61 Men Who Used To Proudly Identify As Involuntary Celibates Share Their Wake-up Calls

Decided that I wasn't happy with myself. Quit gaming and joined the gym (best decision of my life) which just kind of set off a chain reaction of self improvement. Learned how to take care of myself, how to properly do my hair etc.

Can safely say that I'm much different to how I was a year ago. I've been in a relationship with a beautiful girl both in terms of personality and looks, so far these 2 months with her have been the best of my life :) hoping it will last

Edit: just realised I didn't fully answer the question. I guess what drove me to it was losing all hope somewhere along the line that I'd ever find someone that was interested in me and blaming everyone but myself. Also realising how superficial society in general is nowadays, which I still believe to an extent.

>what brought me in

memes, honestly among me and my friends it was just dark humour; we would laugh at incel jokes because they were insane. Over time it just started becoming too real. The jokes about people being chad this or roastie that started making sense to me.
>what brought me out

I genuinely just stopped caring. Apart from my bad looks I'm doing pretty well. I'm pretty content to live life alone but fulfilled rather than always be pining after someone else. After a while the ridiculousness became more visible again, the hypocrisies started showing through.

In High School I sorta was a “Incel” in 9th/10th grade. My mother from a young age put me in religious schools with small class sizes and I didn’t have much opportunity outside of class because the activities I was involved in were either from the school, or mostly catered to guys.

Ended up grabbing life by the [testicles], telling my parents that I was switching to public education, and I ended up switching in the middle of my 11th year, and plopped myself down at a random lunch table. Ended up going to prom that year, making a lot of friends, and having a good time. I don’t think my life would be as successful now without that experience.

My advice? It could be you, it could be your environment, or it could just be chance. Keep trying, and remember that insanity is trying the exact same thing over and over again, so mix it up.

I don’t think people understand a lot about incels and I think this is a good moment to at least show a couple people that read this that inceldom is just a form of depression. When me and most people got into inceldom, we didn’t hate women (I never did btw) we just hated ourselves. And you don’t become a hardened incel on the first day, a couple things need to happen first, and these are the basic steps to “create an incel”

1. Be really ugly (or at least think you are), straight up undesirable by almost all societal standards.
2. Have little or no friends irl
3. (This is a big one) be lied to constantly. Most “incels” really just need to hit the gym or take a good shower to be attractive, but when they voice their concerns about their appearances, they have to do so online, where no one knows what they look like. This means that most positive comments won’t apply or would seem like lies to us hence the constant meme in the community of “just be nice to girls and you’ll get a girlfriend” which is unfortunately perceived to be a display of ignorance by others as to just how ugly you are.
4. Get “blackpilled” - this step is where veteran or Real incels (who are pieces of human garbage btw) convince you, regardless of not knowing what you look like, that indeed you are ugly and you have no hope and you will die alone and that all women will hate you forever.
(It’s important to note in this step that this makes up around 1% of the incel community, if even less, and are extremely delusional and hateful individuals who have made it their job to hurt society as much as they can and gather followers to do so, and just to re-iterate this is an INCREDIBLY small group of people)

What most people don’t know, is that most incels get better. Personally for me, I just realized I wasn’t that ugly and I just had confidence issues (this makes up many incels), or actual what society would call “ugly” incels, end up just getting girlfriends because fun fact, girls get really desperate too and no one wants to be alone.

P.s - any members of the Incel tear “community” should realize what they’re doing is harmful and is perceived by many incels to be society bullying them. It isn’t really great to get bashed just for being ugly and thinking women hate you, it just pushes incels further into their depression, and I’m convinced had incel tears not gained the popularity it has, we would have many less incels today, as the group has exploded in popularity in recent times, and I do attribute it to hateful subreddits such as incel tears.

I used to be an incel of sorts not to the point where I literally despised women but I was very resentful of them and had very sexist opinions on things. This stemmed from my mother being the only woman in my life I really knew and she split up with my dad when I was about 10 then held all his letter and calls to me from for over 2 years and just said that I guess he didn’t care about me. She also was basically never home since she had me at 20 she said that I ruined her fun stage of life so she went to a bar around the corner every night for years and years.

She would come home with different guys and make me talk to them some for their looks some for money to get more alcohol or [illegal substances] for the month. So with this as your only person to really base women on it’s hard to not get a jaded opinion. Luckily I met my amazing gf when I was 18 and moved out and she along with some help from a therapist has really helped my views on women, which were really quite bad. I didn’t know it was bad till my gf and I had a talk about a year in about if we would prefer a boy or girl baby and I went basically ballistic about not having a girl.

I’m happy to say I can look back and know that I was very wrong and moved past it now.

Weirdly enough, it started by me giving up. For years I thought how unfortunate I was for not having ladies because of my shyness. I felt paralyzed by it. Powerless and that frustrated that saddened me to no end. Then, one day, it dawned to me that I was not so helpless as I thought.

Many people suggested me to look for psicologists to help, but I was always postponing, mostly because I knew any treatment would mean facing my fears and that is hard and painful. That constitutes choice. I had a way out to get ladies. I had to go through a painful treatment. It would be harder for me than for anybody else but was possible, and it was my choice.

However, I decided not to do. I did not want woman that hard. My career was more important, and I did not want to face more pain. This decision did not get me lady at first, but gave me peace. I was not paralyzed, no longer maladapted to the system of our species. I just had an unusual life plan that does not include finding a partner. Ironically, I went from incel to celibate.

That took women out of the pedestal that I put them when I was incel. I stopped seeing that the source for this relentless tension to be just people. Virginity no longer defined me.

A year has passed, and this peace eventually turned into confidence. I'm ok with myself, and my lonely choice. Then I saw a beautiful girl in my lab and asked her out. The hell, I thought, I'm okay with not getting any, it just a nice bonus. I was still nervous, but I made it. Now we're dating for two years.

I just kinda realized that "involuntary" probably just meant that I was doing something wrong in my approach. Turns out I was just hanging with the wrong crowd and had screwed up standards. Well, not exactly screwed up, but not anything that was gonna be in my league. Also, it kinda helped to turn myself into someone who is worth pursuing instead of forever being the pursuer. Still haven't found my SO, but at least I've had better luck getting the occasional date.

Realized I was the problem. Not that it helped me with women at all, I just stopped blaming them for the fact that I have nothing going for me as a person.

I grew up.

Was a sorta terrible, incel-ey person during freshman year. Complained about the friend zone a lot. Etc, Etc.

Then over the past couple years, I realized how [toxic] that was and how to be a human interacting with humans.

I came out of the closet, now I've been with my boyfriend going on five years now and we are engaged to be married.

I stopped equating my own personal success by the attention i get from the opposite sex.

Former Incel here. 56 years old now, but didn't get laid until I was 21, which seemed like forever in the late 70's early 80's. It was supposed to be the era of "free love", but I was at a point of just not being able to see how it was going to happen. I did eventually get laid at 21 when my older brother sent his sister in law to my house to lay me. I knew her and we have a friendly relationship, so it was not so awkward. Also she was older than me, knew what to do, and handled the whole thing really great. It was a "nothing personal" lay and we never got serious, even though we were [friends with benefits] for about 6 months, until i moved away.

What I really wanted to say though is that a lot of guys don't get laid not just because of a lack of confidence, which is a big factor, but because they just have way too high of standards. Only 2-3% of women are really hot, but every guy wants one.

It's not hard to figure out that most guys are not going to end up with a hot chick, All those pretty women on the internet are seducing incels into believing there are a large number of beautiful women out there just waiting for them. But there are not. Those chicks are waiting for rich guys. That's the whole reason men want to be rich.

There are a lot of women out there that are not model gorgeous, but none the less still want all the same things that super pretty women want. They want to feel loved and appreciated.

If you continue to hold out for a super fine chick, most of you will continue to be incels. There are a few that will luck out and actually hood up with a fine chick. But it's rarer than winning the lottery.

That would be my advice. Plus, lowering your standards will give you more confidence as you won't feel inferior, like you would with a really attractive girl.

At some point I just realized if I actually wanted a relationship, I'd be in one and that women women have standards just like me. Hell if I don't want myself, who would want me? Confidence plays a large role in this, and if you're as self depreciating as I am, you aren't going anywhere and you're only wasting your time. Basically it comes down to "It's all me, not you." Besides, I've been around for almost 21 years and I haven't made a whole lot of progress. That ship set sail a long time ago.

Outsourced my online dating. Dumped my poisonous friends and family. Moved to another city.

I suppose I was an incel from 23-27 after leaving the military. I was depressed, underweight, socially isolated... I never got fat or super into gaming as is stereotypical, just worked a lot, hung out with my dog, smoked way too much, and just sort of forgot how to interact with women. Which was probably for the best, most of my relationships prior to 23 were unhealthy at worst, meaningless at best.

Ending that era of my life was a long struggle that took concerted effort towards trying to be more positive and social.

One big event was buying and learning to ride a motorcycle at 27- sort of shocked me out of my routine, opened my eyes to the fact that life was not a downhill slide from the adrenaline filled days of 18-22, that new experiences were waiting to be had.

Eventually I met a woman that I just couldnt bear to have the usual "flirt until I awkwardly distance myself" experience with. I *forced* myself to not to my mind wander when we talked, I powered through all anxiety to call and text her daily, I even eventually would do crazy stuff like *get dressed up nice and go to dinner with her* -not something I could have ever seen myself doing at one point.

So I'm married now, still have some issues, but very happy. So I'd say nothing to me, just gotta live through it kid.

I was a virgin at 20-21, there was some bitterness in my heart towards women.

I got on with working, playing rugby and not being fat and it turned around.

Learned to have a conversation, not just trying to chat someone up or show the world how super I was.

married, two children, doing ok.

I despise that guy. He’s an embarrassment to me.

Somehow, it never occurred to me until I [slept with someone] that women are literally just normal people like you or I. They laugh, they swear, they fart, they even (gasp) *enjoy [intimacy]*!

I was the “nice guy” that got friend zoned by any girl I tried to talk to in high school. I was always the one to confess my feelings for a girl just because she had been nice to me for a couple weeks. Then, when she just wanted to be friends, I would get upset with myself and her. Seeing these same girls that friend zoned me hooking up with the [jerks] pissed me off to no end.

I was the type that would do absolutely anything a girl asked me to do at any time. One girl asked me to buy her cigarettes at 1am while I was in bed asleep, so what did I do? Drove straight to the gas station and then 15 minutes to her house and was met with a half-hearted hug and a thanks. I couldn’t understand why these girls didn’t want to sleep with me.

Eventually I realized I was the one putting myself though all this emotional trauma. I decided I was going to work on myself, and not care what girls thought. I realized my hair was always messy and uncut, my clothes were old and fit poorly, and I had been wearing the same beat up shoes for several years. Not only that, but I was scrawny as [hell].

So I hit the gym, went from 150 pounds to 195 over several years (I am 6’2” for reference). And at the same time I started caring about my physical appearance. I started getting a fresh haircut every 2 weeks, bought clothes that fit well and showed off my gym gainz, and my confidence went way up. Having the confidence to not care whether a girl liked me back or not was the real game changer. I’m now at the point where I don’t really hit on girls too much, the ones I talk to usually come to me first.

I look back on all my old mistakes and one piece of advice I can give is: don’t [care] about anyone else but yourself. If you invest all of your self worth into what a girl thinks about you, you’re gonna have a bad time.

TLDR: work out and focus on improving yourself and don’t [care] about what girls think of you.

I don’t know if I qualify as an incel since all of my woman problems happened before social media, but maybe my history mirrors any current “former incels”.

I remember my first crush in maybe 2nd grade. I told my mom I liked a girl in school and asked her how I could get the girl to like me. Big mistake: she told me to be nice to her.

This pattern repeated. Every female friend or woman in my life, when I would ask them how to get girls to like me, they would reinforce that I should be some variation of nice to them (“be a gentleman”, “be her friend first”, etc.). Of course, behaving in this way got me a lot of female friends and the number of voices reaffirming this advice kept increasing. Movies, romantic comedies, and other media also reinforced this. The self effacing, self sacrificing nice guy got the girl in the end due to no other value than his virtuous behavior.

So it should come as no surprise that when this didn’t work in real life I got frustrated and angry. But, crucially, because I was supposed to be nice, I kept all of this frustration to myself. I imagine if incel sites existed back then I would’ve vented my frustration there and gotten sucked into the negative feedback loop.

What got me out of that mindset was when I started becoming friends with guys who were better at getting women than I was. I remember in my early 20s a guy saying that asking women for dating advice is like a rock musician asking a music critic how to write better music.

So I started copying the behaviors of these guys: mirroring their attitude, working out with them, dressing like them, drinking like them, dancing like them, all that. More or less just became a frat bro who was enjoying life.

I grew up around them. I never got as bad as some of the worst examples on the internet though (this was decades ago, mind you)

I got lucky. I have some fortunate genetics meaning I got a lot of chances with women, which was lucky because there were rarely second dates. Eventually I figured out how to be charming, after a LOT of trial and error.

I don't hang out with my old Incel crowd anymore, we went different ways. They're still alone and lonely from what I see on Facebook. No one has any empathy for their struggle so they just learned to deal with the pain. People vilify them when they're already at the bottom with no way to climb out. They're genuinely nice guys, but if we're being honest they aren't attractive physically and can't go down the path I did.