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When most of us go through bad dates, hot-tub dalliances, and painful breakups, it’s usually only in front of our now-insignificant other, not an audience of millions (and usually doesn’t involve use of a lascivious “fantasy suite,” either). The same can’t be said for the love life of DeAnna Pappas, a confident, likeable Newnan resident who rose to reality TV sweetheart as a contestant on ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Though she was rejected in the former and ultimately ended an engagement spawned by the latter, Pappas, who turns twenty-eight this month, now cohosts Lifetime’s wedding-planning show, Get Married, and splits her days between Newnan and Los Angeles. It seems Pappas’s public heartbreak has made her something of a pro at looking for love.

When you’re in Atlanta, where do you like to meet people? When I’m in Newnan, there’s half of me who just wants to sit around the house and hang out with my family, since I don’t get to see them as much anymore. And I own my own house in Newnan, so that’s home to me; that’s where my heart is. If I’m trying to go out with my girlfriends for a night on the town, we usually head up to Midtown and walk in some hole-in-the-wall bar and hope that our odds are good!

I bet you hear a lot of pickup lines. Ugh, pickup lines do not work on me. I think they’re extremely cheesy, and I’ll just turn around and walk away. I was up in some bar in Buckhead recently; this guy walks up, and he’s like, “Hey, De-ANNA, from The Bachelorette!” And I’m like, ugh, strike one. It’s De-AH-na. And he’s like, “Listen, I enjoyed watching you on TV, I don’t want to bother you, I see you’re with your girlfriends.” And I’m like, “Oookay.” Then five minutes later, he’s like, “I’m lying! I want to bother you.” And he just pulls up a chair and bellies up to my table and won’t leave for the rest of the evening. I just want someone to be completely normal: Walk up, say hello as if you have no idea who I am.

But you are sort of famous now—was it easier to get a date before TV? It was easier before. I went through a long period of time where guys didn’t want to date me; they wanted to date the person that they thought they knew from a television show. My life is different now. I’m not just a normal person anymore, whereas before I was just this normal girl living in a small town, bartending and selling real estate. With that, I’ve grown and changed into a different woman as well.

What kind of man is this new woman looking for? I’m definitely done with the kind of guys who want to use me to be famous, or want to use me to further their career, or want to use me to get on television. I want just a guy who genuinely cares about me.

Are you dating anyone now? I’m definitely dating, yes. One person in particular.

Can you tell us anything more? No, because people will definitely know who he is. And I’d like to keep the privacy of it for a while. Because I was on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, people always jump to conclusions the second I start dating someone, or the second I have a boyfriend. They’re like, “Oh my God! Are you going to marry him? Oh my God! Are the signs there?” And I’m like, calm down—it’s only been a month!

But you’re still ready to settle down? I love being single. For me, it was such an important part of my life because I really grew and got to know myself—I traveled a lot, experienced the world, hung out and met new people, dived into different types of culture, and really just lived for myself without having to worry about anyone else. Am I done being single? Yeah, obviously I’d like to meet someone to share my life with. But just because I am quickly approaching thirty doesn’t mean I’m willing to settle.

“Can we line up and slap you?” That was the reaction I got from my closest friends when I told them about my new adventure in online dating. They were appalled.

 

Now, at first glance my profile reveals nothing slap-worthy: “I’m considerate and sweet yet independent and am looking for the same. I’m open-minded . . . I take good care of myself mentally and physically and try to focus on the good in life.”

 

It’s the site itself, and what it stands for, that has inspired such disgust from my friends and led me to keep all this a secret from my family, and to stay anonymous here. The dating site is called sugardaddyforme.com, and it connects wealthy men with women who want to be financially cared for. I know what it sounds like, and why my friends were so grossed out: It seems seedy, like prostitution.

 

On some level I agree with the doubters, because I’ve always thought it was shallow to want someone with money. If you’d told me five years ago I’d be doing this, I would have laughed in your face. I would’ve imagined nothing but gender role stereotypes and gross expectations on both sides. I’m the kind of person who has always been fiercely independent and paid her own way.

 

But I’m also the kind of person who is broke, and tired of it. I grew up with no money, the daughter of a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal preacher who put my needs second to those of his flock. We were a family of five who got by on $20,000 a year, eating government cheese. I went to college on a grant and eventually cofounded a fairly successful business in Atlanta. Despite that success, my financial situation has never improved much. I still can’t really afford to go to the doctor or the dentist, and when I’m thirsty at the gas station, I do some silent accounting to decide whether I should buy a fountain soda. Unfortunately, the men I’ve dated over the years have been just as strapped as me. One guy had legal issues, and we’d fight all the time about them. I’d want to talk about it, and he’d run out. It drove me up the wall and made me insecure, but I kept trying. Another lied to me, mostly about whether he was spending time with an ex-girlfriend. I’d give him the benefit of a doubt, even going to therapy with him so we could work out those differences. But he kept lying about who he was, and eventually I just had to walk away.

 

So I found myself, at thirty-five, single and exhausted and yearning for something casual and simple and comfortable. That’s when I heard about sugardaddyforme.com and signed up on a lark. The offers came fast. One guy invited me for a weekend away in Chicago. Another, a fifty-something retiree, said he wanted to go on a date but never followed up. Eventually I connected with a guy I’ll call Kevin. In the photos on his profile he was hot: a young-looking forty-something with bulging biceps visible through the sleeves of his button-down shirt. He was a rich executive in Atlanta, and we started by e-mailing and then talking on the phone. We both wanted something casual but very honest, and he said he wanted to pamper me.

 

We planned to meet for our first date at my house, but he changed his mind and asked me to meet at the Best Buy parking lot on Moreland Avenue. Sitting in my beat-up car, waiting for him to pull into the lot, I didn’t feel scared. I was excited to be trying on a new persona and dipping a toe into a mysterious dating practice far outside my comfort zone of hipster bars, galleries, and setups by friends.

 

When he pulled up I realized why he wanted to meet here instead of on my narrow street: He was driving a gigantic blue Hummer. He threw open the door. The stereo was blaring Lil Wayne, and as soon as I hopped in he handed me a blunt. “Let’s skip all the awkward small talk,” he said, flashing a great smile. “Let’s pretend like we’ve known each other forever. So how was your day?”

 

I was at ease immediately. We talked about our professional roles, his at a big-name corporation and mine at my small business. I was attracted to him, and appreciated that he understood what I wanted: fun and financial support. No apologies.

 

Then the bubble burst: He told me he was married with kids. He explained that he and his wife had an “arrangement”: She knew he was unhappy, and she stuck around for the financial stability; divorce was unnecessary. I felt really uneasy about this at first—it clashed with my formerly staunch sisters-watch-out-for-each-other stance—but I admired that they were being real with each other and not faking it like a lot of married people do. A lot of the so-called rules for happiness don’t work out in the real world. I could relate to a woman who wanted the security of the marriage but liked an open arrangement. So I moved past it.

 

We spent most of the night at a club in Midtown where he was a VIP, and he held my hand and it felt good to be his arm candy. Maybe I was role-playing, and maybe it was cheesy when he called me “baby” and “honey” and fed me Patrón shots, but I liked it. When he dropped me off at my car at the end of the night, he insisted that I call and check in on my way home. He wanted to make sure I was safe. I liked this. So many of my boyfriends had never really seemed to care that much. It was nice to be coddled and protected.

 

It was after this first date that I decided to tell my closest friends during a dinner party. And really, I understood their misgivings. It makes sense that you might assume that with this kind of dating, the “sugar baby” should expect to offer sex. That it’s a transaction, and that sex is the return on the sugar daddy’s investment. I don’t view it that way. I don’t know if I’d have a different take if, say, my date had given me a diamond necklace or a wad of cash. But let’s be real here: All dating is transactional. Maybe the guy expects just closeness or gratitude, but maybe he expects sex. The transaction just isn’t discussed explicitly, because that’s not romantic. But with sugar daddy dating, there’s no coy behavior or uncertain terms. Everything is out on the table.

 

This explanation doesn’t placate some of my friends. None would admit during the dinner that they, too, fantasize about being taken care of and being involved in something simple and straightforward. Though later, one-on-one, a few told me that they do—they were just too ashamed to admit it to the group.

 

But not long after telling them I was happy as a sugar baby, I met someone outside the site, in the normal world. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s the best guy I’ve ever gone out with. He’s hot, a manly man who works with his hands. He’s also artistic, and we have an amazing intellectual and spiritual connection. He’s caring and considerate, and every time we get together he brings me a thoughtful gift, usually something he’s made.

 

But I’m not ready for this kind of connection. And I’ve realized that even though he’s the best guy I’ve met so far, I have higher standards. I can and should shoot for the moon. Every small detail about a guy matters now, and I can’t excuse things that don’t measure up to my expectations.

 

In this case, the greatest guy in the world is broke. So I cut it off, telling him I wasn’t ready for a relationship, not telling him why he wasn’t right and who else I’ve been seeing, and how I meet them. He said he’d wait, but I have to move on. —Anonymous, as told to Christine Van Dusen

The pickup artist, or “pua” in the systematic tongue of the seduction community, sits across the table from me talking about picking his nose, as it relates to picking up women. “I did it right in front of the hottest chick in Las Vegas,” says the well-groomed, if average-looking, business executive in his late thirties, a self-described “South Park conservative” dressed in designer jeans and a short-sleeve collared shirt. “Just to show her I didn’t care.”

 

We’re at the Dark Horse Tavern in Virginia-Highland on a Thursday night. There are plenty of “targets,” as the PUA, “Henry,” refers to attractive women. (Worried about having his cover blown, personally and professionally, “Henry” insisted on a pseudonym.) The targets are doing what humans habitually do at bars, unaware of the PUA in their midst. We are, as they say, “in the field.”

 

Tonight, though, Henry and I aren’t nose-picking or “peacocking” (wearing outlandish clothing, such as a feather boa) to attract attention, or “negging” (using an “accidental insult,” such as “I love your eyes—especially the left one”) to demonstrate lack of interest, or even using the elementary “triangular gazing” (looking from left eye to right eye to the lips) to insinuate desire. We aren’t running any manner of “game.” I’m simply discussing its particulars with this local lady-hunter, who is unabashedly laying out and admiring his psychological ammunition among his potential prey.

 

Analyzing the “game” is a large part of the appeal to Henry, a one-time student of animal behavior at Berkeley who went to the Congo during college to study chimp flirtation. He’s since gotten into finance (“I make damn good money but don’t wear it on my sleeve”) and casually drops words such as “confiscatory,” “exigent,” and “olfactory” into our conversation, displaying fluency in the disparate worlds of finance and animal reproduction. Yes, Henry wants to get laid. But he also wants to understand why and how we choose our mates. This is not a rationalization so much as a cold, hard, human fact. (The rationalizations come later: I’m a better public speaker now; I can navigate awkward situations more easily; I always try to leave a woman better than I found her.)

 

He sips his second, and final, Jack and water—“if I have too many, I lose the verbal dexterity I rely upon”—paying scant attention (an implicit demonstration of his “higher value”) to the high-heeled young professionals milling around and evaluating, however unconsciously, possible mates. “I’ve always had an interest in biological psychology,” he says. “Before I even discovered the community, I wanted to make a comprehensive model for picking up women, using my background in animal behavior and evolution. I looked online and realized the work had already been done.”

 

Over the last four years, “running game” or “sarging” (a seduction term traced to a legendary PUA’s house cat) has gone from underground art to pedestrian weeknight activity. The watershed moment was the 2005 publication of a book by Neil Strauss documenting his infiltration and ascension to the top of the seduction community (The Game), followed by VH1’s The Pickup Artist, a show hosted by Strauss’s guru, a former “nerd from the Great White North” named Mystery.But sarging is still a chiefly West Coast and Northeast urban phenomenon. With the exception of perhaps Miami, southeastern metropolises haven’t been “sarged out” like, say, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where Henry lived and learned “game” at a workshop called PickUp 101 until moving east for work earlier this year. “You go into a club in L.A. and use a canned line,” he explains, “and you might be the fifth guy to try it that night. You get called out a lot.” One might assume, then, that other West Coast PUAs like Henry may be gradually migrating south and east, to relatively greener pastures.

 

Henry has certainly found “easier targets” here. And he’s lately been wading through Atlanta’s online PUA “lairs”—anonymous forums where members of “the community” discuss techniques and post long, detailed “field reports” of conquest and failure alike—looking for male “wings” to go sarging with him. (“I don’t do as well on my own,” he confides.) Such a lair is where I found him. Practitioners of the game range from business executives like Henry to computer science majors at Georgia Tech. Many, he admits, “are dorks in the IT sector who need help simply talking to girls.” The successful ones are analytical, disciplined, and dogged more often than they are attractive, connected, or wealthy.

 

Henry, who discovered “the community” in his early thirties, insists that he’s “a natural introvert.” He lost his virginity at eighteen but approached no more than a dozen women at bars over the next sixteen years. Friends or coworkers had introduced him to all the women he’d dated, or the women had approached him. In the last four years, during his evolution from AFC (“Average Frustrated Chump”) to PUA, Henry estimates that he’s made some 1,500 approaches, during which he’s fine-tuned his game. “It’s just not virile to not approach,” he says, before going into a brief exposition on the “three-second rule,” whereby one must approach any attractive woman he sees at a bar in the same breath that he notices her. “I simply have to be able to isolate the woman, get her in a conversation, and find out what moves her. Then I simply move her. I’m successful about 80 percent of the time.” The seduction model that Henry uses is one of the community’s oldest and most relied upon. It’s called the Mystery Method, named after the magician-turned-PUA who decoded and organized the mystifying process of getting laid into three phases: attraction, comfort, and seduction. Notably, there is no “relationship” phase. PUAs do not claim to understand what comes after successful seduction, beyond more of the same.

 

A few days later, Henry is running game at Midtown’s RA Sushi, where he initiates a conversation with two nurses from Miami who have ordered California rolls. “You can just get those at Publix,” he laughs, “demonstrating value” as he walks up to them. He then suggests a few more exotic dishes before segueing into a discussion of his time spent in California. His approach is not rebuffed.

 

Not long after the conversation begins, another guy steps into Henry’s “set” (the PUA term used to describe a group of targets) and says something to his target. “I had to show dominance or risk losing the set,” Henry tells me afterward. “I had to show her that I was a ‘leader of men.’ So I said, ‘Wait a second, are you hitting on my ex-girlfriend?’ And [the guy] got really defensive and said, ‘No, no, man.’ I responded, ‘Don’t worry, you can have her. But there’s one thing you’ve got to know—she’s terrible in bed.’ The target spun around in her chair and playfully punched me in the chest, smiling, establishing kino”—physical contact. “He disappeared, and I knew I had her. I’d activated an attraction switch in her that responds to social dominance.”

 

There were other challenges: establishing comfort, isolating her from her friend, recognizing her values, taking her home and dimming the lights. But they were having a good time. Then a conversation began about a burn victim and briefly brought him out of game mode. He was, perhaps, himself. Later, I ask whether this is a good thing. No, he says. “I’d rather be called out for using the game than be called out for who I am.” There’s a girl, incidentally, back in California—many conquests ago, before he began playing the game—whom he hasn’t been able to forget.