Cope of the bitter singles
“You just want a wife to make you happy.” No. I want a wife to make her happy.
Recently, I was served a video of a female influencer deluding herself and her audience with the idea that being single and “freed from the shackles of commitment” allows people to achieve heights of happiness that couldn’t otherwise be accessed. I was attacked for disagreeing with her. Let’s talk about it.
Giving, not taking
Two very different desires
Like almost all 20-somethings, I’ve spent more time outside a relationship than inside one, and I’m currently accruing even more such time. Whenever I see someone expressing their desire for having a spouse, it comes in either of two forms: the more common angle is somebody lamenting the fact that they can’t find anyone who finds them attractive, which is obviously scary since nobody wants to face the possibility of being literally “forever alone”.
But sometimes, I see the less common angle that decentres the person writing, and instead centres their hypothetical spouse: they don’t lament that they don’t have anyone who loves them, but rather, that they don’t have anyone whom they can love. They claim (and there’s no real reason to doubt this since they don’t stand to gain anything by lying in online comments sections) they would get a lot of fulfilment from even just being able to treat someone – their spouse – as well as possible.
Giving is selfish too
I recently wrote about how altruism and selfishness don’t technically have to contradict each other, since somebody may have a value structure such that maximising their own return is done through being a dignified individual towards others. Similarly, it’s not obvious that “wanting a lover” contradicts “wanting to love”. In fact, you don’t even really need a special moral philosophy to make this make sense; you could explicitly be seeking to be told how great of a spouse you are (because you get a kick out of “Good boy!” compliments), and as long as you don’t expect proportional reciprocation, your self-interested pursuit still leads to your partner being treated as well as possible.
To make this more concrete: imagine you promise to give your spouse a massage every evening. Either your motive is true altruism from the kind of value structure I wrote about previously, or your motive is to try extract the words “You’re so kind; you do so much for me; I really got lucky when I landed you as my husband/wife; …” from your significant other, without expecting them to massage you in return. The end result is the exact same regardless of your motive: they get a massage and you don’t care that you don’t.
The cope of the bitter singles
The black-pilled take on relationships is that there is no happiness to be found in them: the other person will only hurt you rather than please you, and the satisfaction of pleasing your partner doesn’t even come up in these circles because they are so solipsistic.
The black-pilled position
I was recently dropped on the side of Instagram that is normally only frequented by femcels. This subculture deserves its own article, but basically, femcels are single women who have such contemptuous, ungrateful personalities that men looking for a serious relationship are repulsed by them, but rather than looking inwards, they blame the world for their singlehood as a coping mechanism, and call relationships for sour grapes. They even have their own theme song which makes it much easier to find where femcels hang out than the underground forums incels do so.
Now, on my journey through the depths of this particular hell, I was served a video of a woman deluding herself and her audience with the idea that being single and “freed from the shackles of commitment” allows people to achieve heights of happiness that couldn’t otherwise be accessed (because they “have their own stuff”). Thousands of comments, some with tens of thousands of likes, all agreed with her.
Like all zealots who hate a certain thing, they make it the center of their existence. In this case: their baseline happiness seemingly does not come from within, but specifically from the fact of not being in a relationship. Entering into a relationship is believed by them to be like swallowing poison. Why? Because relationships restrict their “freedom”, and since freedom is the highest good in an atomised, immature, hedonistic society, such restriction is evil. (In fact, the video claimed that those who promote relationships as more fulfilling than being single are actually conspiring in a sort of crab-bucket mentality where they don’t want anyone to realise how much greater it is to be single.)
The white-pilled position
This is clearly a massive cope. It is the gender-swapped version of the equally cynical view among unsophisticated men that having a girlfriend or wife is like being shackled to a ball-and-chain.1
As any wise person knows, life is infinitely richer with a loving spouse by your side. Someone to have pillow talk with. Someone to care for and gift happiness to. Someone to flirt and play with. Someone to share the experiences of life with: the beauty, the pain, the insights. Someone with whom to intertwine your full life story. Someone who, if fate turned against you, would stand by you, and vice versa. Someone through whom you get access to the 50% of human experience you are otherwise missing, as male and female see and move through the world fundamentally differently but complementarily. Only a fool would compare this to the vapid “freedom” of singlehood.
Femcels don’t realise they are incels
So, under the aforementioned video, I pointed this out, and of course was mobbed by an army of femcels who, exactly like male black-pill incels, delivered the lamest possible anti-relationship comebacks to my address, which I couldn’t help to see as quite poignant projections.
“Only boring individuals desire relationships”
One was “just say you’re boring”. I assume this woman did not call me “boring” as in “you bore other people”, because then the insult doesn’t make any sense – I would be most suited for the individual life. So, the point she was trying to make was that my individual life must be so dull that I couldn’t survive without a relationship. The reason I want a relationship, you see, is to entertain myself because I have nothing going on for me. Funnily enough, this actually proves my point: they are implicitly admitting that you can greatly enrich your boring life by entering into a relationship.
Another reply I received was “I would be depressed being alone if I were you too”, which gives away an even darker underlying thought around which these people orient themselves: according to them, one can only recognise the higher value of being in a relationship over being single, if one is emotionally miserable when single. My guess is that they would also reverse the statement, because their entire point is that the opposite is true: those who promote singlehood must be outright depressed in a relationship. Imagine thinking of a successful relationship and the feeling you associate with that is depression.
I ask myself why people would think this way. I can think of many possible hypotheses. Firstly, it could be that you are on a terminal ego trip: you cannot let go of your single life, because it would break you to the core to no longer be the only person in the universe. It would be so debilitating to your ego that you would fall into deep depression. This is a likely contender, since a lot of adults suffer from arrested development: their bodies matured, but their spirit never made it past pre-teen age. Small children, mostly controlled by their emotional whims, also cannot fathom that the universe doesn’t exist to serve only them.
Alternatively, the demented conclusion that “it’s just not worth it” comes from the same place most embitterment and cynicism come from: disillusionment. Lost hope. Past disappointment. Femcels may not have had a good example at home, or they may have had bad relationships in the past. There is a good chunk of incel subculture inhabited solely by people who got burned so badly in the past that they lost all faith of a good relationship in the future; these are the people who write things like “I stopped talking to women after my divorce. It’s just me and my dog in this world.” I would even hypothesise that a larger chunk of femcels got funneled in due to repeated relationship failure: young men become desperate because women their age don’t look their way. But that’s not because those women are asexual and not dating. They are interested in men and they are dating them continuously. Just the wrong ones – those with an abundance of choice and pathological personalities, which are correlated – all the time. So whereas incels are bred through the idea that “no woman is interested”, femcels are bred through the idea that “no man is good”.
Lastly, if they had a good example at home and they don’t have much experience (good or bad), radicalisation must have happen top-down, from the hive mind of social media. We live in an era of “Sex and the City”-esque entertainment, of “independent boss babe” feminist maleducation, and of short-form TikTok videos that make us cycle through emotions like a schizophrenic. If fed enough of this resentful content, one will surely be influenced. There is a difference between incels and femcels in this regard: both are primarily influenced through social media, but incels do not have any representation in academia and entertainment. Meanwhile, feminism and femcel culture are deeply intertwined: I am reminded of Gloria Steinem’s wicked quote that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. Or, as one of my sociopathic2 repliers paraphrased it: “He’s a man, his whole existence depends on women needing men. He’s gotta cope and try to convince women that women need men.”
“Women are waking up”
As the cherry on top of my comparison of femcels and incels: the same reply ended with the statement “Thank God women are waking up and realising it’s bullshit.” This is fascinating language to me. The blue/red/black pill terminology was originally derived from The Matrix movie, which, based on Plato’s cave allegory, centres around the idea that people are kept asleep by aliens who simulate a reality in their heads. The protagonists of the movie are the enlightened few who have “awakened”3 to the fact that everyone is being purposefully fooled by a grand conspiracy. The statement “Xs are waking up” is shared word-for-word between incels and femcels: incels were evidently first, using the phrase “Men are waking up (to the scam of relationships).” to virtue-signal that they are among the cunning, enlightened few who have “figured out” the grand societal conspiracy that promotes the “scam” of marriage. I’m not sure if femcels stole this conspiratory thinking from incels, or whether it is a case of convergent evolution. My guess is that it’s the former, somewhat against the will of the femcels: it’s conceivable that at some point in time, a subset of femcels found themselves in the comments section of a video meant for incels, read the conspiratory language, and although it likely made them spontaneously combust, the resentful language may have stuck and was metabolised in their brain to be used for their own cause (“Women are waking up (to the scam of relationships).”).
Conclusion
The fact that incels and femcels converge on the same gender-swapped idea isn’t just a fun intellectual observation. It is actual evidence in favour of the pro-relationship position. The incels are convinced that marriage is a conspired scam designed to oppress men. Femcels are convinced that marriage is a conspired scam designed to oppress women. It is true that femcels generally seem to lie and exaggerate more4 than incels do (the epitome of this is their theme song above), but nevertheless, I think that within their own logic and victimhood, they both make some internal sense. So then, who is oppressing whom? It can’t be both. So it must be that they are both living in a paranoid delusion, like most conspiracy theorists.
Truth is that humans yearn for the kind of close, through-and-through trusting, emotional bond that only a significant other can provide. Women crave such emotional security even more than men, and convincing them to not search for it is, in my eyes, evil. I would hate for my sisters and daughters to be deluded into becoming cat ladies (bUt wiTh tHeiR oWn sTuFF!) rather than finding men who will be their emotional safe haven and show them the other 50% of the human experience. And I would hate for my sons to be deluded into becoming recluses with a dog rather than finding women who bring reliable sunshine into their life.
Perhaps this is true if you choose the wrong person, but it is you who should take accountability for that choice, regardless of what the other person needs to be held accountable for. It is in your hands. You dated your girlfriend (or wife) before making it official (or marrying). She was herself. You chose her. Complaining about your own choice after the fact is a self-own and shifts blame for your poor taste. ↩︎
Consider that it is inconceivable to a sociopath that somebody would use their own words and actions not to advance themselves. ↩︎
Note that the term “woke” does not derive from this same myth. Social justice warriors started calling themselves “woke” not to say “We have woken up from the lie!” but rather to say “We have become aware of what people don’t talk about enough!” which is very different. One is about seeing through a premeditated plan designed to fool you, the other is just about not being unknowing about certain phenomena that are happening. ↩︎
If you do a one-to-one comparison of the points made by male and female black-pillers, you will inevitably find that the male black-pill has a more fleshed-out claim to victimhood because it has a longer history and was developed by much smarter people (high-functioning autists on 4chan, versus teenage girls on TikTok). That doesn’t mean I agree with their cynicism nor that I don’t attribute fault to them for choosing the wrong spouses, but fair is fair. ↩︎
