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Women who spend more time on social media tend to report a greater willingness to consider “sugar relationships,” a form of dating where companionship or intimacy is exchanged for financial or material support. According to a cross-national study of more than 22,000 women published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, this link is slightly stronger in countries with more permissive, relaxed social rules than in nations with strict social norms. The findings suggest that the link between social media use and dating attitudes depends in part on the surrounding cultural climate.
A sugar relationship is a transactional dating arrangement in which an older, wealthier partner provides money, gifts, or lifestyle support to a younger partner in exchange for companionship and/or sexual intimacy. In psychology, openness to sugar relationships refers to an attitude rather than an actual behavior, capturing whether a person views this kind of financial and intimate exchange as acceptable, imaginable, or personally viable.
The authors of the new study treat this openness as a modern expression of sexual-economic exchange, a concept in which romantic and sexual interactions are analyzed through the lens of marketplace trade. In a 2004 theoretical paper, researchers argued that heterosexual dating often operates like a market in which intimacy is traded for material resources, social status, or financial security.
“My broader research interest is in how people think about relationships in which intimacy and material support are connected,” study lead author Norbert Meskó, a professor of psychology and director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at the University of Pécs, told PsyPost. “Sugar relationships are a particularly visible contemporary example, but the underlying questions are much broader: What do people consider an acceptable relationship? How do financial support, companionship, and sexuality fit into those expectations? And how do people come to see a particular relationship arrangement as something they might consider for themselves?”
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Although transactional courtship has existed throughout history, social media platforms have made explicit arrangements like sugar dating much more visible by showcasing aspirational lifestyles and peer discussions around them. Media exposure more broadly is linked to how people view dating and sexuality, as a 2019 meta-analysis found that young people regularly exposed to sexual content in mainstream media tend to hold more permissive sexual attitudes and believe their peers are more sexually active.
Researchers have also begun mapping who is most receptive to transactional arrangements in the first place. For instance, an earlier global survey led by Meskó indicated that acceptance of sugar relationships varies widely across countries and is higher among men and among people who favor casual sex and traditional gender roles, while a study of 500 young Hungarian women by the same research group found that women who are more open to sugar arrangements tend to have greater difficulties regulating their emotions and deeper insecurities rooted in childhood.
Missing from this picture was an understanding of how a country’s everyday social rules interact with social media habits to shape views on transactional dating. Researchers call this dimension cultural tightness-looseness, which refers to how strictly a society defines social norms and punishes people who step out of line. To establish a benchmark for how these rules vary globally, a 2011 study of 33 nations mapped how strictly different societies police everyday behavior, showing that “tight” cultures enforce rigid rules and penalize deviance, whereas “loose” cultures tolerate a much wider range of unconventional lifestyles. Meskó and his colleagues examined whether the link between social media use and openness was stronger in culturally looser countries.
“Social media adds an interesting dimension because it brings different lifestyles and relationship models into everyday view,” Meskó explained. “People can encounter accounts of intimacy, financial support, independence, and success that differ considerably from the expectations of their immediate surroundings. However, encountering a relationship model does not necessarily mean accepting it. We wanted to examine whether the wider cultural environment might help explain differences in the association between social media use and openness to sugar relationships.”
“This is not simply a distinction between sexually conservative and sexually liberal countries,” he added, referring to cultural tightness-looseness. “It concerns the strength of social expectations more generally. Two people might use social media equally frequently while living in environments with very different expectations about acceptable behavior. That made it important to examine social media use and cultural context together.”
To test this idea, the researchers analyzed data from a large, publicly available international survey on romantic love and mate preferences that originally gathered responses from 117,293 people across 175 countries. The team filtered the dataset to include only participants who answered all questions about sugar relationships, social media use, and age, and who lived in countries where national cultural tightness scores were available, leaving 34,318 people across 33 countries.
Although the earlier global study found that men were more accepting of sugar relationships overall, men and women typically occupy different roles in these arrangements, with women usually positioned as the recipients of financial support. Because attitudes toward receiving versus providing support involve different psychological motivations, the authors restricted their analysis to women and kept only countries with at least 100 female respondents, producing a final sample of 22,292 adult women across 22 countries.
Participants completed an online survey in one of many languages that included a questionnaire measuring their openness to sugar relationships, which asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements about accepting financial or material support from an older, wealthier partner in exchange for intimacy. They also reported their age and answered a single question about how frequently they used social networking platforms.
At the national level, the researchers paired each participant’s country of residence with an index of cultural tightness-looseness developed in 2014 that covers 68 countries, where higher scores represent looser, more permissive cultural norms. For comparison, the team also gathered country-level statistics from the World Bank and Freedom House covering internet access, mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people, female labor force participation, unemployment rates among young women aged 15 to 24, and national internet freedom.
Before testing their main questions, the authors needed to ensure that women in different countries and languages interpreted the sugar relationship survey questions in the same way. When a standard statistical check showed that the same underlying attitude did not always produce the same answers on the questionnaire in different countries, the researchers applied a mathematical technique known as measurement alignment, which adjusts for cross-cultural scoring biases so that attitudes can be fairly compared across nations. They then analyzed the data using Bayesian multilevel modeling, a statistical technique that accounts for individual participants being grouped within countries and evaluates how strongly the evidence favors one competing model over another.
Across the 22 countries, women who used social media more frequently tended to report greater openness to sugar relationships, with a standardized regression weight of 0.14, a measure that puts different variables on the same scale so their relative strength can be compared. Age pointed in the opposite direction, showing a standardized weight of -0.11, meaning that younger women tended to be more receptive to sugar arrangements than older women.
A country’s level of cultural tightness-looseness on its own did not have a statistically significant direct link to women’s attitudes, showing a near-zero weight of -0.02. However, cultural looseness interacted with social media use, with a standardized weight of 0.04, indicating that the positive link between frequent social media use and openness to sugar relationships was modestly stronger in countries with looser social norms than in countries with tighter norms. By conventional standards, these are small associations, and the cultural difference in the social media link was smaller still.
“One particularly interesting finding was that cultural looseness was not independently associated with greater openness in our model,” Meskó noted. “Its role appeared in the strength of the connection between social media use and openness. The finding is therefore more specific than saying that women in culturally looser countries are more accepting of sugar relationships: the association between social media use and openness was stronger in those settings.”
“Imagine someone encountering an online account presenting a materially supported relationship as an attractive lifestyle,” he continued. “In one social environment, that arrangement might be regarded as a possible personal choice; in another, departing from established relationship expectations might carry greater social costs. This is one possible explanation worth testing, rather than a process demonstrated by our study. We did not measure those specific encounters or reactions.”
Living in a permissive culture was not linked to greater openness on its own. The authors suggest that looser norms may make relationship models people encounter online seem more acceptable or realistic, while stricter norms may raise the social costs of departing from convention, but the study did not test these processes directly.
The researchers also tested a more complex model that kept the interaction between social media use and cultural looseness while adding national internet access, smartphone penetration, female employment indicators, and internet freedom. Adding these national factors did not improve the model enough to justify the added complexity, indicating they explained little beyond social media use and cultural looseness.
To make sure their results were not driven by a single unusual country or a specific statistical assumption, the authors ran several follow-up checks. In a leave-one-out analysis, they repeated the test 22 times, removing one country at a time, and found that both the main link with social media use and the moderating role of cultural looseness held up in every case. They also estimated a model allowing the strength of the social media link to vary freely from country to country.
In an additional exploratory test, the researchers controlled for each woman’s self-reported socioeconomic status. Women with lower personal socioeconomic status tended to be slightly more open to sugar relationships, with a small standardized weight of -0.03, but accounting for socioeconomic status did not change the link with social media use or the cultural interaction.
“The cultural difference was small, but it remained evident across several additional analyses, including models allowing the association with social media use to vary across countries,” Meskó said. “It should not be used to make sweeping judgments about countries or individual women. The broader message is that our online lives are embedded in offline social worlds, and both deserve attention when we study relationship attitudes.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. First, the study measured attitudinal openness to sugar relationships rather than actual participation, and finding an arrangement acceptable in theory is very different from actually entering one. Second, because the survey captured data at a single point in time, it cannot establish cause and effect. Frequent social media use may expose women to content that normalizes sugar dating, but it is also possible that women who already hold permissive or transactional views on dating spend more time on social media, or that other personal characteristics contribute to both.
“I would be cautious about turning this finding into a story that ‘social media is making women pursue sugar relationships,'” Meskó told PsyPost. “That would go beyond what we measured. The study offers a more specific insight: the association between social media use and openness to a particular relationship arrangement varies with the normative environment.”
The single-snapshot design also makes it impossible to tell whether younger women become less open to sugar relationships as they grow older, or whether younger generations are simply more comfortable with transactional dating because they grew up immersed in digital culture.
Meskó also noted that the social media measure was broad. “We did not measure the content participants encountered, their time on particular platforms, or how they engaged with what they saw. One person might mainly follow friends and family, another might follow lifestyle influencers, and another might use platforms primarily for work. General frequency of use cannot distinguish those experiences.”
At the national level, having 22 countries in the analysis means the cultural comparison rests on 22 country-level data points, regardless of how many individual women were surveyed.
“National indicators capture broad tendencies and cannot represent every community or individual within a country,” Meskó said. “Someone may live in a culturally tight country but belong to a relatively permissive social circle, or experience the reverse. The samples should also not be treated as nationally representative estimates of women’s attitudes.”
“Cross-country measurement is another challenge: questionnaire items do not necessarily function identically in different settings,” Meskó observed. “We examined this issue and used a statistical alignment procedure to improve comparability across countries. That strengthens the analysis, but it does not eliminate every possible difference in how people understand these relationships.”
Future studies could address these gaps by tracking participants over time or using experiments to see how viewing specific types of glamorized social media content affects dating attitudes. The authors also note that future work should measure individual psychological traits, such as how much a person values material wealth or tends to objectify their own body, alongside local community norms. Combining those personal details with cross-national data would help explain how online trends and cultural rules work together to shape modern views on intimacy and money.
“Finally, our analysis focused on women’s openness to receiving material support within these arrangements,” Meskó pointed out. “It does not establish that the same pattern applies to men, to the perspective of the supporting partner, or to actual relationship decisions. Future research should examine those perspectives and distinguish among the different arrangements grouped under the label ‘sugar relationships.'”
“Sugar relationships are also a useful window into broader questions about contemporary intimacy,” Meskó concluded. “Material considerations are present in many relationships, but people differ in how explicitly they acknowledge them and where they draw the boundaries between support, reciprocity, dependence, and exchange. Studying sugar relationships can help us investigate those distinctions without treating all materially supported relationships as equivalent. For me, the next interesting question is what happens between encountering a relationship model and considering it a personal possibility.”
The study, “Social Media Use and Openness to “Sugar Relationships”: Cultural Tightness–Looseness as a Moderator Across 22 Countries,” was authored by Norbert Meskó, Jessica S. Ehlers, Anna Molnár, and Hyemin Han.
