Egypt’s Guest-for-Hire Platform Wanas Outsources Kinship

In November 2024, the Egyptian guest-for-hire initiative Wanas posted a short TikTok that quickly began circulating across feeds. In it, a group of young women, dressed in coordinated gold and black gowns, walked arm-in-arm into a wedding hall in Riyadh. The caption explained that Tasnim, an Egyptian bride living in Riyadh city, had flown them in to stand beside her on her wedding day. With her husband’s family refusing to attend, she had asked one woman at Wanas to play the groom’s mother, another to pose as his sister, and the rest to act as the wives of his brothers. One comment wrote, “I want to join this initiative,” and another asked, “How can I rent you?”

Behind the viral post is a Cairo-based initiative run by university students offering rentable companionship for weddings, graduations, birthdays, or any occasion where one shouldn’t appear alone. For a fee, a client can book a group of girls to serve as guests, hype-women, emotional support, or, in some cases, stand-ins for absent relatives.

The image will travel far beyond the ballroom. It will be edited, captioned, and tagged #grateful, #familyforever. Somewhere between the camera flash and the upload, the fiction will eventually harden into fact. A companion is present,  proof in a world governed by visibility where what matters is not who loves us, but who appears beside us and how many of them there are.

Inclusive intimacy names a pattern in which love is not sealed off from the social world but routed through it: couples enlist kin—and kin-like others—to carry, display, and stabilise their bond. Rather than treating family as a gate that either opens or shuts, it frames approval as a rolling negotiation in which cousins, siblings, mothers, and friends become conduits through which the relationship travels and gathers legitimacy.

A modern Egyptian wedding is a portrait of the self through others, trading less in vows than in volume; orchestrated parades where over-abundance signals affection, and a swelling headcount stands in for proof of belonging. For decades, the trappings of festivity could be borrowed; a hall rented, a gown tailored, but companionship has always resisted fabrication. But nowadays, in the age of wedding coverage on Instagram pages, what should happen when the optics demand a company you don’t have? In that sense, initiatives like Wanas are not fraud so much as platformed versions of an existing practice: they supply the public chorus a marriage needs to read as real, turning the work of kin into a service that can be summoned on demand.

Agencies in Tokyo, New York, Dubai, and Seoul now offer entire catalogues of personas: a “childhood friend now based abroad,” a “colleague from the New York office,” even a “distant cousin recently returned.” The rate card reads $200 for attendance, $100 for a one-hour meetup, $100 extra for rehearsed anecdotes.  It’s understandable to dismiss the practice as eccentricity, but that would miss the truth: these rentals flourish not despite modernity, but because of it. The hired guest is the logical endpoint of a world where intimacy is aesthetic, friendship performative, and belonging too algorithmic.

In the age of social media, the wedding is no longer a private covenant but a shareable proof with visibility becoming the highest moral good. To be seen is to exist; to be unseen, to vanish. In this sense, rented companionship is a consumptive authorship; another way of editing the self in public. On platforms built for spectatorship, the image of connection often eclipses the experience itself. The audience, followers, acquaintances, and algorithms confer legitimacy. The act of being witnessed stands in for the act of being known.

Late capitalism has perfected the cult of the self; an economy of mirrors in which identity is endlessly curated, refined, and sold back as proof of agency. It taught us to look inward, not to understand ourselves, but to optimise and brand and compete. The result is a generation fluent in perfected self-presentation and estranged from collective presence: we know how to assemble aesthetics and forgo communities. In places like Egypt, the porousness of kin and neighbours is the hallmark of social life; this inward turn is slowly fraying the old circuits of care. Weddings still echo with the noise of abundance, but the substance has thinned.

Within this aesthetic economy, absence becomes a problem to solve. To arrive alone is to announce deficiency; to lack a circle is to confess social insolvency.

Eva Illouz, in Cold Intimacies, describes this as the “commodification of emotional style” where feelings are measured, curated, and marketed as lifestyle assets. “In neoliberal intimacy,” she writes, “the self is both product and project.” The rented guest is part of that project, a living accessory arranged to affirm that the subject is lovable, loved, and socially capable.

The rise of this practice is inseparable from the gig economy that underwrites contemporary life. Uber sells arrival, Airbnb sells locality, and guest-rental agencies sell affection. Each transforms an existential need, mobility, home, and community into a serviceable unit. What we’re witnessing is the outsourcing of the social. 

While the practice first gained notoriety in Japan, where companies like Family Romance supply stand-ins for absent relatives, its Western and Gulf iterations differ. In collectivist contexts, the service preserved harmony: helping clients meet communal obligations without shame. In individualist cultures, it upholds performance; ensuring the self appears whole, enviable, and surrounded.

The rise of this practice is inseparable from the gig economy that underwrites contemporary life. Uber sells arrival, Airbnb sells locality, and guest-rental agencies sell affection. Each transforms an existential need, mobility, home, and community into a serviceable unit. What we’re witnessing is the outsourcing of the social.  While the practice first gained notoriety in Japan, where companies like Family Romance supply stand-ins for absent relatives, its Western and Gulf iterations differ. In collectivist contexts, the service preserved harmony: helping clients meet communal obligations without shame. In individualist cultures, it upholds performance; ensuring the self appears whole, enviable, and surrounded.

The rented guest is one node in this expanding intimacy economy; a constellation of subscriptions that soothe isolation without erasing it. Like therapy apps, coworking spaces, and digital confessionals, they signal a shift from communal to transactional belonging. In other terms, “acceleration of resonance”, the drive to maximise relational contact without depth.

Where does this lead? Perhaps toward a fully aestheticised sociality, where every relationship doubles as a brand asset; perhaps toward exhaustion, as the gap between performance and feeling grows untenable and people finally accept it’s ok to not show what you don’t have. For now, the hired guest remains both a symptom and a cure.