$100,000 won’t find you a good boyfriend

While it’s true that a good heart is hard to find, it shouldn’t have to cost you a small fortune. Especially not in your early 20s, writes Katy Hall.

In any relationship, trust can be hard to come by.

But apparently, it’s even harder if you’re a lottery winner with money to burn.

According to 23-year-old Jane Park, a UK woman who took home $1.8 million thanks to a lottery win when she was 17, the struggle to find and keep a good man is real. So real, in fact, that she’s now willing to offer her next suitor a retainer of $100,000 to keep him on the straight and narrow.

This week, a source close to her said that thanks to past relationships — in which she has gifted boyfriends cars, dinners, and places to live only to be left broken hearted — Park is scared to love again, and as such, she considers buying her next boyfriend’s loyalty a small price to pay if it ultimately leads her to “the one”.

There are clearly a lot of problems with this scenario. For starters, how much of her winnings can possibly be left after these ex-boyfriend purchases, her extensive plastic surgery work, and five years’ worth of living expenses are deducted from the original sum? Then there’s also the concept of love and a lifetime of happiness being a transactional purchase.

Lottery winner Jane Park is reportedly willing to pay up to $100,000 a year to find a loyal boyfriend. Picture: Instagram/Jane Park

But more than anything, there’s the glaringly obvious trust issues that already exist for Park, who reportedly laid down rules for one ex-boyfriend that included making no eye contact with other women, submitting himself to a drug test, handing over his phone for analysis, and wait for it, having his penis inspected for any secret tattoos he may have gotten while on holiday without her.

Now, I’m no relationship expert. In fact, my approach to dating when I was the same age as Park could best be described as that of an RSPCA shelter seeking out the hipsters of Melbourne’s inner-north most in need of love, affection and a warm bed before sending them on to their forever home toilet trained and somewhat behaviourally reformed. But even I can see many a red flashing light here.

To begin with, it sounds like Park would greatly benefit from some alone time. Time in which she undertakes your run-of-the-mill single girl activities like watching so many true crime series you look into joining the FBI, eating an entire pizza to yourself, sleeping in the middle of the bed, investing hundreds of dollars in skin care products that scream ‘even if my emotional state is a mess my pores have never looked better!’

Dating the wrong people is what your early 20s are for. Picture: Instagram/Jane Park

Spending hours on end not speaking to another living soul might feel like a daunting prospect in the age of social media, but it’s usually in these moments that so many of us figure out not necessarily what we want in a partner, but what we don’t. (A person who gets penis tattoos while on holiday should firmly be in the ‘don’t’ category, in my opinion.)

This process of elimination means that when you become attracted to someone who steals your jeans while you sleep and denies it even when you see them wearing them at the pub with a new girl the next week, a little signal is sent to your brain that says, ‘remember, this is not what you want. You deserve better than this! Maybe not an Oscar-winning actor, but at least someone who won’t nick your gender-neutral pants in the dead of night.’

So if Park really wants to find love, she needs to take some time on the bench. And ideally, put that $100,000 into a high-interest savings account for any future tattoo removals that may come her way.

Katy Hall is a writer and producer for RendezView.

@katyhallway