Who am I to be talking about "ugly" women? That would require me to insult a woman, and apparently even when I think I make a pretty fair post pointing out men's flaws as well... somehow I'm still a bad guy out to harm women with my words. I can't catch a break, literally.
There are absolutely women who are treated badly by men. I thought I covered that. I didn't get into specifics, but do I have to? There are lots of men and women who are basically invisible to the people they find attractive. For what it's worth. Being "fat" doesn't make you unattractive. I've been attracted to women of all shapes and sizes. Believe me or not about that, but I'm WAY more interested in making a connection with a personality and an intelligence. If I like the woman inside, I'll like her outside. That's how I'm wired.
I didn't talk about ugly/fat men either. You didn't point that out, though. But if we're going down that road... ugly/fat men don't get a first look, much less a second look from any women. Even the women you would say are ugly/fat aren't giving the ugly/fat men a break. Are they? How many posts have you seen on this very forum from women who describe themselves as physically unattractive who say they only want to date handsome men and are mad that handsome men aren't approaching them? I know I've seen several. It works very much both ways, as I believe I was saying in my post that you only quoted a paragraph.
Meanwhile... just because most relationships seem to be transactional doesn't mean that is healthy. If your therapist is telling you that, is your therapist also pointing out that most of those transactional relationships are failing? Divorce rates are above 50%, and most people who have relationships have more than one in their lives... so that means most relationships fail. IF they are all transactional, hmmm... maybe that's part of why they are failing? Because people are trying to treat personal relationships like they would a business transaction? And, oh, circling back to the ugly/fat men/women... In a transactional relationship they are going to almost always lose, right? I mean, by business definition people don't like to buy the dented cans on the shelf at the grocery store unless the store gives them a discount, and even then some people still won't buy. This is what transactional relationships get you. That world sucks, and I'm not in favor of it.
Oh, and since you mentioned kids... I hate to say it, but parent/child relationships are absolutely transactional. Kids are helpless and can't do anything for themselves. Parents have to do everything for the kid to survive in the beginning. All kids can offer in transaction is being cute or doing cute things that the parents can show off to get transactional benefit from friends by parading their cute kid around. As the kid grows up, kids often have to do chores because the parents say things like "you live here in my house, you have to earn your way". Parents might pay for school, but will expect the kids to get good grades and a good job eventually. Parents often expect kids to "pay them back" in some way as adults when the parents need help. And our society frowns upon people who abandon their parents in need in their old age, since the kids "owe" their very existence and lives to the parents.
I don't know why your therapist would tell you all relationships are transaction and then cherry pick out the one exception that is most inherently transactional of them all. Kids have zero choice in their existence. We have lots of threads on this forum where people wish they'd been given the choice to never exist. You at least have some choice in who you date or who you ask out or who is your friend... you have no choice at all in who your parents are, and by the time you have any real choice, you already owe your parents a lot and usually they will let you know this.
I don't know why you picked that one paragraph to vent at me on... and I get it if that triggered you somehow, and I am sorry for that. But my post was about so much more than that one paragraph and someone coming here and just seeing that and not scrolling back is going to get a skewed perspective on what I actually said.
