As someone who struggled for many years with a complete and utter lack of romantic/sexual prospects, I'm very thankful I didn't fall down the incel hole. I sympathize with many of those people,...
As someone who struggled for many years with a complete and utter lack of romantic/sexual prospects, I'm very thankful I didn't fall down the incel hole. I sympathize with many of those people, and if I didn't have friends, some of which were female, I don't know that I wouldn't have ended up there.
I found the statistics portion of this to be rather interesting To me this implies that modern dating apps which are often more sexually oriented are failing the market for Women. This isn't...
I found the statistics portion of this to be rather interesting
Women who have found it difficult to date are much more likely than men to say a major reason for their difficulty is that it’s hard to find someone who meets their expectations (56% vs. 35%) and that it’s hard to find someone looking for the same kind of relationship as them (65% vs. 45%).
To me this implies that modern dating apps which are often more sexually oriented are failing the market for Women. This isn't really addressed in the article - the article is focused on men since they comprise the majority of incels, but I think it's something that could have been expounded upon in a bit greater detail.
For their part, men are more likely to say difficulty in approaching people (52% of men vs. 35% of women) and being too busy (38% vs. 29%) are major reasons it has been difficult to find people to date.
This is an interesting one to tease apart. I'm not sure I have any solid leads here, but I would imagine a lot of this has to due with increasing globalization leading to people interacting differently (online as opposed to in person, and in echo chambers as opposed to diverse places) and this is leaving men in the dust because they tend to be less social with less social skills. I've certainly seen among my younger cohorts at work that more and more of them are spending too much time at work and not valuing pursuing their own hobbies and interests outside of work, precisely the place many women are looking to find potential partners.
I see both of these as a failing of the capitalistic and globalistic environment that we exist in, in the 20th century. Social pressures shape us from the very moment we are born, teaching us to value wealth above personal happiness. We then enter school at a young age which is designed to pump out productive workers, once again instilling the value of work. We cram in extracurriculars to compete with the global market of students, not the ones we are interested in but the ones which are most likely to get us into a good institution so that we can land a good job. We're taught to evaluate whether our career will bring us a good income and told to avoid frivolous degrees or ones like liberal arts which won't make us a good income, regardless of the benefits to mental health it may provide. We spend our time at home, online, among groups of individuals who think similarly to us, reducing the diversity of opinion and learning opportunities that increased socialization can provide us. Men tend to socialize circumstantially through activities whereas women do activities circumstantially through socializing. Male emotional intelligence suffers on account of treating them like breadwinners in a society which hyperfocuses on income and business success and doesn't spend enough time on maintaining a healthy social network.
I also, like the author, do not have any answers to the problems presented here. I think the problems are based in a changing society, but have less to do with the society changing and more to do with the social values we have been instilling for hundreds of years being combined with an ever forward progression of how darn good we are becoming at maximizing shareholder value at any cost. We often don't have time to take a step back and consider the ramifications of what we have done, or envision the costs that financial optimization can have on a human society. Emotional intelligence is only just starting to catch on as an important skill to have as is hard science to back up the idea of a healthy social network. Will these advances in science cause a backlash against financial optimization and start remembering the human again? I sure hope so, but I won't be waiting with baited breath.
Oh gosh, I can go on about the failure of dating apps FOR HOURS. Since I'm supposed to actually get some work done today I'll try to hit on some of the high level problems I see. Dating apps...
Are these apps failing to attract quality men or does the medium promote a Pareto Principle in dating?
Oh gosh, I can go on about the failure of dating apps FOR HOURS. Since I'm supposed to actually get some work done today I'll try to hit on some of the high level problems I see.
Dating apps incentivize matches because that's what gets you to rate the app and subscribe. Incentivizing matches means that you will be shown people who have liked you at a higher rate than people who have not yet swiped on you (as well as potentially showing more people who paid than those who did not). This has a few downstream effects based on how people generally interact. First off, some people will treat these apps as "who would I fuck" and swipe quite rapidly, often times swiping 'yes' more often than swiping 'no'. The outcome of this is that it increases their visibility to others - while you might match with them, the quality of the match is very low and shallow in nature.
Secondly, because men are often more willing to devote time to these apps and because they are more likely to make the first move, this causes a huge imbalance in how masculine and feminine presenting people interact with these apps. No matter what a femme presenting individual does, they will see a lot of guys who swiped on them because they are swarmed with men who want to have sex. This imbalance means that women spend less time searching for matches and often will match much faster than men because their deck is so jam packed with people who already liked them that the algorithm doesn't feel the need to present them many other individuals who haven't already liked them. This low quality of what they see when they do interact causes women to disengage with the platform, meaning even less men will be surprised by someone in their stack who has already liked them. The very nature of how these apps are designed causes accelerationism towards the behavior of men swiping forever and women never swiping.
As an aside, this leaves a weird predicament for gay dating and in particular lesbian or femme dating and is a big reason why grindr took off and many apps like her and fem are starting to pick up slack on the femme side.
A particularely quality male using a dating app would likely be willing to have sex with a woman of lesser quality, but would not be willing to date well below his level. Thus a portion of these women, having their time monopolized by men above their attractiveness level, have no prospect of securing long term, and are finding disappointment.
This assumes that quality can be assessed with the way that dating apps present people. I have yet to see a dating app that actually does a halfway decent job at figuring out whether any two individuals are compatible. OKCupid has tried to do this with questions which you can answer, rate their importance, and the answers that you would accept, but this was crowdsourced and because of such there are many frivolous questions and questions of wokeness that don't really serve any purpose.
The whole idea of dating 'at your level' is mostly nonsense anyways. Yes, on the extremes of physical attractiveness you have people that perhaps would not consider partners of at least a certain level of physical attractiveness, but there are countless examples of couples in which one is more physically attractive than the other by conventional standards. Here's the thing - humans are diverse as hell and because of such have varied thoughts on what is attractive and physical features do not necessarily dominate what they are looking for. In fact, women tend to be much more malleable on whom they are willing to date with regards to physical qualities than men are but much less malleable when it comes to personality and qualities like compassion and empathy. There's a disconnect in how people tend to approach these apps and none of the apps try to balance against the cultural norms that gender and society present us and because of such they tend to end up making the problems even worse.
They keep redoing their system. My understanding is that there is no longer an ELO system, but it still doesn't stop the general patterns. I generalized to some extent, but even if you are...
Rapid swiping I believed to move your profile further down their ELO system, effectively limiting your visibility to others.
They keep redoing their system. My understanding is that there is no longer an ELO system, but it still doesn't stop the general patterns. I generalized to some extent, but even if you are matching regularly and have a high ELO in the old system, it's very easy to game and a quick cursory google search will show you exactly how to game the system. Regardless, ask your feminine friends about their experience with these apps and I can almost assure you that the difference in how many people like them versus a masc presenting individual will easily paint the picture for you. I know women who have paid for the app and get thousands of likes per week who are much less conventionally attractive than some masc people I know who have paid for the app and get exponentially less.
This is the age old problem of dating. All these apps do is replace a bar. Nothing can quantify compatibility except experience together. That's the part that comes after.
Somewhat disagree here, but not worth going into it because I don't have a great solution anyhow.
People regularly date at their socio-economic, educational and/or physical attractiveness level. Sure outliers exist (hello Hugh Jackman), but outliers do not disprove the dataset.
Yes, you're precisely proving my point. They don't just look at physical attractiveness, they are just as likely to match on things much more difficult to quantify such as 'creativeness'. The idea that you could tell any of this from a profile is nonsense, about the only thing you can tell from most dating apps is whether they are physically attractive, which some people value over other traits, but as I stated is not very universal and is somewhat sex/gender disparate.
I also think it's important to point out that second note about physical attractiveness level really only measures someone's willingness to interact on an app designed to physically rate people on whether they would meet up with people as physically attractive as they were. Not a great source for drawing population level conclusions about how people actually date and where they set the boundaries for what is acceptable and what isn't in regular life.
We take the leap based on physical attraction, almost always.
I think this is a very biased take. Plenty of people out there have more malleable levels of what they consider physically attractive than you do, and so the notion that someone wouldn't date you because you don't think you're attractive enough or that you're too attractive for them is not as straightforward as it seems like you're trying to present here.
Physical attraction works differently based on context though. Still pictures prioritize a certain type of very conventional attractiveness. But in person you see a lot more of a person. For...
We take the leap based on physical attraction, almost always.
Physical attraction works differently based on context though. Still pictures prioritize a certain type of very conventional attractiveness. But in person you see a lot more of a person. For example, one of the sexiest things about me is my voice. But how would I have put that front and center on Tinder?
And it even applies to purely visual stuff. It's different seeing someone in motion versus as a still image. A lot of things about your general mien and demeanor can make an otherwise average looking person stand out. As another personal example, I'm only 5'9" but if you ask someone to guess my height without me in the room they will generally assume 6 feet and then be surprised to notice that I'm not. I've been told that I "have the swagger of a much taller man." At the end of the day 2-3 inches isn't that big but simply having good posture and general physical "presence" or charisma goes a long way at making you seem bigger. If I met a girl in a bar it literally would not register for her, but on a dating app all they will see is 5'9" to make the decision on.
The problem that I have with dating apps, that perhaps women also have, is that I come into it skeptical. Every person needs to prove themselves to meet my standards and it's just not a good...
The problem that I have with dating apps, that perhaps women also have, is that I come into it skeptical. Every person needs to prove themselves to meet my standards and it's just not a good medium for that. I would much rather have a real imperfect person in front of me than the millions of facades that are available on a social media app. I think that also helps my odds in attracting someone. I'm not interested in tuning a dating profile for matches. I just want to meet people, evaluate them, and then make a decision and I want others to do the same with me. Do people still do speed dating?
This was a good article and I like the take on it. Being ugly to his group isn't going to improve the world at all. I'm not saying we should excuse their behavior, and I don't think the author is...
This was a good article and I like the take on it. Being ugly to his group isn't going to improve the world at all. I'm not saying we should excuse their behavior, and I don't think the author is either. I really like the idea of reaching out with kindness. I mean, it certainly couldn't hurt anything to try.
I think the most important thing any of us can do is to steer those we know personally away from toxic thoughts about relationships and sex. If they actually consider themselves an incel it may be...
I think the most important thing any of us can do is to steer those we know personally away from toxic thoughts about relationships and sex. If they actually consider themselves an incel it may be too late, but there are certainly dozens of steps before "incel" where they can be turned around.
I think one thing worth wondering is if a lot of these people feel they're stuck between blaming women and blaming themselves for their failures, and some pick blaming women because it's less...
I think one thing worth wondering is if a lot of these people feel they're stuck between blaming women and blaming themselves for their failures, and some pick blaming women because it's less heavy on them, even if it's obviously wrong. Just because blaming women is clearly worse doesn't mean blaming yourself is the good ending.
There’s also the Menslib/Social Justice take of blaming society and gender roles, but that take seems to be far from the mainstream and I don't think its entirely unreasonable to wonder if men using the social justice framework to air their grievances might sound strange when a large focus of social justice is to take down patriarchal norms and give equality to women.
You're right that to the mainstream it sounds strange for men airing grievances to be a part of "social justice" (I put that in quotes just because the exact definition of the term varies so...
You're right that to the mainstream it sounds strange for men airing grievances to be a part of "social justice" (I put that in quotes just because the exact definition of the term varies so wildly depending on who you talk to). That said, I would argue those people are wrong. Men discussing the ways society and gender norms have failed them is critical for society to move forward. The patriarchy doesn't just hurt women. Toxic masculinity harms men too. Taking down patriarchal norms isn't only going to help women, it helps raise everyone up.
I agree, I'm just talking about how it might sound to potentially a lot of people, since toxic masculinity and other issues specific to or more frequent in men aren't something talked about too...
I agree, I'm just talking about how it might sound to potentially a lot of people, since toxic masculinity and other issues specific to or more frequent in men aren't something talked about too often IMO.
It might be difficult for them because their low standards (which seem to be any living woman willing to have sex with them) is counter-intuitively lowering their dating pool. It's like a finger...
It might be difficult for them because their low standards (which seem to be any living woman willing to have sex with them) is counter-intuitively lowering their dating pool. It's like a finger trap - pulling it apart makes it grabs on tighter. You need to push your fingers in to take the trap off. These people would be marginally more desirable if they had higher standards. Probably not enough to overcome a hatred of women, though.
I agree a lot of those people probably don't have a good idea of what they want and can/can't tolerate in a relationship and their partner and just operate on the assumption that most women will...
It might be difficult for them because their low standards (which seem to be any living woman willing to have sex with them) is counter-intuitively lowering their dating pool.
I agree a lot of those people probably don't have a good idea of what they want and can/can't tolerate in a relationship and their partner and just operate on the assumption that most women will do, but I also wonder if some of those people would be too worried about just finding someone that will have a relationship with them to actually state and filter for what they want if they figured if out anyway.
That being said, this holds on the assumption that this scarcity mindset is at least based on their experiences and can't easily be 'solved' or significantly mitigated by stuff like being more hygienic, paying attention to how they put things when talking* or giving limited relevance to rejections from people who would never be good partners for you anyway, or just not being a misogynist, which definitely doesn't apply to everyone.
Also, the stereotype for incels in particular is that they have comically high standards, so that doesn't apply to everyone that relates to, for lack of a better term, "the feel of no gf".
I consider myself lucky that I don't feel sex or romance are key to my happiness. I think that with the right person either or both would be additive to my life, but without them I still have a...
I consider myself lucky that I don't feel sex or romance are key to my happiness. I think that with the right person either or both would be additive to my life, but without them I still have a great existence. My feelings here aren't magically positive. I do legitimately have a very comfortable life. There are no external sources of stress. My health is good. My finances are good. But if everyday life was painful then I could see how love and sex would appear as solutions to my happiness problem.
I may not be like other people. But maybe I'm not too different. I think the question we should be asking ourselves is why are so many people miserable by default. What kind of world have we created where people are living in pain and need sex to be happy?
That's just the key. A relationship needs to be two whole people enhancing each other, or it will become a toxic dependency at some point. Other people cannot fix your problems if you have any,...
I consider myself lucky that I don't feel sex or romance are key to my happiness. I think that with the right person either or both would be additive to my life, but without them I still have a great existence.
That's just the key. A relationship needs to be two whole people enhancing each other, or it will become a toxic dependency at some point. Other people cannot fix your problems if you have any, you need to do that yourself, and start liking yourself, and then other people will start to like you too.
I can see how it sounds high and mighty, but that's just how it is. I can totally see how people might look for sex as solution to something and it is nice, but it will only keep the emptyness inside you at bay for a time, it will come back, because it's not a permanent solution.
Maybe it isn't necessarily that people need a relationship to feel happy, but as very important for adding stuff like wholesomemess or intimacy (or more overtly, sex) to their lives even if they...
Maybe it isn't necessarily that people need a relationship to feel happy, but as very important for adding stuff like wholesomemess or intimacy (or more overtly, sex) to their lives even if they don't need it, or they're not meaningfully lacking anything else, meaning that not having a Girlfriend is that much more apparent.
As someone who struggled for many years with a complete and utter lack of romantic/sexual prospects, I'm very thankful I didn't fall down the incel hole. I sympathize with many of those people, and if I didn't have friends, some of which were female, I don't know that I wouldn't have ended up there.
I found the statistics portion of this to be rather interesting
To me this implies that modern dating apps which are often more sexually oriented are failing the market for Women. This isn't really addressed in the article - the article is focused on men since they comprise the majority of incels, but I think it's something that could have been expounded upon in a bit greater detail.
This is an interesting one to tease apart. I'm not sure I have any solid leads here, but I would imagine a lot of this has to due with increasing globalization leading to people interacting differently (online as opposed to in person, and in echo chambers as opposed to diverse places) and this is leaving men in the dust because they tend to be less social with less social skills. I've certainly seen among my younger cohorts at work that more and more of them are spending too much time at work and not valuing pursuing their own hobbies and interests outside of work, precisely the place many women are looking to find potential partners.
I see both of these as a failing of the capitalistic and globalistic environment that we exist in, in the 20th century. Social pressures shape us from the very moment we are born, teaching us to value wealth above personal happiness. We then enter school at a young age which is designed to pump out productive workers, once again instilling the value of work. We cram in extracurriculars to compete with the global market of students, not the ones we are interested in but the ones which are most likely to get us into a good institution so that we can land a good job. We're taught to evaluate whether our career will bring us a good income and told to avoid frivolous degrees or ones like liberal arts which won't make us a good income, regardless of the benefits to mental health it may provide. We spend our time at home, online, among groups of individuals who think similarly to us, reducing the diversity of opinion and learning opportunities that increased socialization can provide us. Men tend to socialize circumstantially through activities whereas women do activities circumstantially through socializing. Male emotional intelligence suffers on account of treating them like breadwinners in a society which hyperfocuses on income and business success and doesn't spend enough time on maintaining a healthy social network.
I also, like the author, do not have any answers to the problems presented here. I think the problems are based in a changing society, but have less to do with the society changing and more to do with the social values we have been instilling for hundreds of years being combined with an ever forward progression of how darn good we are becoming at maximizing shareholder value at any cost. We often don't have time to take a step back and consider the ramifications of what we have done, or envision the costs that financial optimization can have on a human society. Emotional intelligence is only just starting to catch on as an important skill to have as is hard science to back up the idea of a healthy social network. Will these advances in science cause a backlash against financial optimization and start remembering the human again? I sure hope so, but I won't be waiting with baited breath.
Oh gosh, I can go on about the failure of dating apps FOR HOURS. Since I'm supposed to actually get some work done today I'll try to hit on some of the high level problems I see.
Dating apps incentivize matches because that's what gets you to rate the app and subscribe. Incentivizing matches means that you will be shown people who have liked you at a higher rate than people who have not yet swiped on you (as well as potentially showing more people who paid than those who did not). This has a few downstream effects based on how people generally interact. First off, some people will treat these apps as "who would I fuck" and swipe quite rapidly, often times swiping 'yes' more often than swiping 'no'. The outcome of this is that it increases their visibility to others - while you might match with them, the quality of the match is very low and shallow in nature.
Secondly, because men are often more willing to devote time to these apps and because they are more likely to make the first move, this causes a huge imbalance in how masculine and feminine presenting people interact with these apps. No matter what a femme presenting individual does, they will see a lot of guys who swiped on them because they are swarmed with men who want to have sex. This imbalance means that women spend less time searching for matches and often will match much faster than men because their deck is so jam packed with people who already liked them that the algorithm doesn't feel the need to present them many other individuals who haven't already liked them. This low quality of what they see when they do interact causes women to disengage with the platform, meaning even less men will be surprised by someone in their stack who has already liked them. The very nature of how these apps are designed causes accelerationism towards the behavior of men swiping forever and women never swiping.
As an aside, this leaves a weird predicament for gay dating and in particular lesbian or femme dating and is a big reason why grindr took off and many apps like her and fem are starting to pick up slack on the femme side.
This assumes that quality can be assessed with the way that dating apps present people. I have yet to see a dating app that actually does a halfway decent job at figuring out whether any two individuals are compatible. OKCupid has tried to do this with questions which you can answer, rate their importance, and the answers that you would accept, but this was crowdsourced and because of such there are many frivolous questions and questions of wokeness that don't really serve any purpose.
The whole idea of dating 'at your level' is mostly nonsense anyways. Yes, on the extremes of physical attractiveness you have people that perhaps would not consider partners of at least a certain level of physical attractiveness, but there are countless examples of couples in which one is more physically attractive than the other by conventional standards. Here's the thing - humans are diverse as hell and because of such have varied thoughts on what is attractive and physical features do not necessarily dominate what they are looking for. In fact, women tend to be much more malleable on whom they are willing to date with regards to physical qualities than men are but much less malleable when it comes to personality and qualities like compassion and empathy. There's a disconnect in how people tend to approach these apps and none of the apps try to balance against the cultural norms that gender and society present us and because of such they tend to end up making the problems even worse.
They keep redoing their system. My understanding is that there is no longer an ELO system, but it still doesn't stop the general patterns. I generalized to some extent, but even if you are matching regularly and have a high ELO in the old system, it's very easy to game and a quick cursory google search will show you exactly how to game the system. Regardless, ask your feminine friends about their experience with these apps and I can almost assure you that the difference in how many people like them versus a masc presenting individual will easily paint the picture for you. I know women who have paid for the app and get thousands of likes per week who are much less conventionally attractive than some masc people I know who have paid for the app and get exponentially less.
Somewhat disagree here, but not worth going into it because I don't have a great solution anyhow.
Yes, you're precisely proving my point. They don't just look at physical attractiveness, they are just as likely to match on things much more difficult to quantify such as 'creativeness'. The idea that you could tell any of this from a profile is nonsense, about the only thing you can tell from most dating apps is whether they are physically attractive, which some people value over other traits, but as I stated is not very universal and is somewhat sex/gender disparate.
I also think it's important to point out that second note about physical attractiveness level really only measures someone's willingness to interact on an app designed to physically rate people on whether they would meet up with people as physically attractive as they were. Not a great source for drawing population level conclusions about how people actually date and where they set the boundaries for what is acceptable and what isn't in regular life.
I think this is a very biased take. Plenty of people out there have more malleable levels of what they consider physically attractive than you do, and so the notion that someone wouldn't date you because you don't think you're attractive enough or that you're too attractive for them is not as straightforward as it seems like you're trying to present here.
Physical attraction works differently based on context though. Still pictures prioritize a certain type of very conventional attractiveness. But in person you see a lot more of a person. For example, one of the sexiest things about me is my voice. But how would I have put that front and center on Tinder?
And it even applies to purely visual stuff. It's different seeing someone in motion versus as a still image. A lot of things about your general mien and demeanor can make an otherwise average looking person stand out. As another personal example, I'm only 5'9" but if you ask someone to guess my height without me in the room they will generally assume 6 feet and then be surprised to notice that I'm not. I've been told that I "have the swagger of a much taller man." At the end of the day 2-3 inches isn't that big but simply having good posture and general physical "presence" or charisma goes a long way at making you seem bigger. If I met a girl in a bar it literally would not register for her, but on a dating app all they will see is 5'9" to make the decision on.
That's why your profile needs to just say "I have a great voice and an eleventy inch cock" :)
The problem that I have with dating apps, that perhaps women also have, is that I come into it skeptical. Every person needs to prove themselves to meet my standards and it's just not a good medium for that. I would much rather have a real imperfect person in front of me than the millions of facades that are available on a social media app. I think that also helps my odds in attracting someone. I'm not interested in tuning a dating profile for matches. I just want to meet people, evaluate them, and then make a decision and I want others to do the same with me. Do people still do speed dating?
This was a good article and I like the take on it. Being ugly to his group isn't going to improve the world at all. I'm not saying we should excuse their behavior, and I don't think the author is either. I really like the idea of reaching out with kindness. I mean, it certainly couldn't hurt anything to try.
I think the most important thing any of us can do is to steer those we know personally away from toxic thoughts about relationships and sex. If they actually consider themselves an incel it may be too late, but there are certainly dozens of steps before "incel" where they can be turned around.
I think one thing worth wondering is if a lot of these people feel they're stuck between blaming women and blaming themselves for their failures, and some pick blaming women because it's less heavy on them, even if it's obviously wrong. Just because blaming women is clearly worse doesn't mean blaming yourself is the good ending.
There’s also the Menslib/Social Justice take of blaming society and gender roles, but that take seems to be far from the mainstream and I don't think its entirely unreasonable to wonder if men using the social justice framework to air their grievances might sound strange when a large focus of social justice is to take down patriarchal norms and give equality to women.
You're right that to the mainstream it sounds strange for men airing grievances to be a part of "social justice" (I put that in quotes just because the exact definition of the term varies so wildly depending on who you talk to). That said, I would argue those people are wrong. Men discussing the ways society and gender norms have failed them is critical for society to move forward. The patriarchy doesn't just hurt women. Toxic masculinity harms men too. Taking down patriarchal norms isn't only going to help women, it helps raise everyone up.
I agree, I'm just talking about how it might sound to potentially a lot of people, since toxic masculinity and other issues specific to or more frequent in men aren't something talked about too often IMO.
It might be difficult for them because their low standards (which seem to be any living woman willing to have sex with them) is counter-intuitively lowering their dating pool. It's like a finger trap - pulling it apart makes it grabs on tighter. You need to push your fingers in to take the trap off. These people would be marginally more desirable if they had higher standards. Probably not enough to overcome a hatred of women, though.
I agree a lot of those people probably don't have a good idea of what they want and can/can't tolerate in a relationship and their partner and just operate on the assumption that most women will do, but I also wonder if some of those people would be too worried about just finding someone that will have a relationship with them to actually state and filter for what they want if they figured if out anyway.
That being said, this holds on the assumption that this scarcity mindset is at least based on their experiences and can't easily be 'solved' or significantly mitigated by stuff like being more hygienic, paying attention to how they put things when talking* or giving limited relevance to rejections from people who would never be good partners for you anyway, or just not being a misogynist, which definitely doesn't apply to everyone.
Also, the stereotype for incels in particular is that they have comically high standards, so that doesn't apply to everyone that relates to, for lack of a better term, "the feel of no gf".
*Admittedly not an ideal example IMO.
I consider myself lucky that I don't feel sex or romance are key to my happiness. I think that with the right person either or both would be additive to my life, but without them I still have a great existence. My feelings here aren't magically positive. I do legitimately have a very comfortable life. There are no external sources of stress. My health is good. My finances are good. But if everyday life was painful then I could see how love and sex would appear as solutions to my happiness problem.
I may not be like other people. But maybe I'm not too different. I think the question we should be asking ourselves is why are so many people miserable by default. What kind of world have we created where people are living in pain and need sex to be happy?
That's just the key. A relationship needs to be two whole people enhancing each other, or it will become a toxic dependency at some point. Other people cannot fix your problems if you have any, you need to do that yourself, and start liking yourself, and then other people will start to like you too.
I can see how it sounds high and mighty, but that's just how it is. I can totally see how people might look for sex as solution to something and it is nice, but it will only keep the emptyness inside you at bay for a time, it will come back, because it's not a permanent solution.
Maybe it isn't necessarily that people need a relationship to feel happy, but as very important for adding stuff like wholesomemess or intimacy (or more overtly, sex) to their lives even if they don't need it, or they're not meaningfully lacking anything else, meaning that not having a Girlfriend is that much more apparent.
Intimacy and affection I get but I think people that complain about lack of sex need to up their masturbation game.