I think that’s a great trait to have and I’d strongly recommend keeping it. If you can find enough things you like about yourself (and maybe have also worked on yourself to that end), you can also acquire genuine confidence in this way that feels way more robust than acting.
Maybe you’ve thought about this already, but I’d flag that some people (and more women than men) don’t themselves compartmentalize so much between “just sex” and “romance”. Humans have some degree of sexual dimorphism around attraction (e.g., “demisexuality” is rare among men but not that uncommon among women). So, the habit you mention and the way you phrase it might substantially decrease the pool of otherwise compatible partners.
With the phrasing, I’d be worried that what many people might take away from your paragraph is not so much “This person cares about avoiding situations where they’d be incentivized to act inauthentically, therefore they prefer prostitutes over dating people with whom conversations don’t feel meaningful”, but rather “Something about intelligence, therefore hookers”.
The mismatch in psychologies is harder to address than the phrasing, and maybe that just means you don’t think you’re a good match to others who view the topic differently – it really depends on what feels right all things considered.
Just to be clear, I don’t necessarily mean “view it differently” on moral grounds. For instance, I don’t think extraverted people are immoral, but I’d feel weird and maybe too insecure with a partner who was too extroverted. Similarly, some women will feel weird and insecure if their partner has too much of a “men are bad/threatening” psychology, whether or not they think it’s immoral. So finding other ways to meet the same needs could make sense if one worries about the pool of potential soulmates already being small enough, and if one places value on some of the normative intuitions, like importance of emotional connection during intimacy with a partner and not wanting to risk it being adversely affected. (The extraversion analogy isn’t great because it sounds wrong to repress a core aspect of personality – the question with compartmentalization of romance vs. sex is if it’s that or more/also influenced via habit formation and so on. I don’t know much about the empirical issues.)
Maybe you think what I write in the paragraphs above goes way too far in the direction of:
Also implicitly you end up showing more regard for a stranger you don’t know than for yourself, because you basically end up fighting for someones affection instead of giving someone the choice to like you or not like you.
I’d say it depends. “Accommodations” come in degrees. Also, if you make them for any stranger, you’re indeed not showing respect for yourself (as well as treating other people’s personalities as interchangeable). However, if you find yourself particularly motivated to be good for partners with a certain type of character, that means that you already want to be the sort of person who appeals to them.
I think that’s a great trait to have and I’d strongly recommend keeping it. If you can find enough things you like about yourself (and maybe have also worked on yourself to that end), you can also acquire genuine confidence in this way that feels way more robust than acting.
Maybe you’ve thought about this already, but I’d flag that some people (and more women than men) don’t themselves compartmentalize so much between “just sex” and “romance”. Humans have some degree of sexual dimorphism around attraction (e.g., “demisexuality” is rare among men but not that uncommon among women). So, the habit you mention and the way you phrase it might substantially decrease the pool of otherwise compatible partners.
With the phrasing, I’d be worried that what many people might take away from your paragraph is not so much “This person cares about avoiding situations where they’d be incentivized to act inauthentically, therefore they prefer prostitutes over dating people with whom conversations don’t feel meaningful”, but rather “Something about intelligence, therefore hookers”.
The mismatch in psychologies is harder to address than the phrasing, and maybe that just means you don’t think you’re a good match to others who view the topic differently – it really depends on what feels right all things considered.
Just to be clear, I don’t necessarily mean “view it differently” on moral grounds. For instance, I don’t think extraverted people are immoral, but I’d feel weird and maybe too insecure with a partner who was too extroverted. Similarly, some women will feel weird and insecure if their partner has too much of a “men are bad/threatening” psychology, whether or not they think it’s immoral. So finding other ways to meet the same needs could make sense if one worries about the pool of potential soulmates already being small enough, and if one places value on some of the normative intuitions, like importance of emotional connection during intimacy with a partner and not wanting to risk it being adversely affected. (The extraversion analogy isn’t great because it sounds wrong to repress a core aspect of personality – the question with compartmentalization of romance vs. sex is if it’s that or more/also influenced via habit formation and so on. I don’t know much about the empirical issues.)
Maybe you think what I write in the paragraphs above goes way too far in the direction of:
I’d say it depends. “Accommodations” come in degrees. Also, if you make them for any stranger, you’re indeed not showing respect for yourself (as well as treating other people’s personalities as interchangeable). However, if you find yourself particularly motivated to be good for partners with a certain type of character, that means that you already want to be the sort of person who appeals to them.