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There's whole sequences in both plays devoted to showing this, I'd argue it was much more effectively achieved in the musical where the disinterest is easier to show in blocking and attitude, along with two whole ass songs about it, where the play shows it by character walks into room and gives dissertation on the topic. The romance isn't remotely similar to Pretty Woman, as you say Higgins isn't seeking to "make a good deal" which is where the humorous character of the father comes into view. The humor and romance is precisely finding love at a time when you aren't looking for it, about closeness and intimacy melting neuroticism and narcissism.
I see what you’re saying, but I just don’t think it comes across that way. Call me a cynic but I think there’s an underlying suggestiveness to Higgins’ behavior in My Fair Lady around the prurient motive. And Shaw goes a great distance to remove that from the play, and then the musical puts it back and expects the song to remove the muddiness.
And it’s like you kind of suggest in your first post, My Fair Lady is a sexier story. Men dream of finding the diamond in the rough, the beautiful girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is. Women dream of being plucked from mundanity and raised to a better life. But if we buy that, and we buy the new ending, then is it really likely that the thought wasn’t in the back of Higgins’ mind the whole time?
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Just to interject: I’ve never seen either play, but this is a big theme in the original myth as told by Ovid. Notably, the sculptor Pygmalion decides that women are all immoral sluts, essentially, and as such resolves to never take a wife. But he can’t help but fall in love with the statue: he starts to give it gifts, and dress it up, and, well, get intimate with it. By the end, Pygmalion himself transforms from a grumpy man averse to love into a perfect exemplum of the Roman “lover” archetype (the kind of character that Ovid presents in his other love poetry). There’s a neat parallel where the statue’s transformation into a real woman is described with the metaphor of cosmetic wax melting in the sun, which parallels the “fires of love” (the plural Latin word for fire tends to have this connotation) melting the sculptor’s hardened heart. As such, to the extent that any of the modern reimaginings also deal with this theme, they’re exhibiting fidelity to the original intention of Ovid.
(Sorry for the tangent. I just wanted to monologue a bit about this topic.)
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