I agree wholeheartedly that there needs to be a way to indicate which fields/properties need not cause initialization. Properties marked as @Transient could potentially rely on non-transient state, so it's not safe to assume that @Transient properties shouldn't initialize the proxy. But I wish there were to give that power/responsibility to the user. An annotation might make sense, but I also am pursuing a JPA provider-agnostic implementation here. I wonder if there's a way to express this kind of information without Hibernate lock-in.