Would you be willing to date someone who would not kiss you or hold your hand in public, but was affectionate with their previous partners, even if you aren't that into PDA yourself.

Because I like the idea of beating dead horses and choose to interpret /u/Aldabruzzo's comment as a challenge, let's see if we can rehash this same discussion again without getting distracted by buttholes this time.

Storytime

I think it makes sense to start this discussion with a story about a girl I dated several years back.

From the outset of dating this girl, it was clear she was super into me. She was the kind of career driven women who typically had the "boss babe" mentality around most people, but when she was around me would become very dainty and feminine. On our first date or so, we had a conversation where she stated very plainly “I’m not into PDA, just so you know.” I basically told her “that sucks, because I really like PDA,” and we moved on.

This conversation happened all of once. I never twisted her arm or verbally pressured her into any kind of PDA, I would simply do stuff like go for a kiss when I felt like it. If she didn't reciprocate, I'd stop. In pretty short order, she’s initiating kisses and even make outs in public, without me saying anything. I totally forgot about the PDA discussion for a long time.

Fast forward a couple of years, and this girl clearly loses attraction for me. Long story short, I got super sick for a few months, gained a few pounds due to no gym, and was a pretty boring boyfriend (hard to do dates, spent a lot of time in bed feeling like total shit). After a while, she started being more bitchy and confrontational. Pretty typical look for a relationship petering out.

Once I recovered and we were going out more, I noticed that when I tried to kiss her in public, she would snub me and say “oh, I don’t do PDA.” Keep in mind, this girl had been passionately kissing me in public like a year and a half. Hopefully it comes as no surprise that I ended the relationship in the not too distant future.

Discussion

So the fundamental question here is, if you were in a similar situation such that your partner refused PDA with you but had enthusiastically engaged in PDA will past lovers, would that tell you anything about how they feel about you?

I hope the similarities to discussions like "my girlfriend won't do X sex act with me, but did with her ex" are painfully obvious. The benefit is that we don't have to worry about anything like "growing out of it" or any justifications pointing at differences between partners. This example has the same structure as the "me vs ex" discussion, the only differences are that the competition is between "past me" and "future me," and we don't need to worry much about her tastes "maturing" as this change happened so abruptly.

The most reasonable interpretation of my is that a loss of attraction motivated the change in behavior. The common denominator with the previous discussions is that people (not just women) are willing to do things (and not just sexual things) that they aren't as enthusiastic about in order to satisfy their partner. Why? Because they are invested in their partner's enjoyment and want to make them happy.

The obvious corollary is that if you know you are dating someone who makes these kinds of concessions but isn't making them for you, they aren't as interested in you. It's pretty obvious when a partner stops doing this for you within the confines of a single relationship. The arguments about not doing specific sex acts are simply an extrapolation; if attraction can impact someone's behavior within a relationship, the same principle applies between relationships as well.

This is a little speculative on my end, but I pretty strongly suspect that this is more of an issue for men because women are more willing to marry men that they are sexually lukewarm about for other non-sexual reasons.

Just Break Up

I know what some of you are thinking. "Well obviously if someone isn't willing to be affectionate with you, especially in a way that they have previously, you should just break up with them because that shows they aren't interested." That's the point.

It's the same as interpreting a decrease in affection as losing attraction at the end of relationship. The entire motivation for this discussion is men telling other men "look, if she's did something for someone else that she won't do for you anymore, it's the same as if she stopped doing things for you within a relationship. She clearly isn't interested in you like that." This discussion tends to circle back to anal because it's both common enough that many people will try it, but unpopular enough among women that a huge number won't do it simply for their own satisfaction.