Choosing a Partner: Beyond “Checking Boxes” and Toward Character
Modern dating culture encourages a kind of selection logic. Apps present people as profiles, preferences become filters, compatibility feels like a technical problem. From an existential sex therapy perspective something important gets lost in this process. Intimacy becomes detached from encounter. Desire becomes detached from meaning. Erotic connection becomes detached from who a person is in the world.
Existential sex therapy begins with a simple observation. Sexuality is not separate from life. How someone lives, chooses, and relates will show up in their erotic world. So when dating becomes a checklist exercise, it narrows the field to external traits. Height, education, hobbies, income. These details matter for lifestyle fit, but they reveal little about how someone navigates desire, fear, vulnerability or frustration.
Clients often describe the experience of meeting someone who appears ideal yet feels inaccessible. They say things like: we get along, we laugh, we share interests, but something is missing. That missing quality is often not compatibility. It is existential presence. In sexual relationships presence is more influential than resemblance. Two people can have matching résumés yet feel no erotic resonance because neither feels contact at the level of self.
Existential sex therapy invites different questions when choosing a partner. Instead of asking who fits my list, we ask who is this person being. Instead of asking what do we have in common, we ask how do they live with uncertainty. Instead of asking whether they are attractive in general, we ask whether they are reachable and responsive in relation. These are not technical criteria. They are existential ones.
The philosopher Beauvoir pointed out that freedom is revealed in action, not in attributes. The same applies here. How someone responds under pressure tells us more about their erotic potential than any shared hobby. How someone tolerates emotional exposure often predicts whether sexual intimacy will feel alive or performative. How someone holds responsibility often shapes whether desire can move freely or becomes burdened with resentment.
Existential Sex Therapist
When dating reduces people to lists, the erotic dimension collapses. Sex becomes another compatibility marker rather than an embodied exchange that reveals how two subjectivities meet. Existential sex therapy sees sexuality as a practice of presence. It asks whether two people can inhabit the same moment without fleeing into roles. It asks whether curiosity survives awkwardness. It asks whether the other can be encountered rather than managed.
Choosing from character rather than checklist requires patience. It slows the pace. It dissolves the illusion that we can engineer connection by optimizing inputs. It shifts the focus from the external to the internal. From traits to values. From lifestyle fit to relational ethics. Heidegger might call this turning from ontic categories to ontological ones. In more ordinary language it means asking what kind of person they are rather than what kind of profile they have.
Sexual dissatisfaction often emerges when partners are selected for compatibility but not for character. Erotic life depends on mutual presence. Presence depends on values. Values shape how one treats the other when desire falters or when conflict appears. A person can be ideal in the abstract yet impossible to meet in the concrete. Existential sex therapy encounters this regularly. The issue is rarely that someone chose poorly. It is that they chose with the wrong questions.
If you are dating or evaluating a relationship consider examining not only who the other is but how the two of you meet. Not whether your traits align but whether your ways of being can coexist. Erotic compatibility is not built on perfect similarity. It is built on curiosity, honesty and the shared willingness to remain present when connection becomes uncertain.
Checklist dating promises efficiency. Existential intimacy requires encounter. The difference is quiet but decisive. One selects a match. The other meets a person.