Yes, these are all good points, tickle_daemon and BlindTickleS and TheMasterTouch. And yes, sexual compatibility is extremely important. Not THE most important thing, I would argue, but very.
My point was simply one of filtering. Don't filter down to this fetish alone, to start with, when you're choosing a mate. My wife, for example, is ticklish and has gorgeous feet and legs but doesn't like it when I tickle them. She tickles me, and occasionally lets me give her feet attention in bed, and that's good enough for me. (For the record, call me shallow but I wouldn't have chosen a lifetime mate who had ugly feet or legs, even if they *were* extremely ticklish and liked it.) Our sexual proclivities were each discovered, by the way, through the process of time, over many many months of courtship. The courtship is where we fell in love, with each other, over things much bigger than this fetish. If I had thrown her to the curb the minute I discovered she didn't like being tickled early on, we wouldn't have built the wonderful and happy life we've had together over decades.
To put it another way, I'd much rather be with someone long term who is loving, caring, physically and mentally compatible, adventurous, yadda yadda yadda, but isn't into this per se, vs. a TMFer who isn't any of those things.
I see a lot of posts from people who consider this fetish some sort of curse, and I maintain that it only is if you let it. Just trying to give the younger folks some optimism and a little old man wisdom.
Fair enough, and I agree you shouldn't filter by this particular fetish. However, I think it probably
is wise to filter by, let's say, sexual compatibility, which is really only one level of generality higher than any given kink. Like, back when I was using online dating profiles, I definitely put "ethically non-monogamous" and "kinky" on my profile, because there was just no point starting down the path with someone who was firmly committed to a vanilla, non-monogamous relationship. But at the point where you've filtered for people who are generally into kinky, non-traditional kinds of sex (whether or not they're into non-monogamy), then you're presumably filtering for people who are sex positive, don't kink shame, interested in exploring fetishes, etc. And at that point, it's just a stone's throw from them being willing to explore tickling with you. Sure,
maybe they have some independent aversion to tickling that just so happens to make it a hard limit, but in my experience, that's a minority of people.
Taking a step back, and this may sound a bit harsh, but I think the
real problem that a lot of people here describe as "my partner's not into tickling" is
not that they just so happen to be dating someone who inherently finds tickling so unpleasant that they can never tolerate it. Rather, I think what's going on a lot of the time is either (1) the person hasn't effectively communicated to their partner the extent to which tickling is important to them, and/or (2) their partner isn't the sort of person willing to share in their partner's desires. Like, looking back through these posts, I don't really see people saying "my partner understands and respects how important this kink is to me, but it just so happens that she really can't stand being tickled herself - what should we do?" Rather, people are saying things like how their partner finds tickling weird, annoying, tedious, or even offensive. And... if that's the case, it's not really a problem with tickling in particular - it's a more fundamental issue with sexual communication and compatibility.
To borrow a concept from Bryan Caplan, it seems like there's something of a "
missing mood" with respect to a lot of these "partners who aren't into tickling." Like, if you're in a serious romantic relationship with someone, but it just so happens that a major kink of theirs is close to a hard limit for you, that's an obstacle that you should
desire to address. Maybe you try very limited forms of it, just to make sure they get some feeling of exposure to it. Maybe you watch or read kink-specific porn together, so that you still get the feeling of sharing the kink with them. Maybe you allow them to explore it with other people, if you don't have a hard commitment to 100% monogamy. Or maybe you recognize that it's such a fundamental incompatibility that the relationship just isn't going to work. But I find it bizarre that anyone in a healthy, committed relationship, when confronted with a major sexual preference of their partner's, could just say "eh, not interested."