In my experience, a bit of mystery is better than vulnerability.
This is correct. When a man sharing something, it makes sense to consider whether the information will affect his SMV negatively.
I haven’t flown in over three years because of some bad experiences in the past, and fear has been holding me back.
I’m usually the first one to dive into new experiences, but this has been a tough one to overcome.
The other day, I started wondering, how much does something like this affect how attractive someone is?
Like, if a person has a fear of flying, maybe due to past trauma, does that come off as less attractive?
In your opinion, would that be considered a turn-off for women??
The answer depends to an extent on the preferences of local women in Italy. I can only answer this from the perspective of a United States man who dates a certain subset of United States women.
Even if you did everything well in the earlier stages of an interaction, I could envision a fear of flying and a lack of travel shortening some relationships. If your fear of flying prevented some travel, that could cause a woman to lose some attraction for you. Your interactions could survive if she had enough overall attraction for you.
In the United States, there are many White women with bachelor's degrees or higher working white collar jobs (typically I call them bougie White women) who wouldn't like having an LTR where they didn't do air travel because of a boyfriend's fear of flying. A lot of these bougie White women will like to do vacations that wouldn't be feasible by car travel. Train travel isn't common in the United States and would also be more time consuming. Train travel would have some similar limitations as car travel as well.
In Europe, train travel is a little more feasible for vacations. However, even in Europe, a man with a fear of air travel is likely going to have issues in longer term interactions with many women.
In the United States, a man is likely to see his SMV be affected in longer term relationships if he's unwilling to take longer vacations involving air travel due to a fear of flying. In shorter term interactions, this is unlikely to have much impact. Some women might never even learn of this fear if the interaction is short enough.
It's possible that a man with a fear of flying also possesses other unattractive traits. His looks and overall physique might not be good enough to overcome those issues on personality.