You are allowed to have preferences that produce absolutely no social benefit whatsoever. Your personal life does not have to double as public service
You are allowed to have preferences that produce absolutely no social benefit whatsoever. Your personal life does not have to double as public service.
There is not a single soul on Earth who can assert a right to be in your dating pool.
Photo by Kindred Hues Photography
Dating is not public accommodation. Attraction is not a public resource. Romance is not an equal-opportunity program. Sexual access is not something human beings are required to distribute fairly.
You can exclude someone from your dating pool because of sex, age, religion, politics, lifestyle, desire for children, smoking, drinking, geography, personality, history, attraction, compatibility, or something you cannot neatly explain. You can have a narrow dating pool. You can have an eccentric one. You can decide you do not want a dating pool at all.
And this is where some conversations wander into dangerous territory: respecting someone’s humanity does not require making yourself romantically or sexually available to them.
A person can ask to be considered. They can feel disappointed when they are not. They can decide your preferences make the two of you incompatible. What they cannot do is convert their disappointment into jurisdiction over your boundaries.
Nobody gets standing to argue themselves into your time, your consideration, your bed, your romance, your marriage, or your intimate life. A person does not become entitled to consideration simply because they desperately want to be considered.
Dating has no admissions board. Nobody gets to appeal your rejection to a higher court.
That principle protects everybody. Human dignity deserves protection. Human desire requires freedom. We get into trouble when we pretend the first entitles us to the second.
You do not owe anybody a trial period with your time or your body.
And for women especially, it is worth saying without ten paragraphs of apology attached: No person has a civil right to female attraction. No social movement is owed women’s romantic participation. No individual is entitled to be evaluated as a potential partner.
No movement becomes more just by teaching people that somebody else’s intimate boundaries are an obstacle to overcome.
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