How to Rent a Friend in Russia

What started out as a social trend in Japan and some Asian countries now seems to have caught the fancy of rest of the world. Rent-a-friend services seem only a logical extension of today’s materialistic culture where practically every product or service can be had for money. In Russia the trend is a new arrival but is already taking the society by storm.

Rent-a-friend works like any other service for hire. This essentially means that clients pay for professionals who are ready to spend time with them, either doing something that the client likes, accompanying the client to a social event or simply hanging about with him/her. In Russia, the trend is largely limited to the capital city of Moscow but people in the business predict that it is only a matter of time before it catches on to other cities as well.

Moscow as a city can be cold and impersonal to people from out of town. In fact a poll in the online Moscow News found that almost 34.5% of the viewers believed Moscow was an unfriendly city¹. Bars, cafes and nightclubs which are the usual haunts of local Muscovites can seem uncomfortable or even unsafe to people who have come to city from elsewhere to work or study. Moreover when you are cooped up in an office the entire day, there are extremely limited chances of making friends. Corporate policies here are quite strict about keeping professional and personal lives apart. So what do you do to get somebody to go with you for a movie or just a cup of coffee?

Many people in Moscow have found the answer in rent-a-friend agencies. These agencies allow clients to hire a professional ‘friend’ with whom they can then pursue a host of activities, like going to the theater, a birthday party or shopping. At times, clients also use the services of a ‘friend’ to get back their love lives on track, usually by hoping to drive a straying or bored partner into jealousy and back to their arms.

Alexander Romanov runs one such rent-a-friend agency in Moscow². Known as “Alibi Private Services”, the agency specializes in what it calls “helping people out of difficult personal situations”. Clients can hire a ‘friend’ to go show shopping or take someone to accompany him/her to a party where turning up alone could be embarrassing. According to Romanov who has been in this business for around eight years, women in the age bracket of 25 and 40 make up the majority of his clients. Hardly unusual, considering this is the age group which is busiest at work, leaving no time for them to socialize at the traditional pace.

With the arrival of the internet, products and services have now been taken right up to the customer’s doorstep. The same is true of rent-a-friend services too since online portals like rentafriend.ru now allow clients to hire a friend without the need for physically going up to an agency. Clients pay in advance through credit cards or PayPal and then they are ready for their outing with professional ‘friends’. A two-hour meeting at the café or movie theater would cost a client $16 or 500 roubles while online chatting for the same time would come for around $19 or 600 roubles. However these agencies are careful to differentiate themselves from a dating or escort service. At a Rent a Friend, clients are expected to maintain a strictly platonic relationship with their professional ‘friends’ and there is a zero tolerance policy for adult behavior. In fact any kind of propositioning to a hired ‘friend’ can get the client eliminated from the site.

No matter how legal and platonic the practice, the idea of having to pay for a ‘friend’ still does not sit comfortably with the traditional concept of friendship as a selfless personal relationship. However it is one of the solutions, however temporary, to the problem of loneliness and social isolation which if psychologists are to be believed is rampant in the urban centers of almost every modern society. The breakdown of traditional family structures, increased physical and professional mobility as well as a culture of individualism has left people lonelier than before. Gone are the support networks of extended families, kin groups and even familiar neighborhoods. Russia especially is seeing extensive trends of internal migration with students and professionals coming from places like Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg and foreign countries like India to Moscow to live and work. Renting a friend may not be ideal way to get into social circulation but it does allow a person to get out of the house with a minimum of effort involved. And even when a person is not be lonely, he or she can still hire a friend to follow particular interests which may not be shared by an actual group of pals. So if someone gets a kick from skydiving and cannot find a companion to join him/her in the activity, hiring a professional ‘friend’ to go along with, can be a way out.

Problems arise when these hired ‘friends’ are expected to fill in for real relationships. With monetary exchange clearly underlining such practices, you cannot expect them to offer the trust, selflessness and the affection of a genuine friendship. Also these are purely temporary arrangements, working on a per hour basis and do not have the abiding nature of meaningful relationships. University of New York psychologist John Cacioppo has in fact an interesting take on the subject³. In his book Loneliness he compares lonely people hiring ‘friends’ to a starving person munching on celery – “It is better than nothing but there is no long-term sustenance”.

The paradox of these times is that even though one has hundreds of friends on social networking sites like facebook, yet one has to pay for someone just to hang out with. No matter how popular you may be in the virtual world, in real life you still come back to an empty home. So even cynics rue the loss of traditional values, rent-a-friend practice is a reality in today’s world and is here to stay for a long time.