What I Learned From Dating an Incel
The year I turned twenty-two marked two important life events. It was the year I was able to fully bask in the glory of Taylor Swift’s banger ‘22’, and — perhaps more importantly — it was the year that I was bestowed with the gift of first love. And what a gift it was; I cherished it dearly — it was exciting, passionate, and completely rotten to its core. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was dating an Incel.
An Incel is someone who identifies as ‘involuntarily celibate’, but the classification is more complicated than that. Inceldom is multipronged — like a Devil’s pitchfork. Incels believe that their celibacy is a result of genetic determinism and is therefore a form of oppression that needs to be rectified at the expense of women’s liberty.
Not all who remain chaste can be classified as ‘Incels’; it’s an ideology; a way to define how you feel about sex, regardless of how often you’re having it. In this sense, men who are engaging in a lot of sex can still be considered Incels. And this was the case for my first love.
As a woman who fell in love with an ideological Incel and remained friends with him for many years afterward, here is what I observed about his beliefs and behaviors.
Blind Rebellion Turned Corrosive
I was immediately attracted to his dirt-bag personality. I loved that he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and that he reveled in ‘tearing down the system’… whatever that means.
As time went on it became clear that he was nothing more than a rebel without a cause, and that the only system he would be tearing down was his own.
Perhaps this is what happens when abundant, ravenous, political energy meets with pure and incomprehensible laziness. He was a hardcore leftie, and I’ve come to realize that political identity doesn’t mean much when it comes to how people feel about women.
Because when you’re brought up to believe that simply having women — be that as girlfriends or pretty things to look at — is a basic human right, your views of women as a resource will always trump your desire for them to be treated fairly.
If having women as a resource is part of how you view yourself as being treated fairly, then women can not experience liberty under your ideology, no matter how liberal you may be.
And that’s exactly what I witnessed. My Incel believed that a society that rewarded physical attractiveness over ‘merit’ was inherently oppressive. Sounds nice when you wrap it in pretty words, but the reality of it was this; he believed that society should reward merit based on his idea of what merit was, and encompassed within ‘society’s rewards’ was the sexual availability of women.
In other words; down with the Chad’s, and fuck Stacey’s preferences!
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Despair
I believe that Incels create their own catch-22… and I think they do it on purpose.
It’s like picking at a scab because you want it to go away or listening to angsty music to consolidate your feelings of despair. Incels like despair — it defines them — so they perpetuate an environment that continues to create it. My Incel was a strange case; ‘genetically predetermined’ to be a ‘normie’, but also lucky enough to share a phenotype with Harry Styles.
And this is where the self-perpetuating isolation had room to manifest; wedged somewhere between his physical mediocrity and the supernatural draw that women have towards guitarists with long curly hair.
I recall — once — he was approached by a beautiful woman. Shy, the woman giggled as she pointed out his similarities to Harry Styles. His response?
Nah, I look like if Harry Styles was hit by a truck
Charming.
He’d been told by many that he had a subdued beauty that could turn heads if he would just… wear a shirt that fit him… comb his hair, or simply wash the stench of cigarettes from his teeth. Did he do any such thing? Of course not. Did he still expect to reap the benefits of someone who did? You betcha.
He claimed it was ideological — like that Marilyn Monroe quote, “If you can’t handle me at my worst you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” Except what he failed to account for was that his worst was slowly becoming his default.
Vitriol (The Black Pill)
I don’t know where his anger came from. I think it was self-inflicted, but it occasionally bubbled out in interesting ways.
He threatened to kill a security guard when he was removed from a bar; he was violent towards animals; he sexually assaulted a mutual friend of ours, and he called me ‘mentally fucked-up’ when I decided I didn’t want to date him exclusively.
As time went on his ideology began to fester and spread amongst other members of the group. I can see why; to have an ideology that liberates you from all personal responsibility offered to you on a golden platter is an attractive concept. I’ll take a bite of that apple pie. Except, it wasn’t made for me.
One night I sat on the bedroom floor as the boys negotiated their share of the weed. Hot-boxed in, they began to muse about the inherent power of their manhood. It felt disingenuous — I knew these men — they had very little power in their lives. Being a group of leftists, I thought it was safe to ask,
“But don’t you think that women have more power in the current dating sphere? We like… have more options.”
Interesting… how an Incel can simultaneously hold this belief, and explode in an inexplicable fit of rage when a woman repeats it.
“Yeah, well we’ll see who has the power after I buy her a drink.” That’s what he said to me. I was shocked by this statement, and when I told him as such I was met with a barrage of drunken insults. I don’t know when he crossed the threshold into ‘Black-Pill’ territory — but I think this might have been the moment.
Ideological Fusion and Normalised Objectification
I still stuck by him — despite all the pain — because It’s not easy to say goodbye to your first love, and I still believed he had a good heart.
I think a lot of people fall into this trap; they watch a close friend of theirs descend down the rabbit hole of radicalisation and they keep lowering the rope in hopes that eventually the friend that they knew will climb out, unscathed.
I waited years for such a thing to happen, and it never did. He spent so long down that rabbit hole that eventually his ideologies evolved from mere musings related to his own insecurities and into what he considered to be normal in real-world scenarios.
To cut a long story short, a mutual friend of ours snapped after being rejected on Tinder. He went to social media and claimed
All women who have casual sex are dumb-sluts and don’t understand basic biology — go back to school!
He continued his tirade, referring to attractive women as ‘Tricks’ — slang for prostitute, and wrote a post detailing how he would like to sexually assault a ‘Trick’. When I saw the post I was baffled; he’d never expressed this kind of sentiment before, so I left a comment asking him where his sudden hatred of women had come from.
At this point, I thought I was engaging in discourse with a friend.
I was wrong.
He turned the tables on me. Called me a ‘Trick’, and announced to his followers that the only reason I date men was so that I could exchange sex for money or gifts.
I was shaken — but more so than that I was heartbroken when not a single friend from that group — including my first love — stood up in my defense. Instead of defending me, they told me to pay no heed to the sexual assault threat, and insisted instead that I let it go, on the basis of… ‘that’s just how he is.’ I said goodbye forever after that.
Self Esteem
I was able to take a step back after that and view the relationship from an outside perspective.
I noticed things I hadn’t before, like his strange compulsion to be worse and less attractive than other people, even when he wasn’t. His deep-rooted insecurities bled over into how he spoke to me.
He tried to convince me that I was unattractive, by continually poking at ‘flaws’ in my appearance. It’s a strange place to be in; simultaneously propped up on a pedestal whilst being told you’re the footrest.
Something that I’ve learned over time is that no one on your level is coming for you. To put it bluntly… I’ve never had an attractive man insult my appearance.
After our relationship ended his casual digs at my ‘weird’ appearance took a turn. I started dating again, and he told a mutual friend that he was jealous, but only because “her tits are bigger now.”
At this point, I’d spent so much time around men who hated women that it didn’t even occur to me that this was an offensive thing to say. So, instead of confronting him, I told him I was sorry.
Final Notes — Contradictions and Delusions
I want to share some real-life examples of My Incel's thoughts and behaviors so that you can really catch a sense of how inexplicable and self-fulfilling his ideology was.
The man I loved was attractive, so he made himself unattractive as a form of rebellion against social hierarchies. Despite his rebellion, he still wanted to benefit from said social hierarchies by being gifted with a physically ‘superior’ girlfriend. When he wasn’t, he blamed women. Some of the beliefs I remember him sharing were;
- He would never be in a relationship because he was ‘too ugly’
- He shouldn’t have to develop desirable qualities — such as good hygiene — to be considered datable
- Being rejected is equally as painful as sexual harassment and assault.
All of these beliefs he managed to hold despite blatant evidence to the contrary. Based on my time with him, I’d say that the Incel recipe (or at least, his recipe) for an equal society looks something like this;
- Hold Chad’s accountable for their ‘lack-luster’ resumes
- Reward Incels for their (supposed) ‘superior intellect’ … and
- Punish Stacey’s for… umm… having preferences?
And there you have it — The All American Day Dream — in which men are rewarded for merit and merit alone and women are shamed for having personal preferences and experiencing physical attraction to kind and healthy men. Sounds like a Utopia, if you ask me.
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