biggest questions often require deeper insight which addresses the more profound underlying issues, and they recognize such insight hasn’t happened if the answer comes in the same terms as the question. And second, that it is an important life skill to know how to intentionally locate the necessary insight that enables her to transcend the crisis. What these women have figured out we all would do well to learn from.