A cross-national study involving more than 22,000 women finds that heavier social media use is linked to greater openness to sugar relationships, a form of dating in which companionship or intimacy is exchanged for financial or material support. The link is somewhat stronger in countries with looser, more permissive social norms than in those with stricter norms.
The researchers define sugar relationships as transactional arrangements in which an older, wealthier partner provides money, gifts or lifestyle support in return for companionship and/or sexual intimacy. Openness, they say, reflects an attitude—whether such exchanges are acceptable or personally viable—not necessarily a commitment to act on it.
Viewing sugar relationships through a psychological lens, the study frames them as a modern expression of sexual-economic exchange, a concept that posits dating and intimacy can be mediated by material resources or social status as well as affection.
“My broader research interest is in how people think about relationships in which intimacy and material support are connected,” said study lead author Norbert Meskó, a professor of psychology and director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at the University of Pécs. “Sugar relationships are a particularly visible contemporary example, but the underlying questions are much broader: What do people consider an acceptable relationship? How do financial support, companionship, and sexuality fit into those expectations? And how do people come to see a particular relationship arrangement as something they might consider for themselves?”
Social media’s visibility of aspirational lifestyles has been linked in previous work to more permissive attitudes toward dating and sexuality. The study notes that mainstream media exposure correlates with how young people view dating, based on a 2019 meta-analysis that found more permissive attitudes and perceptions of peers’ sexual activity among those exposed to sexual content.
Earlier work by Meskó and colleagues mapped who tends to be receptive to transactional arrangements, finding, among other patterns, that acceptance varied across countries and was higher among men and among people who favour casual sex and traditional gender roles. A separate study of 500 young Hungarian women linked openness to sugar arrangements with greater difficulties regulating emotions and deeper insecurities rooted in childhood.
Despite these pieces of the puzzle, the interaction between a country’s everyday social rules and social media habits had remained unclear. The current study introduces the concept of cultural tightness-looseness, which describes how strictly societies police behaviour and punish deviance. A 2011 cross-national map of 33 nations used the same concept to differentiate between tight cultures, with rigid norms, and loose cultures, which tolerate a wider range of lifestyles.
“Social media adds an interesting dimension because it brings different lifestyles and relationship models into everyday view,” Meskó explained. “People can encounter accounts of intimacy, financial support, independence, and success that differ considerably from the expectations of their immediate surroundings. However, encountering a relationship model does not necessarily mean accepting it. We wanted to examine whether the wider cultural environment might help explain differences in the association between social media use and openness to sugar relationships.”
To test this idea, the researchers drew on responses from a large, publicly available international survey on romantic love and mate preferences. The dataset originally included 117,293 people across 175 countries, with the team narrowing the pool to those who answered all questions about sugar relationships, social media use and age, and who lived in countries with available cultural tightness data—leaving 34,318 people across 33 countries for analysis.
Focusing on women, and restricting countries to those with at least 100 female respondents, the final sample comprised 22,292 adult women across 22 countries. Participants completed an online survey in a range of languages, including a measure of openness to sugar relationships and a self-reported frequency of social networking platform use.
Each participant’s country was paired with a cultural tightness-looseness score from 2014, where higher values indicate looser norms. The researchers also gathered national indicators on internet access, mobile subscriptions, female labour force participation, unemployment among young women, and internet freedom for context.
To ensure comparability across countries, the team employed measurement alignment to address cross-cultural differences in how the sugar-relationship questions were interpreted. They then used Bayesian multilevel modelling to account for participants nested within countries and to compare competing models.
Across the 22 countries, greater use of social media among women was associated with higher openness to sugar relationships, with a standardized regression weight of 0.14. Age showed the opposite pattern, with a standardized weight of -0.11, indicating younger women tended to be more receptive than older women.
At the country level, cultural looseness on its own did not show a statistically significant direct link to openness, with a near-zero weight of -0.02. However, looseness interacted with social media use, producing a standardized weight of 0.04 and suggesting that the positive link between social media use and openness to sugar relationships was modestly stronger in looser countries than in tighter ones. The effects are small by conventional standards, and the cultural difference in the social-media link was even smaller still.
“One particularly interesting finding was that cultural looseness was not independently associated with greater openness in our model,” Meskó noted. “Its role appeared in the strength of the connection between social media use and openness. The finding is therefore more specific than saying that women in culturally looser countries are more accepting of sugar relationships: the association between social media use and openness was stronger in those settings.”
He added that imagining someone encountering an online account presenting a materially supported relationship as an attractive lifestyle does not necessarily translate into real-world decisions, and the study did not measure those encounters directly.
Living in a permissive culture did not, by itself, predict greater openness. The authors suggest that looser norms may make online-presented relationship models seem more acceptable or realistic, while stricter norms may raise perceived social costs of stepping outside convention, though this was not tested directly.
Further modelling that included additional country-level factors such as internet access and smartphone penetration did not materially improve the explanatory power beyond social media use and cultural looseness, the researchers reported. They also conducted a leave-one-out analysis, removing one country at a time, which confirmed the robustness of both the primary link and the moderating effect of looseness.
Controlling for self-reported socioeconomic status did not change the central findings, though those with lower personal socioeconomic status showed a very small tendency toward greater openness to sugar relationships. The authors stressed that this did not alter the main association with social media use or the interaction with cultural looseness.
“The cultural difference was small, but it remained evident across several additional analyses, including models allowing the association with social media use to vary across countries,” Meskó emphasised. “It should not be used to make sweeping judgments about countries or individual women. The broader message is that our online lives are embedded in offline social worlds, and both deserve attention when we study relationship attitudes.”
Limitations noted by the authors include the study’s attitudinal focus rather than behaviour, and its cross-sectional design, which cannot establish causality. They acknowledge that the single-snapshot approach cannot answer whether younger generations are inherently more open to transactional dating or simply more immersed in digital culture.
The study’s authors propose future work to track participants over time or experiment with howExposure to glamorised online content might influence dating attitudes. They also suggest measuring personal traits—such as valuing material wealth or body objectification—alongside community norms to better explain how online trends and cultural rules shape modern views on intimacy and money.
The paper, titled Social Media Use and Openness to “Sugar Relationships”: Cultural Tightness–Looseness as a Moderator Across 22 Countries, was authored by Norbert Meskó, Jessica S. Ehlers, Anna Molnár, and Hyemin Han.
