???

I feel like my point was missed a bit; let me repost a part of your comment with one detail (the sport) changed:

Anyhow, I don’t think there should be an “even playing field” because that’s not realistic. Where would you ever encounter a perfectly flat tennis court, other than at a tennis game? It would be fine if that artificial constraint led to more interesting humans, but it doesn’t. It leads to boring matches.

Does that illustrate better what I am getting at?

It’s cause it’s approached as a sport, in which you usually want to have an even playing field metaphorically and literally.

Football and tennis would arguably also be more “interesting” (a better word is probably “varied”) if there were random playground elements on the field.

Can’t quickly think of ANY sport where it wouldn’t be the case, actually. But then running 100m in a straight line wouldn’t be that anymore.

“These hands sailing up the clyde wild colonial boy” ಠ_ಠ

https://youtu.be/jWmnEP4eumg

Well, you don’t want to deny asexual people romantic relationships.

But yeah it’s simply more of a gradient, and different folks put their goal posts on different parts of that gradient.

Could even comment about the inflationary usage of the word “love” in American English, where people “love” the taste of a juice, the efficiency of a corporate business process, or the smell of napalm in the morning. Ancient Greeks were on the other end of THAT scale, with different words for different loves, even for e.g. the love for your home country.