Men Are Spending $10,000 On OnlyFans For Good Morning Texts

A man spends $10,000 messaging a woman who doesn’t know his real name. Another forks over $600 a month just to hear someone ask how his day is going. He’s not dating her – he’s actually never met her. He’s unsure if it’s really her texting back – it could be an automated message or a paid assistant pretending to care. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows it might not be her, but he pays anyway.

That’s the reality journalist Carly Lewis captures in The Cut’s recent piece on OnlyFans addiction. Men are paying for videos, pictures, and parasocial relationships that only leave them isolated and addicted.

The piece opens with Evelyn, a 27-year-old who noticed her long-term boyfriend growing irritable and withdrawn. He stopped initiating sex and started guarding his phone. When she finally got into the device, she discovered a string of messages to women on OnlyFans. Some of them were casual banter, while others were requests for customized pornographic videos.

“I just wanted to say hi,” he once wrote to one of them. “I’m in the Costco bathroom and my girlfriend is waiting outside for me.”

The Loneliness Business  

OnlyFans launched in 2016, but it exploded during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Stuck inside, people got creative about both side hustles and coping mechanisms. A lot of women started creating content, and a lot of men started subscribing. 

Unlike Pornhub or XVideos – which offer unlimited access to explicit content for free – OnlyFans charges a monthly fee. Users get to interact with creators and can send messages, leave tips, and in many cases, get replies. 

Eric, a 30-year-old man profiled in the story, explained, “Being able to talk to another person was like pure heroin.” He spent over $10,000 on the platform, with much of that money going toward “Girlfriend Experiences,” a feature that simulates romantic companionship through non-sexual texting. “I spent thousands on it. Enough that I feel a visceral horrible feeling in my gut.” He checked his messages before bed, during work breaks, and even when he got up to pee at night.

Many wonder why men won’t just go watch porn for free – that’s because these customers are lonely. They’re paying for the attention, even if it’s not real. This addiction, as we know, can lead to an isolating reality. Worse, regular porn use can alter the brain. As porn use increases, so does the brain’s need for new, more extreme stimuli. Men get addicted to free porn on adult sites, but then they desire more – so they end up on OnlyFans, where the next step is actually messaging the women they’ve been fantasizing about.

We understand that lonely men are on OnlyFans – but why are taken men on there, too? The reason is simple: Porn offers novelty, it goes above expectations. Relationships take work; real-life intimacy can get boring. Sometimes their wife or girlfriend isn’t in the mood, other times, these men have lost their attraction to them. Sometimes, they just want a woman they can’t reach – pixel-perfect, curvaceous, always available, one that doesn’t argue or reject them. The difference is that she exists entirely in their imagination, and in that way, tailored to their desires and untouched by the messiness of reality. She’s not tired, she’s not annoyed, she doesn’t have boundaries or needs of her own. OnlyFans becomes more appealing than the real woman sitting on the other side of the couch. They get used to these fake messages, and their real partner starts to feel underwhelming.

This is devastating for the women who loved and trusted their partners. It’s bleak for the girls coming of age in a culture that teaches men to see them as porn categories, not people. And it’s disheartening for the women who feel their best shot at success is profiting off male loneliness and emotional neglect.

For the men, OnlyFans has become a hollow coping mechanism under the guise of connection. While I will always be against infidelity, I recognize that most cannot stay loyal because they’ve grown dependent on the instant gratification that digital fantasy offers. Instead of facing the discomfort of vulnerability or working through the rough patches, they reach for the easier fix, because it doesn’t require them to be present, patient, or real. 

Most of the men who pay for these subscriptions know that OnlyFans creators only care about money. Eric admitted that he understood the arrangement was transactional. It didn’t matter. “Dating apps shattered my mental health,” he said. “I could fail all day at trying to make small talk with co-workers and on dating apps and then just go to OnlyFans.” 

Julianne, a 51-year-old wife and mother, discovered her husband had spent at least $46,000 on a woman online. The content wasn’t even explicitly sexual. It was just constant, ongoing communication full of affection and compliments. She thought they were broke and that vacations and home repairs were unaffordable. What she learned was that the money was quietly bleeding out through digital microtransactions.

“He never said anything like that to me,” Julianne said, after reading one of the messages he’d sent was, “Good morning beautiful.”

And when she confronted him, he insisted they were friends, that she liked him just as much as he liked her. “You don’t have to pay your friends to interact with you,” Julianne replied.

People will brush off the notion of a porn addiction, but many have found that these aren’t one-off behaviors. Relapse is common, and Evelyn’s boyfriend, the Costco bathroom texter, assured her he’d stopped. They started having sex again, and she truly believed him – until months later, when his temper came back. When she checked his phone again, he’d simply moved to other platforms like Fansly and Reddit. 

“It took over my life,” said Matthew, 22, who spent $14,000 on Chaturbate over a year and a half. “I didn’t feel like I had any control.” He tried to block the websites and gave his friend his password. He added a parent to his bank account to monitor his lavish spending. In the end, he lasted 18 days.

It’s hard for men to stay away from sites like OnlyFans, especially when the platform offers a bottomless feed of women to flirt with, talk to, and project fantasies onto.  

What Does That Do to Relationships?

The Cut reported that therapists say this version of emotional outsourcing is growing fast, especially among young men who don’t know how – or don’t want – to try real dating. “They end up not knowing how to be in a relationship,” said Australian sex addiction therapist Tori McCarthy. “They rely so heavily on these relationships with people who aren’t real.”

Laura, an OnlyFans creator with a background in mental health, spends most of her time not filming sex but texting about football or politics. “There’s a lot of lonely men out there,” she said. “They want to look at pictures of me, but they also want to have conversations that for whatever reason they’re not getting to have in their day-to-day lives.”

“I have a few guys who clearly develop an emotional attachment to me,” she said. “But this is money I’m saving for my kids’ college funds.”

Even the creators know some of these men are spiraling. Laura admitted herself admitted, “If I had a situation where a man was spending thousands of dollars on me, that would raise some red flags, and I would probably put the kibosh on that.”

Closing Thoughts

We can’t keep acting like this is just about horniness or lack of self-control. This system is growing and ruining lives, and it profits from loneliness. One that trains boys before they’ve even finished puberty to crave something synthetic and erodes relationships from the inside out by offering an easier version of love.  

We need to teach men that OnlyFans offers convenience, not connection. As therapist Nancy Tricamo said, “People certainly feel in love with the women they’re interacting with… It becomes a relationship in their mind.”