Kathryn Jones, 28, was driving down a dark, desolate road when her car collided with a bear.

“There were swamps on either side of the road, and I was going around 60 miles per hour when this big black mass appeared out of nowhere,” Jones explains. “There was no way I was going to swerve and end up in a ditch or in a swamp, so I clipped him, and his body struck the front of the car. He completely smashed in my front end.”

The accident took place on Christmas day. The merriest day of the year turned into the most miserable after the insurance company cast suspicion on her “jaywalking-Winnie-the-Pooh-bear” story and told her how much the crash would cost her.

“They told me my deductible was thousands of dollars, and my heart dropped. I told them, I just don’t have the money. I’d just spent all my money on Christmas,” she says.

Jones never suspected that weeks later, her saving grace would come in the form of SecretBenefits.com, a sugar daddy dating website.


[Kathryn Jones]

Jones had been a sugar baby with Secret Benefits for about two years, and had been on a number of other arrangement dating sites before that. Over the course of dating about 5 to 6 sugar daddies, she’d amassed a small army of men who wanted to spoil and protect her — like any good daddy would.

Sugar dating isn’t for everyone. With the glamor of the gifts, the five-star dinners and the all-expenses paid vacations comes a fair share of stigmatization. The allegation that sugar babies are glorified escorts is a difficult taboo to rise above.

Sure, Jones explains, sex can be a part of the arrangement young women make with their wealthy benefactors. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be. “You set your own boundaries and terms, and do as much or as little as you want to,” she says.

The way she sees it, dating on Secret Benefits parallels dating in the real world — with many of the most terrible aspects removed.

Wasted time, for example. In every lady’s dating life, she’s doomed to find a few duds and douches along the way. When the same inevitably occurs in the sugar daddy dating world, at least they’re compensated for the ones that didn’t work out.

Another aspect almost eliminated: creeps and losers. “Before becoming a sugar baby, the men I happened to meet were not ambitious or goal oriented, and I found myself taking care of them in the relationship,” Jones says. “I got kind of tired of that.”

Quite the contrary, she can’t speak highly enough of her sugar daddies. “The way they carry themselves is captivating,” she says. The way they speak, dress, exude affluence, power and confidence. They’re far from the typical Tinder suitors — the type to send poorly-lit pixelated smartphone dick pics snapped in the bathroom with the piss-crusted toilet in the background.

There are let-downs in the sugar daddy world, too — men who lie about their marital status, or even worse, about their income — but Jones insists Secret Benefits does a grade-A job of screening those suckers out.

Jones celebrates the service, because in her bear-induced trauma, it was her savior. Shortly after the accident destroyed her sole means of transportation to work, Secret Benefits reached out to its sugar babies about the company’s Forget Santa competition, in which girls could write in asking for presents that Santa failed to deliver.

Jones seized the opportunity to ask for exactly what she needed: $2,000 to cover her car insurance deductible. She and her mother snapped some adorable pictures of her pouty-frowning beside the damage this asshole-Baloo had caused, and sent in her contest application. About a week later, Secret Benefits announced she’d won.

“I screamed for a minute straight at the top of my lungs,” Jones says. She’d gotten gifts from sugar daddy dating before — clothes, shoes, dinners or lingerie — but this took the cake.

Jones, and generally everyone else in the sugar realm, says that sugar babies and sugar daddies share a mutually beneficial relationship. Jones has enjoyed those benefits over and over again.

Like so many babies before her, she turned to Secret Benefits because she needed the money. At the wrinkled hands of lonely old daddies, they often find it. Salvation comes in strange forms.


[Kathryn and her Ford Explorer]