Rent A Friend: An Aspie's Dream! (Not)

Aspies, our prayers have been answered!! OMG!!1!

Helpless? Lonely? Why Not Rent a Friend?
Rentafriend.com features the profiles of over 167,000 people offering companionship for $20 to $50 an hour. The site receives 100,000 unique views per month and has nearly 2,000 paying members. Available activities include: clubbing, pottery, wingman/wingwoman, and zoo.

Yes, it’s true! Trouble making friends? No more will your social ineptitude hold you back! Just whip out that credit card, and you, too, can know the joys of friendship!

In a world where friend is a verb and you may never meet some of yours from Facebook in real life, where research indicates chronic loneliness can lead to depression, suicide, high blood pressure and viral infections, where roughly 20 percent of all people – 60 million in the United States alone – say they feel lonely at any given moment, is renting a friend a solution or stopgap?

Ouch. This is serious stuff. Friendships are a big deal. How far would you go to cure your loneliness? Does it cheapen the concept of friendship if it can be bought and sold? And is Rentafriend.com just a trendy gimmick or does it tap into a real need?

And yes, “Rent a Friend” was indeed a Tiny Toons episode nearly 20 years ago. Hey, they say Steven Spielberg’s an Aspie. Prescient!


Tiny Toon Adventures is a trademark of Warner Bros Inc.