Taking martial arts classes (specifically for me, Brazilian jiu jitsu). Coincidentally i met my current girlfriend there, but you shouldn’t expect to meet women there. Rather, it’s a way to stop thinking about women for two hours. I realized that back then my mind was constantly thinking non-stop if i’m attractive to women, what women like, how i can get one, etc. It’s those thought loops that make interaction so painful.

Literally anything that can get your mind off of women. Hot take; I wouldn’t advise going to a gym though, because still then you’re thinking about how to become more attractive by becoming fit. The goal is to work out to take your mind off things. Martial arts is perfect for this: you physically work out, and your mind is focused on your opponent.

I was never full-on incel, but I was definitely headed down that path. I was a late-20’s fat guy with severe acne all over my upper body, and I’d obviously never had a girlfriend. I looked ahead in life and just saw it going further and further downhill. I tried dieting, working out, etc, but none of my attempts at making a change ever lasted.

One day I saw a facebook post that one of my old highschool classmates had gotten married. The guy looked a lot like me, and at first I was mad - I had that classic incel thought of “why is he successful and not me?” But after sitting in that dark place for awhile, I realized that the answer to that question is that I can be successful! I realized that I’d never tried to put myself out there because I always viewed myself as not being worthy - I needed to be fitter, more attractive, better at talking to people, etc - but did I really? I wanted to find out, so I made an online dating account, cleaned myself up, got a friend to take some nice pictures of me doing things I enjoyed, and put myself out there.

I made a goal for myself to never start a conversation with “Hey” or something similar - I went through every profile I found and picked something specific to talk about. It took a while, and I missed a lot of opportunities by being awkward, but eventually I got good enough at holding a conversation to secure a few dates, and in only a few months of that, I found the woman who is now my wife!

I’m still fat, but having someone to look good for was at least enough for me to shower more regularly, which cleared up a lot of my acne. I’m still pretty awkward, but so is my wife, and we both find it endearing. Life’s not perfect - there are still issues - but I’m no longer looking ahead at my life and seeing only downhill trajectory; I have a sense of optimism I didn’t have before, and it mostly came from me accepting myself. I’m not sure if other incels are the same as I was - not realizing that the one they actually hate is themselves - but I hope that if they are, they eventually come to the same realization that I did: that they are worthy.

I changed my gender.

I don’t know if this counts since I was never the women hating type, but for a long time I suffered because I couldn’t figure out a way to have a girlfriend.

How I dealt with it? Understanding myself, mechanisms of social pressure, and the wrong motives I had for wanting to have a girlfriend.

It was always about proving something to others, rather than actually finding a life partner. Everyone around me constantly pestered me to find a gf, friends, family … All the media celebrates certain kinds of romantic relationships. I thought I’m worthless if I don’t do it as well.

Changing that mindset transformed me - I don’t have to put myself in situations I’m uncomfortable with, and I don’t have to pursue types of relationships defined by others.

I got asked out by a girl in high school I barely knew after feeling unlovable for most of my teens. I became fast friends with her female friends and it kinda helped me realize that women are just people.

Later I broke up with her but stayed friends with everyone. Eventually I started dating one of her other friends, and we’re still together 6 years later. Taught me that being friends with someone should probably come before a relationship, and the best way to get girl friends is to just hang around them and do normal friend stuff.

Later I found out that the only reason I got asked out in the first place was because of a coin flip. If I lost that 50/50 I might still be an incel weirdo. Weird to think about.

I don’t think I was ever an incel, but back in 2011-12, I was being “red-pilled” on facebook. Goshdarned wimminz, they ruined everything!

The first thing I want to say is how fucking ashamed I am to have fallen for that shit back then and I’m really fucking glad I managed to get out soon-ish. Perhaps ironically, what kept my sanity intact was that I was a very common target of “real men” because the FB groups would often attack the political left and communism with some of the stupidest takes I’ve seen in my life, like “Every failed African country is communist” or “Nazism was left leaning, it’s National SOCIALISM!!!” - Younger me would see that shit, get pissed and write how wrong that was, which has led me to being banned from 2 groups back then.

Now, how did I even end up there in the first place? Well, as nearly everyone else, I suppose, it felt like I wasn’t getting what “the world” had promised me, a cis white man: a woman. I’m not bad looking, but my manners and social skill were caveman level for the most part, I rarely, if ever, thought about others, I just made rude remarks left and right because “haha fuck you”. Of course, back then, I was deluded and saw myself as a gentleman, that disconnect between my own perception and reality (aka how others saw me) no doubt played a huge part in me feeling that I was wronged, that I wasn’t getting any because of some fault within the system instead of myself. Once you’re in this mindset, seeing posts that blame women for your problems make a lot of sense. It’s not that I’m rude and deluded, it’s women that are too picky, it’s women that have terrible taste and go for “obviously low quality males”, it’s women that just want a man they can easily manipulate, etc etc.

As I always fancied myself as left leaning politically, anything that was more political than “personal”, like posts about women in the workforce (women should receive less because they’ll ALWAYS get pregnant!), I’d just ignore and think they were stretching things a bit.

SOOO, I got out of that. My recommendation for anyone that wants to get out of that mindset, the first thing I tell you is: stop fucking following and taking in ANY such incel content. Literally block everything that can remind you of that shit. That’s step one. You don’t need that in your life, you don’t need to feel like you’re in that specific group of losers. There are many better groups of “losers” to be part of

Second, reassess yourself and compare how you view yourself vs reality, how others look at you. In a 10 second interaction with a random person on the street, what would they likely think of you? Any answer that is too extreme on the positive or negative means you’re very likely deluded as I was with myself.

Third, and perhaps most important, when it comes to having any relationship, amorous or not, is: what makes you interesting? “Nothing”? Then you better work on something, anything. Just because you’re into nerd shit doesn’t mean you have to be a nerd shit. I love anime, I love videogames, boardgames, tabletop RPGs, but I never undersell them as nerd shit, I always prop those things as these amazing hobbies I want to SHARE with others, and I’m always 100% ok with people that don’t like them or don’t want to try them (the latter mostly because of all the bad rep thanks to toxic nerd shits)

Adding to the “what makes you interesting”, expand your horizons a bit. Try something new and different, look for any group activities that are cheap or free near your job or your home. You are not the things you like, the things you like are part of what makes you you. You change, your tastes change, you grow up, don’t think current you is too precious to change.

I used to be an incel, but probably not in the way you’d think. I mean it in the original use of the term, that is, I was a queer kid in a small town and there was not a single person in town I was attracted to who was also attracted to me.

I moved to a big city, and things got a bit better but I still had issues in meeting new people with meaningful connections. I expected to just stumble upon the perfect partner that loved me exactly as I was, even though I hated myself.

It wasn’t until someone basically slapped me in the face with the question, “Well, would you want to date YOU?” that it started to make sense. I was spending so much time looking for “the perfect partner” that I forgot to work on myself to become the perfect partner FOR that perfect partner. Once I stopped “looking” for them and instead started working on making myself a better person that things started falling into place.

The only person you have to live with your entire life is yourself, so make sure you love yourself first and people will be attracted to that. No one wants to be with someone who hates themselves and everyone around them.

I took estrogen.
I was like fuck them they are so pretty 😭 Now I am pretty yay

Lucked out and made (and still have) a great friend who’d always call out my bullshit and also talk through what was wrong with my mindset and thoughts. God, I was insufferable

I don’t know if I’d have considered myself an incel, but there’s definite cringe behavior in my past that would at least fall under incel behavior.

Thinking about it now, I was just too focused on being what I thought would make me attractive to someone, mostly based on listening to other guys or media, and not actually getting to know the people I wanted to date and finding out what they wanted.

I saw the people I liked more as a goal to reach in some gamified system, rather than as just another person who wanted to meet someone nice. Just not a lot of empathy going on. You can’t just grind to an ideal character build and have some formula say, ok you’ve met the requirements, here is your achievement trophy.

I’ll assume you want an actual partner, and not just a fling, so it’s going to be platonic one on one time that’s going to get you closer to your goals. The “friend zone” is not a trap. The “friend zone” is a power up. You’re spending time with someone you like. That’s a win. Even if you aren’t dating them, you’ve managed to find someone who wants to spend time with you and get to know you. It’s getting you interacting better with other people and hopefully understanding and accommodating them better, not you just being self centered. It’s making you a more interesting and rounded person. That guy is the real thing the right person will eventually want to date.

You trying to date that particular person probably wouldn’t work out, and being their friend is still a positive thing to your life. It’s someone to commiserate with, to get to know your actions around a girl you can have mutual respect for, to learn what girls you like really care about and want to see in a relationship. She doesn’t owe you love for you time. You owe her respect for her time, and she will give that back to you. It’s the same as a guy friend. It’s another member for your party. That’s a strength, not a loss.

Spend time with women without there being an ulterior motive, and you will learn a lot. For me, I liked strong willed, assertive women, and well… that lead me to get to know a lot of women that had no interest in men in that way, so it eliminated the whole dating part of the equation, and that took a lot of the pressure off there for trying to “win them over” in that regard, and to just learn women are people just like me, with the some wants, needs, confusion about dating, and all that.

I ended up also finally talking to my doctor about depression, and that was the life altering experience that really made everything fall into place. My shit behavior, past and present at the time, was all my fault, but it turns out I had some things really stacked against me with my ability to cope and develop emotionally, that once I got that fixed, was a huge burden lifted from me.

Once that was dealt with, I was in a whole new world and all relationships became much easier to understand. Guys and girls became all of a sudden much more relatable and understandable, and I was able to process other people’s wants and needs instead of just my own, and it had taken too much of my resources just to make myself a barely functional person.

I became able to learn empathy and that helped me become someone people were interested in knowing and loving, in friendship or in dating. It helps build and maintain good relationships. I can better know what I want, and how to better understand someone else’s wants.

I feel the incel/nice guy behavior is largely just people with underlying emotional issues they haven’t figured out. You’ve got to realize other people won’t complete you or can’t be that missing piece. That’s something you’ve got to figure out first. If that’s getting meds to give you an even playing field, going to therapy, are just having someone you’re accountable to to fix your shit behavior, ego, or selfishness, do what it takes to address it. Everything else is you making excuses, and until you fix that roadblock in yourself to building those deeper relationships, you’re never going to have success.

I look back, and regret so much of my life now, but what’s done is done, and I can at least know I never want to act anywhere near that cringe again! But I can recognize it now, and stop it dead. I too just try to share my story when asked, and I hope to help save them some of that embarrassment and regret.

I fell down an incel-adjacent rabbithole when I was a teenager and young adult and while I was physically isolated (lived with my parents in the suburbs but my parents hadn’t bothered to teach me to drive, so getting around was a royal pain in the butt. Realistically I could’ve done more but youth truly is wasted on the young) I then for “reasons” socially isolated myself by avoiding online communities where i could have met people. I had really bad acne that brought my self-esteem to zero (in hindsight the acne was about the 5th least attractive thing about me at that time) and was struggling to complete a college degree in the wrong field while also failing to work enough to be able to afford to move out (again, hindsight 20/20 I had things I could have done but didn’t)

Because I didn’t interact with anyone outside of my household, my social skills never grew and probably deteriorated. I was depressed and felt trapped, I believed myself to be “too autistic” to do things that could help, and it was all around a pretty unhappy time in my life.

I happened to meet my now-wife on an online dating site, and we’ve both reflected and determined we were both in similarly bad but different places at that time. She had gained a bunch of weight (I seem to have a wider attractive range for weight than most people so this wasn’t a problem for me) and was moving on from her nth abusive boyfriend. Honestly my lack of social skills at the time made it so there were times where I flat out said something incredibly hurtful without realizing it. She’s since told me that she put up with that because “at least I wasn’t physically abusive” (single dudes, the bar you need to meet is so, so low)

Anyways we both have since grown a lot as people and have both grown into fairly functioning adults. We both have more to grow (we both really need to get our respective executive dysfunctions under control), and sometimes we’ve grown apart, but we’ve kept growing back together.

I’m too old to be an incel™; I was going through it back when the term incel was coined as a neutral descriptor. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have gone down that rabbit hole, because critical thinking comes very naturally to me, and the idea that it was women’s fault didn’t ever quite sit right with me. Women aren’t a monolith; they don’t get together and scheme. But if the incel phenomenon had been around, well, who knows? The camaraderie and validation of a group is incredibly beguiling.

Anyway, I was dealing with depression, which brought along a lot of other problems that caused me to be deeply angry and unsatisfied with life. One thing that really woke me up, oddly, was the song Toledo by Dan Bern. Specifically, the lyrics, “Maybe all the things you thought you got coming to you / Ain’t coming to you / Not in this life / And maybe all of the promises you thought were broken / Were never really made” In short, where was I getting the idea that life was fair, or that the universe owed me, well, anything? Not quite out of my posterior, because many cultural messages tell you that. But those messages are wrong.

So I decided to make the best of what life gives me, work on my own issues, and to have fun and do interesting things solo. And wouldn’t you know it, a year later…

…I was still single. What, do you buy into that trash about how you find “the one” when you stop looking? I’m still single years and years later. BUT! That’s okay, because “giving up looking” isn’t some fancy, new way of low-key actually-looking. The benefit has been being more satisfied with life, and doing fun and interesting things.

Honestly, I touched grass and made some good good friends. I matured and realized incel shit wasent very cash money. I wasent full incel but I was definitely on the path. I worked on myself a lot and really grew into just enjoying my hobbies. I learned that I wasent mature enough for a relationship and didn’t respect myself enough. I still have a lot to learn and will continue to learn and grow. Currently im in a nice relationship and around good friends

Honestly… Two years in prison. Made me grow up and see how shitty I was as a person.

We didn’t have the term incel when I was a young adult, but at 25 I had an experience that allowed me to realize I wasn’t too far off from my peers, and decided to brute force my way to learning to socialize. My therapist suggested hunting down the local recovery community (which meant going to AA groups even though I wasn’t an alcoholic) which got me to CoDependents Anonymous.

As a note CoDA and SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) are full of people glad to fall off the wagon, which is a major plot point in Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. Before I got too involved, a very nice person yanked me from CoDA into the local kink community, who were the advanced class of consent, limits and boundaries training. This isn’t to say they’re perfect at it, but they get more into the nitty, especially those who engage in edge play. (Not to be confused with knife play, though there’s some intersection.)

That said, I became sexually active at 26, which is pretty late in the game, but a far leap from world records. Sir Isaac Newton died sexless and was obnoxious and proud of the fact. Incels often have nothing on the mathematics sector.

< rant >

The current state of how we regard our teens remains an issue to me, and at one point while Microsoft was fantasizing on how to get Cortana to fend off unwanted advances (Google’s LLM would just ignore them and turn a come-on into a web-search), I was thinking of how a simulated girlfriend might teach incels how to engage others without scaring them off through trial and error and sheer practice. But now we have scary data-stealing e-girlfriends that prey on the lonely.

Then with the rise of abstinence-only education, the alt-right and the eagerness of the Republican party to keep their War Boys ( witness me! ) as a voting bloc and recruitment pool for their militant wing, I realized US society doesn’t have a strong interest in making things better for our newly-sex-starved teens since, as George Orwell observed, sexual frustration + three minutes of hate turns into a powerful tool for fascism-style civil wrangling, at least of the lumpinproletariat (the people who can’t civics very well). Kids developing a healthy sexuality doesn’t serve to turn the population into devout workers / soldiers glad to serve the ownership class.

It also may be that we just don’t like our own teens, and want to evict them (which might be a hunter-gatherer means to stir the gene pool. Gorillas do a similar thing) and the thinking ape actually sucks a thinking past some of our presupposed values like dominance hierarchy. Hence we worship athletes and fear smart, less physical guys will turn into supervillains, and this informs our incapacity to do anything about schoolyard bullying, or workplace bullying, or gunboat diplomacy.

So, when it comes to my fellow incels, I’ll borrow from Red Dragon (The Harris novel and two movies)

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He wasn’t born a monster; he was made one through years of abuse.

< /rant >