• INSIDER spoke with Sara-Kate, a former sugar baby, at a recent Sugar Baby Summit in New York City to break down common sugar baby myths. 
• Sara-Kate's experience as a sugar baby included paid vacations, weekends at the Plaza, and monthly allowances of thousands of dollars — but she also used sugaring to pay off student loans and go to grad school.
• Sara-Kate retired from sugaring after five years and is now writing a memoir about her experiences.

Sara-Kate hadn't planned on becoming a sugar baby.Then again, most people don't. On a whim during her senior year at Tufts University, Sara-Kate joined Seeking Arrangement, a popular app that matches wannabe sugar babies and daddies to create potentially lucrative arrangements.

The first excursion she went on through the app was, to her, much like a "normal date" — other than the way it ended.

"We got drinks and dinner," Sara-Kate told INSIDER. "Then, he drove me back to campus and when he dropped me off he was like, 'I had a great time. Does $500 sound good?'"

She was taken aback. "I hadn't known that it was going to be that kind of amount right away. My first impression was, 'Wow, this is so easy,'" she told INSIDER. "And I got pretty obsessed. "

But being a sugar baby can be more complicated that many people realize. In a conversation with INSIDER, Sara-Kate broke down some of the most common misconceptions that people have about sugar babies.

Being a sugar baby isn't all about receiving extravagant gifts

The narrative that surrounds sugar babies is fairly simple.

The general idea is that a young (and attractive) woman meets regularly with an older (and wealthy) man, and the young woman is then showered with gifts as a "reward" for spending time with the man. 

These gifts, to be clear, are expensive ones. First class flights, lavish beauty treatments, designer bags, luxury jewelry, or, simply, some stacks of cash to be used however the woman — AKA the sugar baby — sees fit. 

Based on the shiny material benefits that have become integral to the sugar baby myths, it shouldn't come as a surprise that there are certain stigmas that surround people who engage in the sugar baby lifestyle. (Or, to use the particular lingo that many sugar babies favor, people who engage in "sugaring.") Many people are quick to make the assumption that, because there are gifts involved, being in a sugar baby/daddy relationship is equivalent to sex work.

Read more: 9 things you're probably getting wrong about 'sugar babies'

But for people like Sara-Kate, being a sugar baby is just another way of dating — with some practical applications. 

At the time she started using Seeking Arrangements, Sara-Kate was disillusioned with her dating prospects and the job she had lined up after graduation. She thought that using the app could help her escape the monotony she saw as pervasive in post-grad life. Besides, she had always preferred older men to her hookup-happy college classmates, so seeking out a "daddy" seemed like a natural choice.

Sugar babies don't always have sex with their sugar daddies

After her first (surprisingly lucrative) date, Sara-Kate started going on more and more Seeking Arrangement dates, much in the same way that some people become addicted to swiping through Tinder and Bumble. Some dates turned into long-term relationships, and some were a one-time thing. But they all afforded her the luxury of leaving her full-time job in Boston. 

"I quit my job after one day," she told INSIDER. "I had just returned from a trip [with a sugar daddy] to New Orleans for a week in which I'd received $5,000, so I didn't need it."

After a few months in Boston, Sara-Kate moved to New York. There, she had what she called a "perfect example" of a long-term sugar baby relationship.

"When I moved to New York shortly after graduation, I had a sugar daddy who I would spend the weekends with," she told INSIDER. "He had a room at the Plaza and he would provide a monthly allowance of $4,000. We'd go to museums, we'd go to dinner, and, eventually, the relationship became intimate."

Read more: A sugar daddy reveals 4 things people always get wrong about paying for companionship

This is important to clarify, according to Sara-Kate, because intimacy was not guaranteed to the people she dated. Having sex with a partner, whether they were a sugar daddy or not, had to be something that organically and with explicit consent.

This relationship eventually fizzled out, and Sara-Kate decided to move to Los Angeles for some time to do some sugaring there and to try her hand at improv classes. 

Being a sugar baby can allow you more freedom to pursue your dreams — but it's easy to get caught up in an unsustainable lifestyle

By the time Sara-Kate had moved to Los Angeles, she had paid off all of her previous loans and she didn't have an official job. This meant that she was "pretty aimless."

 "I had all this time and money, so I just wanted to do whatever seemed fun to me," she told INSIDER. "So I came back to New York to go to grad school in creative writing and the money I'd saved up pretty much lasted me throughout the whole degree."

When Sara-Kate was in her MFA program, she started writing about her experiences as a sugar baby. At this point — about five years after she had started using Seeking Arrangement — she also stopped sugaring. It wasn't because she didn't like it anymore. Rather, she had simply evolved from the person she had been when she started using the app.

"As I was assessing myself and how aimless I had been when I first started using the site, I decided that I didn't really need to use [Seeking Arrangement] anymore. I had found what I was interested in," she said. "That was the greatest value of my experience with the site, it allowed me to find out what I was actually interested in and wanted to do with my life."

This isn't to say that Sara-Kate's recollection of sugaring comes without its share of disclaimers. She also said that because sugaring involves a lot of "instant gratification," it can be difficult to figure out what you might want to do other than — or in addition to —  being a sugar baby.

"I wish that I'd been able to figure out my goals a little earlier on," Sara-Kate told INSIDER. "I think [sugaring] can be a great thing if someone knows exactly what they want to do, but I did start off doing it in an aimless way."

A sugar baby and a prostitute are not the same

"I've always found that talking one-on-one with people, there's some intrigue, and they're just curious about the experience," she told INSIDER. "But if it's the first thing someone hears about me, they'll bring all their misconceptions to the table. And that's when it gets less normal, because they're like, 'Oh — sugar baby. Prostitute.' Instead of, 'Oh, you're a normal person, and this is a way that you go about dating.'"

Read more: A 'sugar baby' said he never had to worry about bills — here's why he decided to give it all up

Still, on the whole, Sara-Kate credits becoming a sugar baby with giving her a sense of direction and meaning in her life. Now, she is writing a memoir about her sugaring experiences.

"Once I became more open about what I was doing, I found that people were interested in this whole phenomenon. I decided that I wanted to write not only about the act of sugaring, but also what leads someone to this lifestyle," Sara-Kate told INSIDER. And that, she says, has been a "true pleasure."

Visit INSIDER's homepage for more.

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