Girlfriend as a Service
“Hey, have you tried GaaS yet?” Jennifer asked me.
“Gas?” I said. “No. Yes? Maybe. I don’t know. How does one try it?”
“Not gas, doofus, G-A-A-S. Double the A.” Jennifer took a long pull of her strawberry smoothie, the kind that would give a normal person brain-freeze. I’d asked her about it once before, and she said she’d never once given herself brain-freeze, though not for lack of trying. She’d gone so far as to ask her doctor, who shouted her straight out of his office. Something about hypochondriacs always looking for another way to game the system. The receptionist had to chase her down in the parking lot to charge her the copay.
“I’ve doubled the A and I don’t feel any closer to understanding,” I said.
“Girlfriend-as-a-service. It’s this new thing, and it’s going viral.”
“Ah. It takes viral things a little longer to reach me,” I said. “It’s a lifestyle choice.”
“Well I hate to be society’s messenger, but it’s a hit,” Jennifer said. “Also, teach me more about this lifestyle choice thing. Is there more to life than following people on Instagram?”
“Not as far as I’m aware. Tell me more about GaaS.”
“The old ‘I’ll show you yours if you show me mine thing,’ eh? Fair enough. You’re familiar with Uber right?”
“Yes, the little cracker that goes perfectly with any flavor of jam. Also, that’s not how you play doctor.”
“No, the ride-sharing-”
“Yes, I was kidding. I’m sorry, it’s a horrible disease, I kid when I shouldn’t. My doctor says it’s beyond the limits of modern medicine.”
“You hypochondriacs,” Jennifer said, and shook her head. “Palliative medicine is still your friend though.”
“GaaS?” I prompted. “Uber?”
“Yes, so it’s basically like Uber for girlfriends. It’s obviously not how they market it, the FCC or JFK or whatever would shut them down so hard if it was, but it’s how I think of it. You know how you take your girlfriend to meet your parents and they love her, but then you take her to meet your friends and then you don’t have any friends?”
“No.”
“Sometimes it’s the other way around.”
“Then yes.”
“Well this is the market they’re hitting. A girlfriend for any occasion. Going to meet your parents? Need a girlfriend who loves to cook, can manage a bank account, looks great in a pencil skirt, has proper respect for her elders, and thinks the latest generation has lost touch with reality? Meet Jane. Going to meet your grandma? Need a girlfriend who’s racist against black people? White people? Jews? Maori tribesmen? Meet Linda. Input your target audience, and we’ll equip you with a girlfriend they’re guaranteed to love, or double your money back.”
“Double your money back, huh? They must be good at what they do.”
“Nah, there’s legalese up the butt. You won’t get a cent out of them.”
“Right. But are they good at what they do anyway?”
“You mean have I tried the service? You know I’m a heterosexual right?”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not actually a homosexual.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it means.”
“I see. Well in that case, you still haven’t answered the question.”
Jennifer narrowed her eyes at me, and downed the remaining two thirds of her smoothie in one go. It was a great intimidation trick. If my name were Frankie Two-fingers or Boris the Hatchet, I’d probably skip town for a few days after seeing that trick. As it was, I just got a mild placebo brain-freeze.
“Yes, I’ve tried it,” she said. “You thought I brought it up for general education purposes?”
“Other people have been known to try to get me to assimilate into the mainstream.”
“You have a lot of nerve, insinuating I might be one of the ‘other’ people. Do you want me to tell you the story or not?”
“I do. I humbly apologize for my insinuating. It’s a horrible disease, I insinuate when I shouldn’t.”
“Forgiven,” Jennifer said, with a magnanimous shake of the head. I really needed to brush up on physical communication. All I had was the single eyebrow arch, which was really hard to twist into unorthodox meanings. Did you just arch your eyebrow with disdain at me? No, actually, I meant it as an eyebrow arch of loving kindness.
“I tried it on a whim. I thought it’d be a gas,” she said, and winked. I arched an eyebrow.
“Ha.”
She made a loud sucking sound with her straw as she vacuumed up the dregs in her glass. People around us scrambled to check their weather apps, just in case they needed to look outside. “Yes. Anyway. So I had this shindig I had to be at. A wedding. An old friend I didn’t think I was close enough with to warrant a wedding invite, but anyway. At first I thought it might be one of those setups, where the whole wedding is just an elaborate ruse to show me how unhappy I was being single-”
“But then you remembered that you’re a classic narcissist.”
“Hey, who’s telling the story? But then I remembered I’m a classic narcissist, and that the wedding might actually be about someone other than me. I still wasn’t that interested in going, but then, the fates aligned-”
“A coincidence.”
“The fates aligned, by coincidence, and I saw this ad for GaaS. And I thought to myself, let’s have some fun!”
“Sorry,” I interrupted. “I’m one of those people who reads books backwards. Did the wedding still end with the original bride and groom locked in matrimony? Did you inspect the bloody sheet?”
Jennifer shook her head. “I’m not a book, Alex, how many times do I have to keep telling you? And it’s ‘joined’ in matrimony.”
“Fine. But I’ll have you know that when I re-read this story in my mind later, I’m going to read the last page first.”
“Please, never tell me about what you do in your mind. To books or anything else.”
“Noted. Continue?”
“So I go to their website, and I’m trying to find the section where they showcase their men, and I’m getting kind of excited, and I see that they don’t have a catalogue of men at all. Which is bloody obvious from the name, but as a feminist, I have trouble reading things correctly sometimes. It’s a horrible disease. So I browse the women, just for the hell of it. And they have all these categories for filtering your girls. Height, weight, physical and mental agility, capacity for compassion, history of depression, you name it. And then I see their job openings section, where it says: Be Someone’s Perfect Girl.”
“Ooh,” I said.
“Ooh, indeed. Apparently I’m a slow thinker, cause it didn’t even occur to me that I could go work for this circus.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“You’re goddamn right. Don’t you dare tell this story to someone else, with you as the lead.”
“I solemnly swear,” I said, putting my left hand to my heart.
“The heart’s on the other side of the chest.”
“Actually, it’s in the middle.”
She stared at me, then narrowed her eyes. “And you like to tell people that little fact, so you put the wrong hand up. Clever. I’m going to steal that.”
“It’s yours. But I should warn you, it takes a lot of practice to pull off.”
“Yes yes, stop distracting me. Has anyone ever told you that you’re the worst listener?”
“More people than haven’t. It’s a horrible disease-”
“Shush. So I can’t help myself, and I click the ad. And they do a really good job here of appealing to the stereotypical female brain. I read their pitch, and even though a little voice in the back of my head is shrieking THEY’RE PLAYING YOU, I find myself ooh’ing and aw’ing, and getting all misty. Basically, it’s the Snow Queen fantasy. You want to be the Snow Queen as a little girl, and then you grow up and the lottery gives you the mortgage fantasy instead. Or in my case, the Snow Queen fantasy, which I have to tell you, is the winning ticket. But every other sad little girl has that Snow Queen fantasy in some dark repressed corner of her mind.”
Jennifer paused. I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t seen The Snow Queen in years. I remembered it only as a terrifying movie from the dark days before Hans Christian Anderson was Disney-ified.
“Of course it’s a load of crap. As it should be. Snow queens, yours truly excluded, are vapid, flavorless, soulless, witless virgin robots. But they had me for a second. So I signed up. You can always pepper spray them, right? That’s what I told myself, because I really hate having to shoot people. I took their thousand question personality assessment, got into their 3D scanner to measure my exact proportions-”
“Really?”
“No, but I did have to send them a picture of myself just in my underwear.”
“Ooh, can I see?”
Jennifer reached across the table and slapped me in the face, a little harder than I think she intended. It stung like a mouthful of spicy ramen, and my ear rang a little.
“Ow, why!” I whined. Fucking snow queens and their snow jujitsu.
“I’ve just always wanted to do that,” she said, grinning. “Thanks.” She swept the room with her eyes, collecting information like a Terminator. “I’ve always been curious what looks people would give me after. You should feel honored I chose you for the experiment. See that woman two tables behind you? She’s giving me two thumbs up.” Jennifer returned the gesture.
“Do I get a cookie or something?” I said. I rubbed at my cheek, which now had a pillow-like aura of prickliness surrounding it.
“You just might,” Jennifer said. “May I continue?”
I nodded.
“So it isn’t an hour before I get my first request. I guess it was a really hot picture.”
“Now you’re just teasing me.”
“I am. It had nothing to do with my looks. I’m actually on the chubby side of modern tastes, too little exercise and too much cheesecake in these kale and cheesecake smoothies. It was this guy in his thirties who wanted to show off his new girlfriend to his parents, but who knew they wouldn’t approve. He wasn’t at the stage where he was planning to marry her, so he didn’t want to waste his or his parents nerves unnecessarily. Thoughtful, huh? His girlfriend’s a doctor, a general practitioner, which, if you can believe, isn’t good enough for them.”
“Oh, why not?”
“I’ll get to it. Anyway, he seemed to think they would appreciate a successful businesswoman.” She pointed to herself with both hands, and gave a little seated curtsy.
“I always say, there aren’t enough businesswomen in the world,” I said.
“You, my friend, have a sarcasm problem.”
“Well you shouldn’t have pressed the sarcasm dispenser on my face!” I pouted a little, with one side of my face. The pain was beginning to dissipate. “Plus, some people see it as a feature.”
“Some people need thicker glasses.”
“Ouch. You’re mean.”
“Snow Queen, bitch, I told you. So the guy apparently chose an outfit for me, a decent if slightly cleavage-y one for a dinner with parents, but hey, when in Rome…flash your boyfriend’s parents. It was delivered twenty minutes later, and I have to admit, I was starting to get a little nervous as I climbed into it. I read the specifications for the date ten times to make sure I wasn’t expected to put out, or serve their family in perpetuity as their house elf, Dobby, or whatnot. But it was just dinner, and there was this setting, which I turned on, where they would call you every half-hour into the date, in case you needed to be bailed out. Pretty cool.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Really? I thought it all sounded like a spy movie.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh. I see your point. Anyway, so an Uber picks me up right as I finish dressing, and I climb in, thinking there’s a non-negligible chance I’m going to end up as one of those bodies in the river tomorrow, with their teeth knocked out to make them hard to identify by their dental records.”
“You haven’t done 23 and Me?”
“No, what’s that?”
“An insurance policy for the riverside death scenario. Never mind, go on.”
“The guy’s already in the car. He’s pleasant, chatty, but not pervy, which I find somewhat reassuring. I ask him if he’s ever done this before, and he nods a little too sagely, like you might expect from a fifteen year old if you ask them the same question.”
“Ha.”
“Yes. So I’m insanely curious, and I pepper him with a million questions, and he’s not exactly an efficient converter of thoughts into words, so I have to abort a lot of his attempts, but it does clear some things up for me. Firstly, this isn’t a sex thing.”
“This?”
“This business. It’s prostitution all right, like any form of trading services for money, being a doctor, a banker, a slot machine wanker, but it’s not a sex trade. It’s at once much simpler, and if all goes well, much more socially destructive.”
“Because it commoditizes relationships?”
“No, because it commoditizes interactions.”
“Hm, I’ll have to think about that.”
“You should. But it’s a great business, for sure.” Jennifer stared past me into the future for a few seconds. “I’ve invested six months salary in it already. I feel like I’m buying shares in the apocalypse, but fuck it. If the world’s going to end, maybe this isn’t the worst way for it to go.”
“It’s a public company?”
“No. I have connections in the investment community. Why, you interested?”
“Very. But I don’t have any money.”
“Classic. Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s just an opportunity, you miss thousands of them a day.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Actually, I’m about a 5 on a 10 point scale for ‘comforting.’ More than you’d have guessed I bet. At least according to GaaS.”
“Really?” I was genuinely surprised. “Is the average person really that heartless?”
“I’m an 8 for ‘heartlessness,’ hardly average. You don’t know me very well apparently. By the way, people with a high heartlessness score are really popular. They hit some kind of masochistic gold vein in the zeitgeist.”
“I’ll decipher that later. So is there more to the story?”
“Not much more. Remember you were asking earlier why a doctor isn’t good enough for his parents? He explained it to me on the drive over. Have you heard of scalability?”
“The best friend of unsustainability.”
“Exactly. Long story short, his parents worship scalability. A doctor can only save one life at a time. But an engineer? A businessman? They can create bombs that vaporize millions of people in a second, or build monopolies that rob people all over the world of their money. Or even their sanity.”
“Hot.”
“Yes, I put a cynical twist on it, did you enjoy that?”
“I did. Saved me a lot of work.”
“It’s how I avoid getting interrupted all the time. I just tell the story in your sad little language.”
“We speak the same language you know. It’s now like you’re British or something.”
“Ha! That’s funny. You stole that one, admit it.”
“I admit nothing.”
“You stole it. That’s not your sense of humor.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“See, now that eyebrow, that’s all you,” Jennifer said. “That’s you in a fucking nutshell. Now where was I…right, almost at the end. Dinner. It’s amazing how little there is to say about dinner. It was the most anti-climactic dinner I’ve ever had, expectations-to-reality ratio-wise. I thought I was going to be exposed for a fraud five seconds in, but it was perfectly pleasant. I felt like a sociopath, that’s how pleasant it was. We talked about nothing for two hours, laughed like a bunch of overeducated hyenas about more nothing, then patted each other on the back on having made a waste of time tolerable, and said good night. I’m seeing them all again in six months.”
“Recurrent revenue?”
“Exactly. Not that it pays well. I make more sitting in my office watching our stock grow. I guess I do it for the experience.”
“To commoditizing experience.” I raised my empty cup. She clinked her empty smoothie glass with it. “So did you end up going to your friend’s wedding?” I asked.
“I did. And I took a girl.”
“And?”
“And they still got married.”
“Phew,” I said. “That’s all I really wanted to know.”
