[quote=harvey][quote=davelj]What’s the difference, really? [/quote]
Well, I’m sure there’s probably a lot more sex in profile #2.
But kidding aside, there’s some big holes in your example:
Woman #1 did love her husband once, enough to marry him and have children, even if the flame has gone out and they no longer “love” each other, there is still common goal of caring for the children.
Keeping the family together means a little more than just scraping up enough money to pay the grocery bills. If the relationship is still civil it could be much better for the kids well-being if the parents stay together. The “weekend dad” thing has its own host of problems.
Even though both women have “practical” motives, you really can’t compare a relationship between two people that once cared enough about each other to have a family together – even if they’ve grown apart – vs. hundreds of impersonal “relationships” that last less than an hour and are purely for the money.[/quote]
I can and did compare them. I agree with you that there are differences… just not as much as would appear on the surface.
My larger point is that we’re (almost) all “prostitutes” in the larger sense of the word. That is, 99% of us do (certain) things that we’d prefer not to do in exchange for “resources”. Prostitutes, business people, etc. etc… there’s always some aspect of exchanging labor we’d rather not do for resource. We all lie along a spectrum… and the positional difference between Profile 1 and 2 above isn’t that enormous in my book.
Personally, one of the main reasons that I work for myself is that I like to minimize the prostitution factor in my everyday life – but even in my situation it can’t be eliminated entirely.
