@Rain,
Because the means look similar but the ends and intentions are different.
When a man pays for a date for a woman and she accepts it, generally he is doing that as part of a courtship ritual. He is saying, "I'd like to provide for you and am capable of that. Would you accept to be my mate?" She is saying, "I'll accept your gifts as I consider whether to accept you as my mate."
Men who continue to treat their women to gifts and dinners once in a relationship do so either because a.) gift-giving is part of their love language or b.) they think they have to or fear they have to. The woman may or may not care about receiving these gifts. There are plenty of women out there who get sick of guys constantly taking them to dinners or burying them in gifts and wish the guy would simply give more quality time instead.
Here's one example further highlighting the divide between prostitution and genuine relationships:
There are men who use gift-giving as a way to try to slide women into quasi-sugar baby relationships. I have had women tell me about their disgust at discovering a man was doing this to them. e.g., the guy who starts seeing a girl, dumps gifts on her, but is only able to see her once a week. The girl quickly gets frustrated with "gifts instead of progression in the relationship" because she wants progress, not gifts; then eventually she discovers he's actually got 2 or 3 girls he's dumping gifts on trying to keep. She dumps him in disgust, feeling dirty and used... feeling like a prostitute.
You can actually break human romances down depending on the intentions of each party:
- Pure romance/seduction: man is with woman for her; woman is with man for him
- Woman using man (gold digger): man wants to be with woman; woman gives sex because she wants man's money
- Man using woman (Lothario?): woman wants to be with man; man gives gifts because he wants sex
- Pure transaction (prostitution): man gives money/gifts for sex; woman wants money/gifts for sex
Thus why you're able to instinctively tell "sugar dating" is different from a traditional "man pays for woman" date -- it is the intentions of each involved party that determine how you feel about it. If one or more of the parties is approaching it transactionally, it's something different from pure romance/courtship/seduction.
@ph40,
If another guy came along with 5x more money and offered your sister to switch to him, would she?
If not... and my guess is it's probably 'not'... we cannot say she is with him "for the money", which is what makes it transactional.
A man's earning potential may factor into a woman's selection of that man as a short-term or long-term mate. However, having that as one of a constellation of factors that makes a man desirable as a sexual partner or a marriage partner is a very different thing from having money as
the principle thing a woman is seeking in EXCHANGE FOR one-time sex or an ongoing sexual relationship.
Who said that?
I did not say that.
See my differentiations to Rain above.
As for "someone who is financially supporting a young college girl"... that is not a 'real' date in the definition of neither party having intentions other than "let's see if this can lead to mutual sex and/or a romantic relationship."
Here's how you make it a real date: college girl goes out with you with no expectation you pay for her lifestyle, purely because she's excited about you and hopeful that either a.) you're gonna lay some good pipe down or b.) you might be the man of her dreams.
So long as there is an expectation in one of the party's minds other than "penis in vagina" and/or "cozy nice relationship" it is not a real date.
If a guy takes a girl out but she only wants to be his friend, that is not a real date no matter how much he insists it is. He got played or was delusional about it.
If a girl goes out with a guy she's hoping for a relationship with, then he buys her an expensive dinner, pumps and dumps her, and proceeds to never contact her again, because he figures "she got a nice, expensive meal out of it; we're even", without ever clarifying to her that all he wants is sex or that he views that ribeye steak as advance payment for the sex, that too was not a real date. In this case, it was the girl who got played or was delusional about it.
You need to factor the intentions of both parties in to figure out if it's a 'real' date, if one or the other is getting played or is deluded, or if it's mutually transactional on both sides.
No offense dude, but that has got to be the dumbest argument I have ever heard in favor of prostitution / gold digging ever.
That kind of super simplistic one-dimensional mate selection calculus only holds in prostitution world.
In fact, not even there. I know a guy who was living in Pattya, Thailand (hooker central), and girls past a certain looks threshold would not take his money because there were too many good-looking young guys flooding the town, and since every guy was paying the same rate these girls decided they were only going to go with guys who were good-looking AND would pay. That's two dimensions for you, right there (looks and money). But actually that same friend said if he built some preselection and let the hottest hookers see other hookers flirting with him, he could often get the really hot girl hookers to take his money too. So there's a third selection criteria for you.
Out in the real world, where women are seeking mutual sexual/romantic connections, rather than transactional ones, the mate selection process is infinitely richer than it is in the super simplified prostitution world.
There are hundreds or thousands of different things real girls are looking at to determine if they want a man:
One of the biggest obstacles for a lot of men when it comes to improving with women is fixating on the wrong thing. Much of this seems to come from improper understanding of some of the raw basics of attraction. When you see guys get hung up on one specific characteristic and blame that as the...
www.girlschase.com
You're enmeshed in hooker-land.
It's seeped into your brain and made you unable to accurately process the way human courtship works outside the transactional bubble.
Chase