"Keeping up with being kept"

An excerpt of this article appeared in The Week magazine, and I was so fascinated that I went to the NY Times site to read the whole thing. All I can say is that there are some seriously delusional people in the world - if you're getting paid to have sex with someone, that's prostitution. And if you're paying someone to have sex with you, or even just to be your companion, then yes, money is a factor in their "attraction" to you. Wake up and smell the filthy lucre folks. This is a sad, sad commentary on our inability to form and maintain meaningful relationships in our consumeristic and transactional society. When you can just buy the qualities you want in a person, and set up a relationship to have an expiration date, what motivation is there to work at making a relationship successful and to mature as a person?