That would require your partner to be sentient, wouldn't it?

Or to have been sentient.

Haha, not quite. I think you'd want it to be sentient just enough to provide a challenge but turn off its sentience whenever it becomes unpleasant or inconvenient.

I'm not always sure which instances of “sexbot” in your comment are supposed to be literal and which are supposed to be metaphorical.

Whichever works (which in some cases means both).

That would require your partner to be sentient, wouldn't it?

Yes, quite right. My mental cache evidently used too much compression and the reconstruction thereof failed to include the necessary explanation. The ego related possible answer that I originally intended was of course that factors of pride and validation of sexual appeal may be absent in both cases and so "just pay a prostitute" would not help them.

Not necessarily. It would require your partner to be difficult to acquire, probably based on their own selectivity and probably based on traits considered high-status, which is why literally buying a sexbot might not be enough for some people - unless it requires wealth, which is usually high-status. Prostitutes are likewise undesirable, unless they are expensive/choosy high-class prostitutes. It implies that they are more likely to be sentient in that they may be choosing based on their own goals, but that's a rather fragile implication.

In that context, if you solve for the taboo meaning of the word "girlfriend", it basically comes out to nonsentient sexbot.

Would he agree with that description? Maybe he would, or perhaps there are other things that he said or did that make your attribution of meaning valid. However in themselves the words quoted are just as compatible with the taboo meaning being "someone who executes a set of behaviors that happen to include X, Y and also [thing]". That is a matter of someone having incompatible romantic preferences and who has made incorrect assumptions about your conformance to a particular social contract.

Again, I'm not saying the description is incompatible with him wishing you were a non-sentient sexbot. Rather, that this particular story doesn't come anywhere near making that interpretation the most plausible.

(Now I'm reminded of someone in the Italian edition of Loveline asking a question starting with “I've been with my girlfriend for a year, but we haven't had sex yet” and being answered with something starting more-or-less with “first of all, if you aren't having sex with her, then by definition she's not your girlfriend; she's just a friend”.)

Were you a mono couple? Members of mono couples sometimes have ideas about an obligation to fulfill all the other person's sexual and romantic needs since the partner can't go anywhere else. Perhaps he had asymmetrical ideas about this and would not have obliged if you'd made a similar request, but if the notions were symmetrical then it's not a sexbot thing. One reason I'm careful not to date women who aren't dating any other men is that my life is full of other and overriding demands, and I don't want to be someone's only boyfriendly recourse.

Okay, but if you're saying gain isn't a bad thing, then you're not really saying anything. Maybe it would help if you name these other things that can be gained by expressing concern?

I'm [...] merely commenting on which situations concern is expressed

But you're not, because you didn't name any situations.

I can't quite explain why it feels trivial to read gain as a good thing, but I have an example. Positive version:

When someone goes to a job interview, it's probably because they want the job.

Or because they expect to gain from the interview.

It's kind of confusing, right? It's like "Err, yes. That's what I said." Compared to:

When someone starts a soup kitchen, it's probably because they want to help starving people.

Or because they expect to gain from the soup kitchen.

That's why I read it as the second one.

The term connotation is usually used for what distinguishes the meanings of "dog" and "cur". The exclusivity of "or" seems to be a rather different thing and is commonly regarded as a conversational implicature (which explains why it disappears under negation, for instance). Whether that's really correct is somewhat debatable, especially because nobody really knows what the denotation of "or" actually is; but calling it connotation strikes me as misleading.