RentAFriend Lets You Buy 'Friends for Hire'

July 13, 2010— -- Maybe it's true that you can't buy friends for life, but you can now rent them for as little as $10 an hour.

Just ask Isabel D'andrada. A few weeks ago, D'andrada, a 28-year-old New Yorker, earned $40 in cash for browsing at Bloomingdale's with a middle-aged fashionista. She made $60 for hitting Manhattan's club scene with a pack of twentysomethings on the prowl. She even made $10 an hour just for accompanying a single guy to a movie.

Over the past month, she said she's netted about $200 in cash (not to mention plenty more in free movies, meals and drinks) as a "friend for hire" on the Web service RentAFriend.com.

It's not big money. But it's not a bad deal either, considering that all she has to do is show up, smile and pretend to be someone's purely platonic pal.

"When I signed up, I didn't put a lot of thought into it. But it occurred to me… why can't they find someone? Really, do you have to pay someone to go along with you?" she said. "But I think another way of looking at it is you want to do a specific thing and just nobody is available."

For many people, the idea of paying for friendship may be as taboo as the idea of paying for sex. But others point out that, sometimes, people just want a one-time buddy for conversation and companionship.

"[There are] people who may not have a large group of friends or maybe even a few friends as they enter into adulthood," said John Grohol, an expert in online psychology and founder of PscyhCentral.com. "Some people might feel awkward trying to talk to a stranger. They might feel more comfortable doing that with a person you know will reciprocate because you're paying them. It's similar to why prostitution thrives. There's a market for it."

RentAFriend's founder, Scott Rosenbaum, 30, said he created the site for U.S. and Canada after he noticed a bunch of similar sites booming in Japan and China.

"Over there, it seemed like it's important to have a full family structure," he said. When people need family members for special occasions, like fathers and uncles for weddings and graduations, they can rent "friends" to fill the gap.

Americans might not have the same kind of family pressures, he said, but they still face a society that doesn't always know what to do with a party of one.