You ride the buses, I’ll ride with my pussy! – reflections on fathers

Then you take your busses, I’ll ride my ‘own’ pussy,” is a line that sugar-babes whose car leases are paid by their sugar-daddies do not say to women who have preserved their self-respect. Why? Because they are fundamentally dishonest and try to distort reality – an attempt that always fails in the end and results in internal chaos, identity collapse, and the loss of the maternal role, despite efforts to maintain the façade of the “good mother” and “strong woman.”

Sugar relationships. Much has been written about them, yet not enough. Repetition is said to be the mother of wisdom, and what else does that saying mean except that a person begins to believe the things they repeatedly do. In this sense, wisdom is our conviction about reality, formed through repeated actions. Beliefs do not actually lead actions – actions shape beliefs. This is also why most forms of therapy do not produce results (except financially, for therapists themselves).

And “mother” (both as repeated activity and as the principle of being a mother) is in this sense multi-layered: she stands hierarchically above “wisdom.” She is the one who is believed, the one who gives birth to wisdom. She does so in any case – sometimes wisdom is a warning and a lesson, sometimes an example. Therefore, the mother is always believed at first, and maternal love is assumed until the lack of it is concluded. And then only the lesson remains.

A child’s lost faith in their mother is not restored by sentimental tears, caresses, public lament, gifts, or fairy tales. The child often splits the mother into two figures: the “good mother,” who is dead, and the “bad mother,” who remains as a warning. We see signs of this in forced smiles in birthday photos, where the child’s discomfort beside the mother is evident, because the mother has become a pose. The mother no longer dares to come close to the child (physically or metaphysically), because the resentment accumulated inside the child could explode.

Because the maternal figure is so powerful, faith in her can be destroyed only by the mother herself – through her actions. And it is precisely the actions that must be talked about.

The cognitive trap and the categorical supremacy of actions

Just as many “psychology specialist” trainers who have not yet lost their naivety nor actually stepped into life (for example, have not experienced that blow of timeless significance that breaks into consciousness when one has children, shatters it, and then assembles it again in a new way), speak of a schema where beliefs create feelings, feelings create actions, and then a new belief framework forms, many mothers also believe that words and thoughts have a lasting, weighty influence in raising children. Without question, this narrative of American-style self-help culture sells well in many fields, and there is a certain inner logic to it if one looks narrowly and one-dimensionally at cognitive associations. But this is precisely where a categorical error is made: these components do not carry equal weight in terms of psychological impact, especially in the case of a small human being.

To understand the fundamental limitation of the influence of beliefs and feelings, one can make a small thought experiment. If this schema truly worked, we would live in a world populated by people in ideal physical shape, highly educated, honest, emotionally balanced, and full of initiative. Addiction would not exist, and everyone would have plenty of money (which would mean that money no longer has meaning, etc.). It would be a utopia surpassing even Orwell’s imagination — more like Huxley 2.0. How difficult is it, for example, to simply adopt the belief that one must be hardworking and disciplined; that instead of watching TV or endlessly scrolling streams, one should read books or go to the gym; that one should eat only healthy food and form habits that cultivate both body and mind. It becomes almost comical. If the system worked like that, nothing would be wrong. Unfortunately, the human psyche does not work that way.

Those typical psychological “triangles” — schematics that hang on the walls of today’s schools in the offices of “mental support staff” (whose role remains pathologically vague to many more critically-minded parents) — where thought, feeling, and action are depicted as phenomena of equal significance, cause more harm than benefit in reality. Why? Because the weight of actions should comprise almost the entire structure. Not Pareto-like 80%, but 99% or more. Thoughts and feelings are subordinate to actions, not the other way around. As long as a person does not accept this logic, the schema serves only as self-soothing or as a naïve optimism immediately after a seminar, a brief attempt to change one’s life. Sincere, yes — but regardless of initially good intentions (if they existed at all), ultimately impossible.

Therefore, all such schemas should consist almost entirely of the block “action,” because actions determine everything else — both change for the better and change for the worse, both for oneself and for others.

The limitation of understanding life without the axiological component

The same applies to mothers and fathers: talk about what a family is, and what the role and responsibility of a parent is, becomes empty without the actions that support it. Just as understanding the world is impossible without a hierarchy of values, raising children cannot be done solely through sharing emotions, verbal reassurances of care, and repeating life truths, if the actual behavioral example (or rather, the warning it creates) cancels it out.

Being in the world and understanding it is not essentially a changing instruction manual, a weather report, or a menu composed of isolated parts. It is something much more fundamental: a structure consisting of three parts — the metaphysical (or ontological), the epistemological, and the axiological — and these can function only together. And here I intentionally go further: the first two are understandable only through the third. If the axiological component is not stable, clear, and dogmatic, a person cannot cope with life, because they cannot sufficiently interpret their experience of being alive or the world itself.

To describe the nature of the world and our understanding of it, a person must have a lasting sense of what is categorically right and wrong — and such a sense can exist only in the form of an internal individual value hierarchy, which is vertically connected to the timeless. This is why, for example, Heidegger in a certain sense remained only at the cognitive-ontological level in his descriptions, even when he articulated in detail (and later reformulated) the dynamic between the ontological and epistemological parts. The treatment is in many ways beautiful, yet also frustrating, because it lacks a clear vertical line. Anyone who has read Heidegger may say that he did not intend to address the third component — the explicit axiological framework through which the rest could be grounded in lived reality. Fine: his project was the understanding of Being, not the hierarchy of values.

Yet I argue that some form of axiological grounding is a prerequisite for the possibility of acknowledging and interpreting Being itself, as Schelling attempted to show in his Weltformel. (It may sound as though I’m dropping names like characters from the Russian film Bumer, but I have written hundreds of pages of lecture material about these thinkers on my website — williamparvet.com — and did so long before the arrival of ChatGPT.)

Kant, in a certain sense, chose a more direct and in my view more correct path — being forced to acknowledge the limits of cognitive reason in the first two domains (no matter how we try to fill those gaps) and demonstrating that moral, axiological hierarchy is not an “addition” to them, but the precondition for making sense of them. From his posthumously published works, one can even read out an even greater significance of that hierarchy.

What does this mean in simpler terms? We cannot talk about what the world is, or how we understand reality, without a stable and clear understanding of good and evil, right and wrong. Religion, as an axiological element of absolutes in our perception of the world, provides the structural possibility (and to a large extent, the justification) for conceptualizing the experience of living. This is where the combined significance of both Heidegger’s and Kant’s approaches must be understood.

How does this relate to “sugar-daddying”? (I do not claim authorship of the term — the sound of it is unpleasant in itself, but I use it intentionally.) First, let this be said plainly and without insinuation: a larger age difference between a woman and a man does not automatically make the relationship transactional or inclined toward the sugar-daddy dynamic. I know several families where the age difference is more than ten years; three functioning relationships where it is around fifteen; and two where it is over twenty.

These are certainly exceptions, but I am convinced that these men are not “sugar-daddy types,” and these women are not “sugar-babe types.” These relationships contain a higher layer, whose precondition is precisely a functioning axiological worldview (yes, also patriarchal, but justifiably so) — predominantly articulated by the man and accepted by the woman.

This is precisely what “sugar relationships” lack, and what fundamentally distinguishes the two. More simply: those relationships with a large age difference are guided by the idea of family, marriage, and love, not by the use of sex as a commodity. They have an axiological framework that aligns with the logic of a sustainable life.

The transactional logic of relationships and the transcendent component

In today’s world, when it comes to understanding close relationships, young men — if we set aside the whole spiritual nonsense (neo-Taoism, Western mysticism, commercialized yoga and similar trends, which are so fluid and without structure that conceptualizing them is as impossible as conceptualizing fourth-wave feminism) — generally orient themselves toward three main psychological-cultural directions:
(a) complete withdrawal from relationships with women (incel),
(b) aggressive and often overcompensating alpha mentality (Tate), or
(c) religion and value-based living.

Against this backdrop, it has become common to interpret the relationship between man and woman transactionally: the man brings something into the relationship that the woman needs and cannot provide herself; the woman brings something that the man needs and cannot provide himself. This logic cannot be denied — it is part of the structure of human intimacy.

Hamsun described this beautifully: when Inger came to Isak for the first time, not a single explanation was needed. The mutually complementing function of masculine and feminine — and yes, also entirely transactional — was present without a word. This is natural. The question is not whether transactionalism exists, but how large a portion of the relationship it occupies.

The problem arises when transactionalism is no longer just one dimension, but becomes the relationship’s entire substance. When the relationship is reduced to a trade — or more precisely, a sequence of trades — without being subject to something higher, it loses its meaning. Such a relationship does not protect the value, identity, or future of either party, but ultimately destroys both.

This is where the symbolic axis comes into play. If we imagine everyday transactional exchange as the horizontal beam of a cross, it is useful, practical, and necessary — but on its own, limited. Only with the addition of the vertical beam does it become a cross. And the cross has an effect even on those who consider themselves far removed from religion (though often they are not). In other words: the vertical dimension brings about a categorical transformation. Likewise, a relationship becomes meaningful only if it contains a transcendent dimension — something that stands higher than the daily exchange logic of benefits between man and woman. Hamsun’s characters were resistant to the blows of fate (the most accurate term here would be Taleb’s antifragile), because their lives were carried by hierarchical transcendence — they managed because they submitted (or were guided to submit) to a higher order.

Heidegger spent his entire life searching for the same thing — walking in cemeteries, in solitude, listening to the presence of the weight of Being — and he remained searching. Hamsun, in a sense, began where Heidegger never arrived: he described the human and the world from the height of the axiological downwards, not from below upwards. One wrote from the felt weight of Being, the other from meaning.

This does not mean that Heidegger missed something essential; rather, he consciously remained within the inner structure of the ontological-epistemological framework, without explicitly articulating the vertical, value-based axis that makes experience meaningful. Hamsun, on the other hand, assumed (and continuously felt and expressed) this axis implicitly, and therefore he could move directly to the level of meaning.

A banal but accurate analogy (and as one of Estonia’s finest yet sometimes underrated philosophers — who did not philosophize merely with a hammer, but with a full toolbox, and was also a man of action — Karl Pajupuu — would say: “my story, my examples”): if one needs to solve a whole problem, then Batman would be Hamsun and Robin would be Heidegger.

The inevitability of sacrifice

A relationship, family, and marriage do not endure because a partner is a “soulmate,” “the one,” a “twin flame,” or some other New Age romantic psycho-mystical ideal (I don’t know these terms precisely; usually these expressions are two words long — as Tarmo Urb once said, if I recall correctly, about such things: “just like bullshit”). The probability that out of four billion people your partner is “the one and only” — the exact person who understands you best and is ideal for you in every aspect — is not just practically, but absolutely, zero.

There certainly exist people who might be even more compatible, more aligned, more understanding, more supportive, more attractive, with the right height, eye color, or any number of other characteristics. Therefore, sacrifice is not some tragic optional add-on to a relationship, but an unavoidable structural part of being in one — a sacrifice is made in every case; the only question is which sacrifice and for what purpose. There is no “right” person; there is simply another equally “wrong” person with whom going forward requires relying on hope and a jointly chosen higher idea (family, marriage, children).

Sacrifice tends to be interpreted as something negative, although its logic is actually far more positive than it appears at first glance. One could even say that the sacrifice of one’s personal freedom, of all alternative future scenarios, and ultimately of one’s entire life to the relationship, family, and marriage is not a punishment but — although the concept may seem impossible at first — a gift.

“How so? A person deserves happiness! What sacrifice? What suffering?!”
Nearly everyone has cried out (at least internally) in this way when confronted with the existential tragedy that always accompanies human existence. The inevitability of sacrifice becomes easy to understand when life is viewed as having two parts, and the breaking point between them.

The division of life into two parts and the “breaking-point”

Every human life can be divided into two fundamental parts, though their proportions vary from person to person.

The first is the stage of life during which a person believes in the possibility of a happy life and sets as their goal the sincere desire to “spend as much of one’s time as possible in pleasant, enjoyable, and tension-relieving states.” This is the idea of happiness as something that can be achieved and maintained — a myth easy to fall in love with, especially in childhood or adolescence, and particularly when parents give the child the apparent “gift” of shielding them from the tragic and suffering-filled nature of life.

The second part is the period when a person comes to understand that the essence of life is tragic. And although human beings are not inherently cynical in the Hobbesian sense, they add to life’s inevitable tragedy (finitude, illness, accidents, wars, unequal burdens) through their own contribution — often through partially conscious actions that increase suffering and pain. From the moment this realization appears — and blessed are those who experience this early, for they are the ones to whom the possibility of truly changing the world is opened — the person no longer creates for themselves the illusion of the possibility of lasting happiness. They realize that they are in an existential situation in which only different forms of suffering can be chosen, and they differ only in the degree of meaning that accompanies the suffering. I say honestly: no classical philosopher taught me this, but Jüri Arrak once wrote a single thought in ordinary pencil on the back of a painting and left it for me to decipher — and that’s where it came from. He was a good man.

People in whom this “breakpoint” has not yet occurred stand (metaphorically) on the left side of the scale: hedonism, self-soothing “spiritual self-care,” contemporary pleasure-oriented New Age “spirituality,” and the other two-word expressions already mentioned. On the right side are religion and a stable hierarchy of values. The journey from one side to the other is often long, and the moment when this awareness arrives is never easy — it is always, in its own way, sad. A person suddenly and irrevocably realizes that the myth of euphoric reality they had cultivated is not false merely because of personal tragedy, but because such a reality is fundamentally impossible. It is not a collision with external reality — it is a collision with oneself. At the same time, it is an existential developmental step — in Jungian terms, becoming an adult through the (symbolic) death of the father. In simple language: the person realizes that a life without suffering and with permanent happiness is not prevented by external circumstances — it is simply not possible at all. The amount of suffering inevitably increases over time, and within the “fantasy of the happy life,” it is always at least as great (and usually greater) than in the present moment.

People who are in this transitional stage — on the way to the point where they lose the naïve expectation of lasting happiness — are in a psychologically interesting state. This state is a mixture of suppressing certain thoughts (so as not to allow the knowledge fully into awareness) and a large dose of rationalization. They operate in a world that is largely distorted, because to maintain it, they must constantly produce new fantasies of a “beautiful future,” and use these imagined pictures to keep alive the hope of happiness. And now one might ask whether this section corresponds to the title of the article. It does — exactly. Because it is precisely in this state that people enter “sugar-relationships,” and it is usually at the moment of the breakpoint that they leave them.

The illusion of happiness through a distorted process theory

One of the simplest ways to understand the absurdity of the happiness-expectation that tends toward pathology is to look at it through the lens of Whitehead’s process theory. When a person imagines themselves in a “beautiful, happy future” — for example, walking into the sunset, being wealthy, healthy, and loved together with an “ideal” partner — they have manipulated their consciousness and the surrounding world on nearly every analytical level. Whitehead describes very precisely how each moment (actual occasion) forms through the interplay of a large number of prehensions: physical sensations, memories, desires, a basic moral aim, and all previous moments carried into that point.

Simply put: every moment carries all of its past with it, and when we imagine “happy moments” in the future, it is impossible to foresee which layers of past pain, loss, and tension will accompany them — especially the ones that diminish (if not nullify) the imagined happiness.

This is why the idea of a “happy future moment” is inherently incomplete. It is true that due to self-awareness we can “travel” in time — imagine, recall, project — but we cannot perceive the moment that will arrive together with its future-past pain: the influence of earlier experiences, traumas, losses, biological changes, and the choices of others. We see the future without the very factors that will be present in it.

David Lynch has depicted this in many ways. In his world, the personality is not linearly continuous, but consists of different moments: of what has happened, what has happened with others, and what could have happened but did not. This “future past” — a dreamlike, non-linear chain of experiences — forms the internal space of a person. Lynch shows how personality is shaped through the interplay of moments, experiences, and possibilities. In doing so, he essentially visualizes process theory in his films, even if he arrives there by a different route. We are not tomorrow who we are today — not even after one night and one dream, let alone after events that happen or fail to happen. For every moment changes the underlying structure. And precisely for this reason, a person needs a vertical axis — an internal point of permanence that carries through time. Without it, experience would break down into something fluid, ungraspable, and accidental.

Returning to Whitehead. Even if the imagined “sunset” arrived exactly as imagined, the person would be there together with their health problems, memories of loved ones falling ill, the knowledge that someone they love may soon die or has already died; together with guilt, loss, mistakes, and the pain of responsibility — for example, the suffocating and unforgivable awareness of having lost one’s children or having sacrificed the parental role for hedonistic pleasures. Everything that is unavoidable in real life is simply removed from the happiness-fantasy. Thus arises a situation where one fantasizes about a future that is structurally impossible from the outset.

The mirror image of this dynamic, moving in the opposite direction, appears in Anna Gavalda’s descriptions. When she writes about “stolen hours” and the tragedy embedded within them, she points to the fact that just as one cannot pre-live future “happy moments” without the future-past pain carried within them, the happy moment experienced here and now is never pure. Within every moment of happiness is already the knowledge of its inevitable finitude and the pain that will come. If anything should shake a person awake, it is this: every moment shared with a child is limited and unrepeatable. This knowledge alone should be enough to make any parent think before going down the path of breaking the family.

No matter what arrangement emerges after a divorce, it will always be less favorable in terms of time spent with the child than during cohabitation. And one will have to literally fight for every remaining moment with the child. If those moments are lost to a “sugar-relationship,” the parent is essentially dead as a father or mother. They have ended their full existence in the eyes of the one for whom they were supposed to be irreplaceable, sacrificing those moments for their own “well-being” in the lowest sense of the word.

There is no need to explain this further, because there is more truth in it than parents who have destroyed their families are able to admit to themselves. One can deny it, but one cannot rise from that role. And this pain is woven into every future moment with the child: the loss of oneself and the eternal echo of personal collapse. Simply put: no father or mother should cultivate illusions of post-divorce euphoria. The future-past pain in those moments is, in its nature, often much closer to a metaphysical hell on earth.

As a result of the above, the “pursuit of a happy life” in sugar-relationships often becomes a strained and internally absurd process. To maintain it, a person must remove a large part of reality and stage scenes of the future into which life’s inevitable burdens have not yet arrived. They must cut life into pieces in order to sustain fantasy-images that require a constant flow of input energy — because real life moves against them.

But when a person understands that suffering is inherent and that life does not offer the choice between suffering or not suffering, but only the choice of which suffering has meaning, the breakpoint arrives. This breakpoint does not express itself in collapse, but in liberation: the person no longer needs to manipulate their future in order to believe in the possibility of happiness. They can begin to live not in anticipation of a feeling, but in accordance with meaning.

Thus, the sugar-relationship is always a mediated way to prolong the life stage in which the person has not yet reached the breakpoint — a construction used to preserve the illusion of the possibility of happiness while avoiding meaningful responsibility. But the breakpoint always arrives. And the later it arrives, the more painful it is. Just as a damaged diamond, once its flaw has been seen, can no longer be “unseen,” once a person perceives the inherently suffering-filled nature of life, they can no longer look at life through the old naïve optimism.

I remember how — purely by coincidence, when I was 34 — Steven Tyler once spoke to me about the impossibility of “not-remembering.” And I still remember it, without having to recall it. We live inseparably in chains of moments that have brought us to today — and the influence of children in these chains is the most significant. That is why there are things with which one must not play.

“Sugar” relationships as prostitution with one client

A relationship with a large age difference of this tragic kind does not have, and in reality cannot have, the aims of marriage, family, or children — unlike age-difference relationships that are grounded in a healthy internal value hierarchy. The core of the “sugar” relationship is exchange: the woman offers her youth and beauty, sex, company, and attention; the man provides material benefits, which are usually realized not as direct payments, but as lifestyle enablement — rent, car leases, travel, restaurants, gifts, living together in luxurious conditions.

In essence, this does not differ from prostitution in any meaningful way. In conventional prostitution, the number of clients is simply larger and the exchange rate more explicitly defined. The principle is the same: one’s body, beauty, and youth are traded for money and material benefits.

And almost all sugar-babe type women — in those rare moments when they are honest with themselves — admit that their benefit does not lie in the sugar-daddy as a person, but in the lifestyle and material advantages. This means that the man is a replaceable component: if someone younger or more appealing appeared who could guarantee the same (or better) lifestyle, the exchange would occur. Without wealth and lifestyle, the sugar-daddy would simply be an older, lonely, and slightly odd man — the idea of “being in a relationship with him” would evoke, at best, a smirk and quite often an out-loud laugh.

Likewise, the sugar-daddy’s position is reductive, but in the opposite direction: he does not care about the sugar-babe as a whole person, but about the body. He desires the physical attributes, not the human being. He would want the same body even without the woman’s background, intellect, children, experiences, or dignity as a person. Therefore, it is not at all inaccurate to define a sugar-daddy relationship as “prostitution with one client.” It is an exact definition.

Yet — and for very understandable reasons — both parties almost always conceal this, not realizing how transparent the clichés are behind which they hide. The sugar-babe, in monumental naïveté, claims: “I didn’t even know he was rich,” and “I would have been interested in him anyway.” The sugar-daddy, in turn, speaks of how “deep and interesting” the sugar-babe is as a person, and how any physical contact is secondary for him. But without exception, such a relationship ends the moment one party shuts off the flow of benefits. The relationship does not end when “love runs out”; it ends (and usually becomes labeled as a “meaningful friendship”) when the exchange ends. The supposed “intellectual depth” and “emotional connection” collapse the moment the exchange ceases — and with it collapses the illusion of love.

Let us call things by their real names. Prostitution has existed since the beginning of human society and is unlikely to disappear. Although I consider prostitution ultimately a loss for both participants, it contains at least one honest element: the transaction is not hidden behind sentimental rhetoric. It is openly described as exchange — not love, not values, not destiny.

In theory, a “sugar” relationship could be just as honest if it existed in complete isolation: a solitary, responsibility-free old man and a solitary young infertile woman with no illusions, no future expectations, no connection to family-based value structures, and who is immune to the internal trauma of selling her body. They could mutually improve each other’s “quality of life,” without that pathology radiating outward.

Unfortunately, in real life such situations almost never occur. The sugar-babe is always someone’s daughter, and often someone’s mother. The sugar-daddy is someone’s son, and often someone’s father. Therefore, the transaction does not remain limited to satisfying the needs of two individuals; such a phenomenon cannot be kept existentially neutral.

This is where the real tragedy of “sugar” relationships appears: the relationship does not harm only the two participants. Its effects carry into other relationships, into the structure of the family, into value hierarchies, into generational lines. The suffering is not individual — it is hereditary. It transfers across time just like all traumatic nodal points that awaken again in future moments.

Thus, the “sugar” relationship is not merely a “slightly altered lifestyle with shifted values.” It is a construction used to postpone the breakpoint — the moment in life when a person must acknowledge life’s inherent tragedy. It is the cultivation of deviation in the hope that culture will shift — but in reality, the relationship always ends.

This is the shared fate of those involved in sugar-relationships: not euphoria, but an inevitable return to oneself — often accompanied by delayed regret, lost value, and family fragmentation. The lonely sugar-daddy enjoys sex in the twilight of his life at the price of deliberately abandoning his role as a father, believing he has nothing to lose. The sugar-babe sacrifices her life, reputation, future, the respect of her children (and often other family members), and her possibility of being a meaningful parent.

The impossibility of hiding the deviancy of the sugar-daddy dynamic

The dynamic of the sugar-relationship has concealment built into it. This is not accidental, but part of its structure: if the phenomenon were addressed honestly, the social pressure against it would be destructive. But when one tries to explainthe relationship, the situation resembles digging a hole: with each sentence, the hole deepens and the deviation becomes even more transparent. No matter what version the sugar-daddy tries to present to himself or to others (the most honest version would simply be: “I buy sex because I can and I want to”), the image becomes more grotesque with every word.

If the sugar-daddy is single and has children, they will sooner or later — often quite young — ask, when they encounter the sugar-babe: “Who is that lady? Is she like a mother? Or a friend?” Especially when the “lady’s” age is closer to the children’s age than the father’s. These questions are almost never answered sincerely. Instead come long, wordy, contentless explanations in the style of verbal salad: “She is a very important person to me, she had a difficult time and I’m just supporting her…” or “She is just daddy’s friend, she’s not your mother, but she is a very nice person…”

An extremely small number of sugar-daddies (virtually zero) would say the truth directly:

“You know, dear son (or daughter)… Daddy is already quite old. Young women don’t want to give him sex just like that. Daddy pays Aunt Z’s car lease and takes her on trips A, B, and C, and Aunt Z gives Daddy sex in return. I do not intend to marry her, and I am not building a family. I use the situation for as long as it benefits me. In short: I prefer my orgasms to you growing into a person who respects family, timeless values, and yourself.”

That would be the honest answer.
The child would draw their own conclusions.
They would see the father’s behavior as a warning, not as an example.
And most likely, they would choose the opposite path in their own life.

Unfortunately, such straightforwardness does not characterize sugar-daddies. Instead, they speak of “helping,” “tenderness,” “a spiritual connection,” “energy exchange,” “the game of life intertwining destinies,” “soul bonds,” and “twin flames” (see again the two-word expressions). Or the entire relationship is hidden in the hope that the children will never find out. That hope is what is known as the comfort of the fool.

Children find out.
Always.

And when it happens early, the consequences are tragic.
Why?
Because a child cannot conceptualize transactional relationships. They cannot interpret the logic of exchanging body for money. They can only interpret love, belonging, and values.

The trauma becomes especially severe when the child sees a traditional family as the alternative — for example, when the mother has built a new family that has vertical meaning: mother, father, children, marriage, a shared future that is greater than any single member.

The child then stands between two worlds.
In one world: a spiritual axis — family, roles, continuity, dignity.
In the other: exchange — sex for material benefits, until someone more useful appears.

No psychologist, school psychiatrist, or “emotional release workshop” can resolve that cognitive dissonance.
It is a break-point that cuts into the soul.

Often, the sugar-daddy’s rationalization mechanisms have developed so far that looking the truth in the eye is nearly impossible. It is very hard to admit:

“I placed my hedonistic needs above my family and my child’s psychological health.”

So the causes of the child’s trauma start being sought elsewhere: ADHD, teenage years, divorce effects, school, friends, “someone said something bad.”

But the true reason is extremely simple:
A child cannot love two parents who represent completely opposing life models.

And sometimes, in a completely ordinary moment — on a park bench, in a car, in a mall café — this realization reaches the sugar-daddy’s consciousness.

This is the moment when the world breaks:

“I hurt my child because I could not give up my orgasms.”

There is nothing ridiculous in that moment.
Only grief.
And raw, delayed truth.

There is nothing more tragic, in terms of mocking lasting values, than the image of a sugar-daddy crying like a sad clown on a park bench or in a shopping mall, as a Lynchian inevitability dawns on him: his desires and his deviation were the real cause of his child’s trauma.

Sugar-babe – the inevitability of writing oneself out of one’s children’s lives

From the sugar-babe’s perspective, the situation is actually far more tragic. If the sugar-daddy has usually reached the later half of his life and statistically has less life left to live, the sugar-babe sacrifices her future, her self-worth, and — if she is a mother — also her children.

The sacrifice of the future lies in this: the majority of men whom the sugar-babe considers “worthy” of her expect inner strength, value, and dignity from a woman. A sugar-daddy relationship requires the opposite: the selling of oneself. Men who are socially desirable partners — whether successful, dignified, dedicated, or grounded — exclude a sugar-babe as a potential life partner. Not even primarily because she has exchanged sex for benefits, but because they understand: to do so, she must have had low self-respect and an internally fragmented identity. It is very hard to love or respect someone who does not respect themselves.

If the sugar-babe is also a mother, then at best she becomes a warning to her children, not an example. No matter how one tries to “explain” such a relationship, it is essentially digging one’s own grave.

For example, when a sugar-daddy pays for the sugar-babe’s car lease, rent, or trips, and the sugar-babe provides company and sex in return — the child perceives this exactly as it is: a specific form of prostitution. There is no future, no family, nothing lasting. There is only exchange. Today, no third party needs to explain prostitution to a child — social media and the internet do that (sometimes satirically, but very accurately).

If the sugar-babe has a teenage or soon-to-be teenage daughter, then the mother effectively has three options — and only one of them is honest:

a) to normalize prostitution;
b) to acknowledge herself as a fallen woman, as a warning rather than an example;
c) to lie and hide, hoping the child will not understand.

Almost always the last option is chosen.

The honest sentences that are almost never spoken would sound like this:

“Mom had a hard time. Money was scarce. Earning money is difficult. I couldn’t drive you to kindergarten every day with Bolt. The bus is uncomfortable. I chose comfort in exchange for a cost that took away my dignity as a mother. Uncle X pays my car lease, and I sell him my body. It was weakness. I made a mistake. Learn from me and never repeat it.”

That would actually contain a kind of dignity.
It would be an ethical break-point.

But that is not what is said.

Instead, one hears things like:
“He just helps me,”
or “We have a special connection,”
or “He is a very important person to me.”

And at the same time, they know — or at least sense — that the child will understand sooner or later. The later it happens, the more painful it is.

One inherent and systematic consequence of sugar-relationships is that sugar-daddies do not want the sugar-babe to become independent. They do not want the woman to have her own income, stable job, property of her own, or greater custody rights in case of divorce. Because a woman who is independent or spends much time with her children is no longer an ideal sugar-babe.

This is why we often see situations where the sugar-daddy spends generously on travel, restaurants, entertainment, and “glamour,” but restrains himself from supporting anything that would build the woman a foundation for independence.
Why?
Because once dependency disappears, the exchange collapses.

Both sides know this.
And the child understands it.
Always.

Eventually, the moment arrives when the child realizes:
Mother did not choose me.
Mother chose benefits.

For the child, this is an existential rupture.
Not because the child does not understand what money or the body or sex is — but because the child cannot find where to look for the mother’s soul anymore.

From this break-point onward there are no more illusions, only a quiet, gradual withdrawal. The child does not scream, dramatize, or accuse.
They simply stop looking for something that is no longer there.

These children stay silent in front of the mother,
but speak about it with each other,
or with people they trust.

Children understand everything.
And this is exactly how the sugar-babe writes herself out of her children’s lives.
Not legally, but spiritually and permanently.

Often, this is accompanied by pitiful attempts to demonize the father — using the most common narratives of “toxicity” and “abuse.” When the mother has nothing left to lose and her soul has been hardened by the shame of selling herself, she may go further — for example, claiming that the children’s father has “suddenly developed pedophilic tendencies in midlife,” from which the children must be “protected.”

Such extreme accusations are a cry for help.
And they separate the mother from the child permanently.

When such accusations are revealed to be knowingly false (and they almost always are), the children cannot see in the mother’s actions even a trace of humanity. Seeing one’s mother as a person who knowingly lies on this level is not some cruel external narrative. It is the mother’s own logically constructed and personally enacted collapse.

Those who assist the mother in maintaining such lies — whether friends, new partners, the sugar-daddy, lawyers, psychologists, or “supportive” relatives — are directly participating in the incitement of a person’s final downfall. They are not helping a wounded person; they are deepening her internal collapse, adding another layer of cynicism and cruelty to an already tragic situation. This is not “protection.” It is the destruction of a human soul and dignity — final and irreversible.

In religious language, this is sacrilege: not against something external, but against what was still alive within the person.
And that is an unforgivable sin.

The place reserved for people who commit such acts is not paradise.

Preserving the ideal of family despite personal failure

Everything said above is not meant as some radical or dogmatic call to never divorce or to stay in difficult relationships that have very little chance of surviving, although in a small way, it is that.

Everything above is not meant as a strict “obligation” to stay in unhealthy relationships or to never end marriages that do not function. Although in a way, it is also an invitation to give every possible chance to any relationship that still has even the smallest potential for life. Life’s tragic nature contains many losses and much pain. This is part of life itself, and dealing with it is both suffering and possibility.

The question is not about the causes of family breakdown, nor about the fact that clearly children grow up best in a core family where there is mother, father, and love. Sometimes one must acknowledge a personal defeat — but that is the very moment when one stands at a crossroads: whether to abandon the ideal of family together with the personal failure, or whether to preserve it despite everything.

In Tõnisson’s Wedding the apothecary (or Lible — both were good philosophers) said something like: “Life will always win in the end — it is stronger than us.” (Not word for word, but that was the meaning.) In this sense, life always defeats us; we fall short of the higher ideal because we are human. The instinct then is to lower one’s head and, like Cain, spit on the ideal — but we know what that brought: punishment in the form of unbearable pain.

To look upward is very difficult, especially after such a loss. Everything is hard, and life is hard.

The role of a parent is given only formally at the biological level — in a core family it is essential and beautiful. But when the relationship ends, one must become a parent again. Then the person stands face to face with life, and everything they actually have at their disposal is not what they assume they have.

Today, in divorce processes, one hears from specialists and institutions, including state-provided support, a constantly repeated narrative:

“Of course family is best, but divorce is sometimes unavoidable, no one needs to be guilty, each parent has their own truth and both have made mistakes. Children are the most important, and now you must get along well and cooperate going forward.”

Having spoken with many men and somewhat fewer women involved in such processes, I have not yet encountered a pair who is able to separate according to this description.

First, there is a deep paradox built into it:
If the parents value the family as an ideal, love the children so much, and do not see circumstances that make friendly coexistence impossible, and if they are both “nice and reasonable” enough to cooperate peacefully — then they could, at least seriously, try to continue as a family.

But one party — overwhelmingly the woman — does not want this.

Sugar-Daddy as the father’s strongest ally in bringing the children “home”

This is where the question of child custody often enters the picture. It is naïve to think this would resolve easily, or that even with external help genuine cooperation could emerge if the parents’ fundamental understanding of the nature of life diverges during the process of separation. This is exactly where everything previously described comes into play: the axiological component of understanding life. It is not an “addition” — it is the foundation. And from here we return once again to the “sugar-relationship.”

Paradoxically — and largely as a consequence of everything discussed earlier — in the custody process, the mother’s sugar-daddy (or a similar figure who embodies comparable values) becomes the father’s strongest ally when the father’s goal is to reach an agreement in which the children grow up with him.

In a peculiar way — and I am not being ironic here — the man in his sixties (or older) often ends up functioning almost like James Bond, a daily undercover agent working in the father’s interests, eventually bringing the children “home, to their father’s home.”

First, the practical interests of both men begin to overlap almost completely:
• The sugar-daddy’s goal is to gain maximum access to the sugar-babe’s body — to create a lasting dependency through paying rent, leases and supporting a lifestyle.
• The father’s goal — if he truly cares for the children — is to reach a custody arrangement where the children spend the majority of time with him.

Thus the two men begin operating in tandem (often almost like father and son), and the father’s substantial victory becomes much more likely.

As described earlier, the sugar-daddy functions from the “inside,” continuously reproducing in the mother the illusion of an endlessly happy, problem-free life, while the father can simply remain steady, present, and emotionally reliable for the children — a safe alternative. Sugar-daddies are extremely effective in this regard, and because they have no motivation to build a meaningful, value-based, transcendent relationship with the mother, they never oppose the father, nor do they try to become a real father-figure (or even grandfather-figure) to the children.

I have heard of many situations where, during custody disputes that drag through multiple courts, the sugar-daddy does not contribute a cent to helping the mother, nor does he stand up for her even as a basic masculine support. On the contrary — he withdraws and flees (sometimes literally running, even sprinting), despite his advanced age.

This is the everyday, practical side. The real victory is achieved by the father and the “sugar-father” together on the axiological level.

This is where everything previously explained becomes not only relevant, but decisive. The entire logic of the sugar-relationship is in such profound existential and evolutionary contradiction with timeless values that it cannot be maintained without lying — mostly to oneself, but also to others, including the children. And the children see this clearly.

To try to normalize a sugar-relationship requires a constant form of psychological intoxication — just as philosopher Karl Pajupuu wrote at the beginning of his first work: “I have made a mistake. Several small ones and one big one,” acknowledging that when the fog of intoxication lifts, reality presses in — and, if I recall correctly, he asks God that he “would not be in a brothel.” (Lynch made several films about the same mechanism.)

The mother in a sugar-relationship is in exactly the same position, and because of the sugar-relationship she ultimately must let go of her children. Both the sugar-daddy and the sugar-babe are in a situation where they must choose between lying and ending the relationship. The original large error creates a chain of smaller ones.

When interacting with and raising a child — let us imagine a daughter — the mother faces three possible approaches to every small question. All three follow the same fundamental understanding of life:

Let us look at the same situation described earlier: the sugar-daddy pays for the mother’s car lease, rent, and travel; in return the mother gives him sex and companionship. If she were honest, she would say to her less fortunate girlfriend with ironic pride: “You take the bus, I ride my pussy.” But of course, they do not say that.

The sugar-babe has three options:

1. Normalize the situation:
Normalize the use of sex as a commodity and purely transactional relationships — essentially support prostitution (“one-client prostitution”).
This is directly against the child’s interests and causes suffering that extends across generations.
The child’s inevitable conclusion: Mother cares more about herself than about me.

2. Admit the truth:
This is the most honest path.
The mother acknowledges she has failed as a woman in the most fundamental sense, and tells the child that her life should serve as a warning, not an example.
But the child still concludes: Mother cares more about her own comfort than about me.

3. Lie and conceal:
This is the most common path.
The mother lies, evades, hides, and tries to define the sugar-daddy as a “kind wealthy friend,” “travel companion,” or “important person in my life.”
But lying to a child never prepares the child for life — it creates a fragile fantasy bubble that will eventually shatter.

And now we reach the most painful truth of all: the mother in a sugar-relationship pushes her children away — because she sacrifices them for an easier life. She places her pleasures above her children’s well-being.

This is brutal, but it is the unavoidable and logical consequence of everything previously stated.

Johnny Depp and the victory of honest bastards

All that a father needs to do in a situation like this is remain honest and show that he is willing to sacrifice any form of deviation for the sake of his children, to create a home for them and above all – and I do not say this lightly nor between the lines – to love his child through actions more than the mother does.

Many call this the Johnny Depp strategy – the first man in world history (as some like to joke) who actually won a dispute against a woman. Amber Heard – in my view, not a particularly good woman.

What was Johnny Depp’s entire strategy?

Axiological brilliance combined with brutally sharp, almost Machiavellian cleverness: he openly admitted his own flaws and mistakes, which gave him the ability to refuse to admit a single thing he had not actually done.

Taking everything into account, his honest imperfection became a kind of axiomatic humanity, because he remained honest with himself. And that self, with all of its natural oddities, stood closer to Abel than to Cain – not an ideal man, but relatively much closer to goodness than Amber was.

In the same way, many honest bastards end up victorious. They have flaws, yes. But they do not lie – and not lying in matters of principle is fundamental. If this is ignored, everything else becomes irrelevant.

Johnny Depp did not lie to make himself seem better. Symbolically, he was reflexively honest:

“Johnny, cocaine?” – “Yes.”
“Johnny, assault?” – “Absolutely, against a kitchen cabinet.”
“Wine?” – “Not a little.”

(I simplify, but the idea matters.)

When a person lies about matters of principle – for example, claiming the other person beat them when that never happened – then it no longer matters what small mistakes the other person made (how unhealthily Johnny Depp ate, how big his wine glass was, or how many avocados he didn’t eat).

He wins regardless, because he is fundamentally an honest man, with all his countless quirks.

Just as during the trial, he sacrificed many things about himself and exposed his weaknesses without shame, in order to remain strong in what mattered: the truth.

Many honest bastards remain just as honest with their children. If a son asks directly, for example:

“Did you jump naked into the pool in front of others?”
“Did you try to have sex with mom’s friend?”
“Did you call the police to force a drug test on yourself?”

(these are invented examples)

The father owns it all and can look his son in the eye sincerely, because he has always been there for him.

If the alternative offered by the mother is some schizophrenic fairy-tale narrative where the truth never becomes clear, because every new layer is more confusing than the previous one, and the father is always guilty of everything anyway, then Johnny Depp wins.

Truly good fathers and mothers have long since given up themselves for the sake of their children

Effectiveness in raising children does not depend only on the number of hours a parent spends with the child, but primarily on the parent’s internal hierarchy of values and orientation toward something timeless and meaningful. Good parents are those who, by using themselves as instruments and offering themselves up, bring the axiomatic essence of life closer to the child.

What does this mean?
They acknowledge their own limitations, they understand very well that they (like all people – the only difference lies in the level of awareness) have the capacity to be bad, they know that the world contains enough tragedy and evil, and they make a principled choice: to give everything to the child despite those limitations.

Let us illustrate this with a small example of loss and action.
A child is at kindergarten, and the father finds her goldfish at home floating upside down.On the bigger scale of things, it is a small thing; as is the child small. It is a direct encounter with reality. Of course, the father knows that he will not find an identical fish. But of course, he brings a new one. And of course, the daughter immediately understands. Then the father tells the truth, and the child experiences suffering. She experiences life and death, clarity and harshness, and also the father as the channel through which life is allowed to break the child just enough, so that she can learn to put herself back together again. The father is present, continuously, so that the child grows stronger over time.

This is love in action – a mechanism that repeats until the father’s death. Such fathers exceed normal limits – then people say they are “harsh, dangerous, or aggressive” or that they do not care what the world thinks. That judgment is mistaken. Their world is in the heart of their child, and they will never be at peace if that heart is troubled. And people who cannot understand the impossibility of these fathers behaving otherwise – because they care too much – have understood nothing.

Sugar-daddies and sugar-babes conduct the opposite experiment on their children.
By placing their own hedonistic desires above truth – unwilling or unable to recognize that separating the child from evolutionary reality and distorting the world through normalization and concealment of transactional relationships – they make the child weaker with each such moment. Their world is rooted in pleasure. They know the child’s heart is troubled, and yet they choose to withdraw. Their “gift” is the ability to pursue happiness and self-interest even while their child is unhappy.

This appears clearly in rhetoric.
Parents who love through truth and action see themselves as responsible for shaping values in their children. They understand that one of the greatest existential sacrifices is bringing into the world someone without whom they themselves could no longer live, and knowing that one day they must leave them behind. The only question is what they have given the child to stand on.

Consider the two approaches:

a) Sugar-daddies and sugar-babes have brightened and prettified the world. The child remains weak. Their coping capacity in the real world is diminished, and confrontation with life leads to chaos. Their rhetoric becomes: “Well, children will grow however they grow and make their own choices.”
In such sentences lies abandonment. They have stopped being parents. Responsibility is outsourced to society – but society cannot compensate for parents who betrayed their role. The child will live out the behavioral blueprint of the sugar-relationship.

b) Truly good mothers and fathers know that the world and existence itself are heavier and filled with more suffering than we like to admit. They do not make the world prettier. They allow life to break the child in a controlled way, because only then does the child grow strong (resilient). They seek no praise as parents – they literally cannot behave otherwise. And instead of saying, “The child will make their own choices,” they speak of what they did to guide the child. Every word carries a deep, unpolished parental love that, even in difficulty, makes them shine without realizing it.

These two approaches produce two different concepts of normality across generations.

Participants in sugar-relationships cannot consider it abnormal when a 16-year-old girl shows up with a new 40-year-old "boyfriend" who pays her car lease (or Bolt costs), takes her traveling, and receives sex in exchange, while explicitly avoiding marriage and family.

If the mother herself, now 40, does the same, then there they sit together:
a 16-year-old sugar-babe-in-training,
two 40-year-old generally pleasant adults (one the girl’s mother, who could have been a mother-in-law in another life),
and a vigorous 65-year-old sugar-daddy.

In the second approach, the daughter could never do such a thing – out of respect for family, father, and meaning.

In conclusion: life is difficult.
Even with all sacrifice, one can only hope to be an approximately good parent, never an ideal one. But this is no reason to spit on the ideal and make life even harder for children.

There are men and women who, after the end of a relationship, have nevertheless preserved their hierarchy of values and their grasp of reality, and who have quietly (sadly for themselves, but hopefully for their children) said:

“Although I failed to preserve the family, I have not abandoned the family as an ideal. And I hope that you will never abandon it either – that you will marry, protect your family, and not lie.”

If such words are accompanied by love in action, then hope is not lost.
Then everything possible has been done to prevent the children from one day becoming warnings to their own children – trapped in a sugar-daddy scenario – and instead, until they can buy their own car, ride the bus with dignity and less sorrow, rather than hiding inner chaos behind a strained smile inside a leased car paid for by sex with the sugar-daddy.