This quotation comes from an interview that I conducted for a piece of social anthropology research with ‘blessees’ in Johannesburg: the latest moniker for young women who date older, moneyed men and display their conspicuous consumption on their social media accounts. In the study, I conducted participant observation with three middle-class, university-educated women in their twenties who are on Twitter and engage in what can be called compensated relationships. This phrase is derived from ‘compensated dating’, a phenomenon in Eastern Europe and Asia where adolescent girls are given money for companionship and intimacy (see Swader and Vorobeva 2015; Li 2015); here, it is applied to consenting adult women in their twenties and older. The aim of this chapter is to establish how young women in the high-pressure city of Johannesburg define and practise love and intimacy in their romantic relationships in the era of social media and the #blessed lifestyle.

Olivia, a 26-year-old candidate attorney, is in an exclusive relationship with Siyabonga, an advocate in his forties, who regularly gives her money. She lives in Johannesburg, works in Pretoria, and constantly moves between the two cities to socialise. In the interview quoted above she refers to a Twitter interaction with Mapule, a woman from Botswana, whose anecdote is evidence of Johannesburg's far-reaching notoriety.