Why Are Some Guys Now Renting Girlfriends?
The World According to Zandland - Issue #8
What happens when a growing number of men stop believing real relationships are possible, and start building entire emotional lives around substitutes instead?
Next Monday we’re releasing a new film on YouTube looking at the world of renting girlfriends. The timing, as you may have guessed from the fact it was just Valentine’s day, isn’t accidental. This is a time of year when the cultural pressure to be loved, partnered, desired, chosen, feels especially loud.
In the film we spend time with a man called T who wants what he describes as a “subservient” partner. Someone who doesn’t challenge him. Someone who doesn’t say no. Someone who exists entirely on his terms.
He’s not sure if they’re traits he can find in a real relationship. So instead, he rents it.
This film sits alongside our previous work exploring incels, gooners and looksmaxxers. These films are available on Hulu in the US, Channel 4 in the UK, and our YouTube. They also are increasingly mainstream, with the growing popularity of the chad-lite influencer, Clavicular, in the US, putting Looksmaxxing on the map. These are all different subcultures, with different languages, different ideologies. But often with the same emotional gravity pulling people inward.
Isolation. Rejection. Shame. Confusion.
And beneath it all is often a powerful and dangerous belief:
That the world has withheld something they were owed.
The power of listening
One of the most fascinating parts of making these films is that when you listen, many of the men involved can give you what feels like a coherent explanation of how they got there.
It rarely begins with ideology.
It begins with loneliness.
Often severe loneliness.
Repeated rejection. Romantic failure. Social exclusion. A sense of being invisible, or worse, fundamentally undesirable. Over time, that emotional pain looks for structure. For explanation. For somewhere to go.
And increasingly, the internet provides it.
Forums become community centres where identity and worldview is hardened.
A lot of the men we’ve met spend most of their waking lives inside these spaces, moderating Reddit communities, running Discord servers, producing content, analysing themselves and others through increasingly rigid frameworks of value and hierarchy.
The outside world becomes abstract and the online world becomes the only thing that’s real.
Eventually, relationships stop being something lived — and become something theorised, optimised, categorised or simulated.
And at that point, renting a partner isn’t strange.
It’s logical.
Control feels safer than connection
Real relationships are unpredictable. They involve negotiation, vulnerability, disagreement, compromise. They require being seen fully, and risking rejection again.
A rented relationship offers something else entirely. Predictability. Structure. And control.
It allows a young man that’s spent his life facing rejection and pain to experience closeness without uncertainty. To get the affection without the compromise that real relations involve, and the presence of someone without the fear they’ll leave you.
For someone who feels chronically powerless, that can feel stabilising.
But it also removes the very things that make intimacy human.
Across incel communities, looksmaxxing spaces, gooning forums and now rental companionship cultures, we keep encountering the same structural pattern:
Personal pain
Online immersion
Explanatory ideology
Behavioural adaptation
Further isolation
Each step feels rational from the inside.
Each step makes returning harder.
And often, the deeper someone goes, the more they feel the world outside simply wouldn’t understand them anymore. A combination of shame and a sense that you know something the rest of the world doesn’t makes leaving even less likely.
A new format
This week we’re trying a new part podcast part explainer format on our YouTube, that’ll hopefully be a weekly proposition. A piece where I (Ben Zand) talk to camera and do an explainer to accompany the release of Monday’s film.
The mission is to create a space that allows us to talk more informally, and more quickly, about some of the worlds we’re encountering. And this week, we’re trying to map the conditions that make these pathways increasingly common.
Like why is this happening? Why are so many young men, across different countries and cultures, gravitating toward systems that harbour deep hostility toward women and rigid, hierarchical views of masculinity.
There is no single answer.
But if you listen carefully, you hear recurring themes:
A collapse of traditional social pathways
Increasing romantic competition in digital environments
Economic and status insecurity
The algorithmic reinforcement of grievance
The psychological comfort of simple explanations
The seduction of communities that promise belonging without challenge
And perhaps most fundamentally:
A profound hunger to feel wanted, combined with a growing belief that wanting and being wanted are governed by rigid, unforgiving rules.
The question that stays with us
After filming, editing and rewatching, the question we keep returning to isn’t about these men alone.
It’s about the environment that produces them.
What kind of social landscape makes simulated intimacy feel more achievable than real connection?
And what happens when increasing numbers of men stop trying to treat women as equals, and instead seek relationships defined by control, certainty or hierarchy?
We don’t have neat answers.
But we do think we are witnessing a shift that is bigger than any one subculture.
In other news — a different kind of shift
Last week we were in Washington D.C. with a select group of prominent documentary and news creators for an Independent Media Summit hosted by YouTube.
What became clear very quickly is that we’re living through a structural transition between old and new media that isn’t just technological. It’s psychological.
Legacy media distributes (often disputed) information.
New media builds relationships.
On platforms like YouTube, people don’t just watch content. They form attachments to perspectives. They return to voices they trust when something confusing or significant happens. They want context, interpretation, emotional orientation, not just facts.
In other words, they want meaning, not just reporting.
That realisation connects directly back to the work we’re doing this week.
The same forces reshaping media, fragmentation, individualisation, algorithmic reinforcement, the search for belonging, are also reshaping identity, relationships and the way people understand themselves.
Media environments don’t just describe reality.
They help build it.
Where this leaves us
This coming Monday’s film sits inside all of that.
A story about rented intimacy.
A story about loneliness.
A story about control.
A story about how people construct meaning when the world feels overwhelming or unfair.
And perhaps also a story about what happens when connection, in every sense, becomes harder to access, harder to trust, and easier to simulate.
We don’t see these films as isolated investigations. They feel more like fragments of a larger map we’re slowly trying to draw.
A map of how people are adapting, sometimes in ways that are deeply unsettling, to a world that is changing faster than many of us can emotionally process.
That’s what we’re thinking about this week.
— Ben Zand