About 10 years ago when I was in college my friends and I were talking about our upcoming formal. Many of us already had dates, but a few of my friends didn’t have any. We were joking around how they should hire an escort for the night, until they made a few phone calls and found out that escorts would end up costing $150 per hour. Our formal was 4 hours long, and they didn’t have $600 to spend. (Remember we were poor college students).
That’s when I originally thought of a “rent a date” type website. Where people could rend a platonic date. (Platonic means “just friends” and nothing more). Where as it would kind of be like an escort, but wouldn’t be as expensive because there would be nothing more than “just friends” going on.
I thought that there would be people who would want to “rent a friend” or “rent a date” that were just looking for companionship for a party and nothing more. It would NOT be a dating website, but rather just a website where people can rent platonic friends for a day.
Fast forward 9 years I came across an article about the growing Japanese Rent A Friend Agencies. These Japanese Rent a friend agencies were targeting families with voids: Divorced families, incarcerated parents, widows, etc. These agencies were allowing people to “rent a friend” or in their case “rent a spouse” and I’ll explain. In Japan, family structure is very important. If a child has a school event and their parents are invited, it’s important in Japanese society to have both parents present at the activity. But because of divorce, or death it’s not always possible to have both a mother and father figure available. So these companies would “rent” a stand in mother or father figure and their business was booming.
This made me think. If people in Japan would be willing to “rent a friend” would they be willing to do the same in the US? Obviously our culture was different, where as divorce in the US nearly ends 50% of all marriages, but that got me thinking. There could be many other reasons people may want to rent a friend. That’s when I decided to open the website: http://www.RentAFriend.com allowing people to search for available friends to rent.
RentAFriend.com has officially become the world’s largest “rent a friend” service and it’s 100% free to search for available friends for rent in your area. Just visit http://www.RentAFriend.com