My Childhood Best Friend Grew Up To Be A 42-Year-Old Virgin Incel
I wanted to help him but might have driven him further into inceldom
Some people are proud to call themselves an incel. For others it’s a title someone else bestowed upon them. I don’t think my friend who I grew up with would appreciate being labeled an incel, but all of the traits are there and I watched it happen.
I hung out with a group of six guys when I was a teenager.
We called ourselves The Core. We all lived within bike riding distance from each other in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Our childhood was idyllic. We all loved heavy metal and started our own band named My Friend’s Band. With music came girls, for most of us.
Simon was the drummer. He was a little bit shorter, a bit paler, and more round than the other boys. The rest of us were in the sevens as far as 1-to-10 attractiveness went. Simon was a four.
It didn’t matter, he was the best musician out of everyone in our group. He was outgoing and had a sharp yet self-deprecating sense of humor. He was the quintessential drummer.
Simon had lots of friends that were girls that he brought to band practice. He was eternally friend-zoned by all of them and one of us would usually start seeing the girl he brought.
Simon’s biggest problem wasn’t his looks, it was the way he acted around women. Whenever an attractive woman was in earshot, he would turn into Jerry Lewis. A very obnoxious Jerry Lewis with the “HEY LADY!” and “FLAYVENS!” My friends and I advised him to knock that shit off, but he said he couldn’t control it.
The other issue was his choice in women. The other boys and I dated women of a certain caliber. Simon was going after the same girls.
When you’re short, pasty, and flabby you’re going to have better luck approaching someone with similar characteristics than the six-foot-tall stacked blonde who’s already talking to two better-looking guys.
Personality can go a long way. He had an amazing personality and is one of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever met, but he lacked confidence. His repeated failures with women further damaged his confidence. That made him bitter.
All the other boys in our group lost our virginity in our late teens. At 20 Simon had never had a girlfriend. He had never kissed a girl. All his dates were one-time affairs that ended with him eating donuts alone.
We figured he was a late bloomer. Simon was putting in the effort. It should have been only a matter of time. He had a better job and cooler car than any of the other boys in My Friend’s Band. Which has been on indefinite hiatus since the late 90's.
A virgin in their early twenties is a novelty. In your late twenties, being a virgin was an oddity. Especially for Simon. Again, he was decent-looking, had an outgoing personality, and was a productive member of society.
Underneath the surface of his mild-mannered posterior lie a deep-rooted resentment towards women.
Simon had gone to school and received certification to be a massage therapist in his early twenties. I don’t think he had any intention of being a professional massage therapist as a career, he just craved human touch.
Being a massage therapist gave him the chance to touch women. A free professional massage is an effective way to get women to take their tops off.
I heard a scream from upstairs.
My girlfriend’s sister ran out of the room upstairs while hastily putting on her top and bra. She made a beeline from the front door to her car. Then jumped in and took off.
“What happened?” I asked Simon as he descended down the stairs.
“I grabbed her tit and she freaked out,” he said exasperatedly.
I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I never asked my girlfriend’s sister her side of it. Writing this now I’m regretting not saying something to him. That was not okay.
I never asked him after the age of thirty if he had had sex yet but all the other boys did. I figured if there was a change in status I’d hear about it. No matter what Simon accomplished professionally, his persona was defined as being the guy who never had sex.
“Hey Simon! Have you had sex yet?” That was how our friends greeted him.
By his early thirties he had effectively given up. Professionally successful but spiritually unfulfilled. It wasn’t just the sex but he had expressed to me how lonely he was and how much he just wanted to hold someone.
Our bassist’s bachelor party was the perfect opportunity to do something about Simon’s problem. Seven of us piled into a Toyota Previa and drove up to Lake Tahoe. We stayed at a casino but didn’t go to gamble. We went to get Simon laid in a state-approved Nevada brothel and bunny ranch.
The bassist suggested we all throw a hundred down and we did. Simon put a hundred in too, but he thought he was putting in for the bassist. We hung out with the working girls and found one he liked. Initially the girl wanted two grand, but we told her about the situation and that this probably wouldn’t take long. She agreed to have sex with Simon for eight hundred dollars.
“Alright dude, you’re up. We all put in. She’s all yours for up to fifteen minutes.”
“NO! I’m not losing my virginity to a prostitute!”
We all pleaded with him that this was something he needed to do. At this point it didn’t matter with who. I asked him if he liked people asking if he was still a virgin every time they saw him. After five minutes the working girl was getting annoyed and he wasn’t budging.
Simon left the bunny ranch a very angry virgin.
Around this time Simon developed a full incel mentality. He never came out and declared himself an incel, but anytime he talked to a woman he would speak in thinly veiled insults with resentment in his voice.
He had struck out so many times he began to assume women weren’t interested. One more time, the guy wasn’t bad-looking at all. As a man gets older his opportunities to date increase with older, more mature women who are more interested in personality and not as focused on looks. However the nice guy I knew as a teenager had grown up to be the saltiest thirty-five-year-old incel you’ll ever meet.
We all tried giving him pointers, helping him with style, and introducing him to potential women. I asked party girls if they were willing to help my friend out. A few agreed but once they met him they backed out. He was a nice guy and they were afraid he’d fall for them.
In the past he reeked of desperation. Now he was being a complete jerk to all women. I’m not sure if he was reading pick-up artist books and trying to neg women, but If that’s the case he wasn’t doing it right. I knew there was a zero percent chance of him attracting anyone with that attitude.
As a last-ditch effort we hired another sex worker for our friend Simon. This time we had her meet us at a bar by the beach in Santa Monica. She agreed to come up to our group of friends and start kissing Simon. Then hopefully seduce him at our keyboardist’s apartment down the street.
The first part went off without a hitch. She slithered up to him and within five minutes she had her tongue down his throat, and his hers. This may have been his first kiss. He looked absolutely thrilled. We boys provided encouragement and support for them both in the form of cocktails.
It looked like it was in the bag, but Simon was prone to bad luck. If something can go wrong between Simon and a woman, it will.
On the short drive back to our keyboardist’s gaff, it looked like she was rounding third with her hand in his pants. We were probably more excited than him. When we got back in the apartment our keyboardist generously offered them the use of his room. Simon said he had to use the bathroom first.
While he was in the bathroom, the sex worker fell into the keyboardist's lap and was trying to hang off him. He couldn’t get her off of him in time and Simon came out of the bathroom to a view of his date groping his friend.
Simon looked like a kid who got his bike stolen by a neighborhood bully and was watching him ride it around without being able to do anything about it. The girl realized what she did but it was too late. He no longer wanted to go into the bedroom with her and said he was leaving.
We pointed out the incredible opportunity he had at this moment. But his mind was completely made up.
He asked her for her number, then left. We had paid her three hundred bucks for the evening. As much as we wanted this to happen we weren’t going to deceive him into a relationship.
A few weeks later one of the boys called me.
“I think we need to ask Simon if he’s gay. And if he is assure him that it’s okay and that we’ll all still be his friend and support him.”
I didn’t think Simon was gay. None of us who knew him well did. Still, it was the first question most people asked when I told them about my forty-year-old virgin friend. It would explain a lot.
The three of us that were closest to him confronted him at my house.
“You know Simon, we all love you no matter what. None of us would think any less of you if you were gay.”
“Goddammit, I’m not gay! You guys are my best friends! You know I’m not gay! Why the fuck are you doing this!”
“Bruh, we just want you to be happy.”
“I’d be a lot happier if you all left me alone! You act like I’m some sort of freak because I’m still saving my virginity for the right person! Fuck off!” And that’s the last time we ever saw Simon.
He accepted our apology but shortly after he deleted all his social media and cut all contact with everyone in our group. He never announced he wasn’t talking to us, he just stopped returning our calls. That was three years ago.
I was hesitant to write this story. I feel I’ve already lost the trust of a friend and I’m pouring more fuel on the fire by publishing this.
If you have a friend frustrated at their attempts to find love, talk to them about it only if they want to. Interfering even with good intentions can lead to disaster.
Nobody knows why he chose to stop talking to all of us. If you’re reading this Simon, I know I didn’t always do the best by you. But everything I and the boys did came from a place of love. I just want you to be happy. If cutting us out of your life made you happy, I respect your decision.