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Which high school friend took a path you didn't expect?
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Cry me a river. Being treated badly isn't a good or valid reason to treat others badly.
And you're definitely not doing the same thing to women (blaming them as a generalized, abstract category) when you speak like this, got it, sure, sure.
Man, this couldn't get any more sad and funny at the same time. Whew, thanks for the laugh.
But seriously, you really need to learn to let go of that pain and try to not blame the opposite gender at large for what you see as perceived failures on their part. If you have only ever experienced women saying your intergenerational trauma is your own problem... you might be just as guilty of the "sin" of choosing to pursue the wrong type of person as you claim women are.
I personally have had loads of supportive and loving women in my life, so it's hard for me to wrap my mind around this mindset. Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe it has something to do with me not making generalized statements about women in general instead of accepting them all as unique, flawed individuals just as much as anyone else, including myself.
Dude, you're being really based here
Thank you kindly for the compliment.
You could say the same to women who use their trauma as an excuse to berate men.
Maybe there are some who don't act like that, but at least online they seem ubiquitous. Hence the famous "man or bear" question, and basically every thread that's ever existed in a feminist space online. I'm simply reporting the evidence of my eyes and ears.
At the very least, if women give themselves a free pass to make sweeping generalizations about men, then I don't want to hear any grandstanding about how I'm supposedly generalizing about them when I say it's a common occurrence.
If a woman chooses to date abusive men, that's a failure on her part. Acknowledging that they have a responsibility in that decision isn't "blaming the opposite gender at large," and the fact that it's so taboo to even point this out is problematic.
I don't pursue anyone anymore, because women have made it clear that they don't want to be pursued. The only guys left pursuing women are the ones who don't respect boundaries, and what that means for natural selection is fairly easy to guess. Assholes will reproduce, and "losers" like me will perish. You'll get the day you asked for when all the "nice guys" are gone.
Even if I did choose to only pursue women who don't blame me for the sins of all men everywhere, her friends and the rest of society would just say I chose her because I picked her out as "an easy target" who "doesn't stand up for herself," because they'll always assume my intentions are predatory and never simply "wow, she's an introvert just like me. She likes books, I like books. She doesn't like parties, I don't like parties. We could really work together!"
Well, look at you! You must be well-adjusted, maybe conventionally attractive, certainly in possession of social skills. You might have a good sense of humor, a charming personality. In any case, you're probably generally likeable. You probably had plenty of women in your life growing up, and some positive male role models as well. Likely plenty of opportunities to interact with your peers and develop socially in an organic way.
What about someone who was homeschooled and isolated growing up, kept in a conservative bubble and fed lies about "evil liberals," sheltered, brainwashed, and gaslit about what's true or false? No opportunities to interact with peers, to develop social skills in an organic way the way most people do during the formative years of their development.
What if the only women in one's life was one's own mother, and the occasional visit from an aunt or two, all conservative? What if the only male role models were narcissists with exploding tempers, and an older brother with abusive tendencies?
What about when that person finally enters the world and attempts to socialize, with no basic social skills to go off of, and is immediately singled out, ostracized, bullied, and universally disliked?
And then that person goes on to become an adult. Do you think they'll just magically develop social skills and become well-adjusted, simply because they're legally an adult now and are expected to have a minimum level of "maturity," or what the general consensus dubs "maturity"?
Go on, and blame me for having no friends. Go ahead and blame more for having no healthy relationships, no supportive women in my life, no positive role models to look up to and emulate.
Go ahead and fucking blame me, I don't care. It's just fucking typical. I've been putting up with that my whole life. It comes as no surprise.
Sounds like you've gone down tbe blackpill/incel rabbit hole, hopefully these videos might help. You should also at least read books such as cPTSD by Pete Walker if you're not looking for therapy, which is for everyone.
Dating Advice that applies to everyone
Debunking the toxic manosphere
I'm not in the fucking manosphere, I hate that machismo bullshit. And if being unable to get laid makes me worthless or lesser in your view, then you're promoting toxic masculinity more than you realize.
Any time I express a shred of self-respect, people call me names like "incel," "redpilled," or whatever. Sorry, if you want me to be perpetually self-debasing to earn your approval then you can fuck off and I'll continue to be a friendless recluse. I don't care, I'm already used to it.
If telling my story and talking about the challenges I've faced means I'm "redpilled," then everyone can fuck off. You can't expect sympathy from me if I've never gotten sympathy from anyone else.
I'm tired of being gaslit that my problems don't exist and that I've supposedly been brainwashed into believing in my own problems by a bunch of douchebag influencers who I don't even listen to, who I despise as people and fundamentally disagree with philosophically. They're the abusive assholes that I'm talking about.
No, you're just angrily venting indistinguishable to someone who is, making up my position, and getting angry at what you made up. If that's how you act when someone offers any sort of help than go ahead and ignore it.
You're not helping your case by telling people who actually get laid regularly "don't be a cuck," though. If you don't want people to throw you in that handbasket, then maybe stop giving them reason to do so through the way you speak and present yourself? Then turning around and blaming them for it?
I mean, I definitely don't feel like a cuck because a woman with serious issues that stemmed from trauma stopped talking to me (and later admitted to stalking me afterwards, wondering what I was up to), when I was dating someone new who was a better fit for me within six months (a beautiful punky redhead with a killer rack). Nevermind that this was also all 22 years ago for me. Nevermind that I've also never wanted to get married or have kids. She's doing well now, has kids, is married to someone kind and loving, and I'm happy for her for that. I'm happy she worked through her trauma and didn't keep going down the same path of submitting to abuse.
You're giving people lots of people good reasons to make such assumptions and then you blame them for not knowing your personal history after some throwaway internet posts where you make some seriously misogynistic statements and aren't initially giving your background. You don't have to be steeped in machismo to be a misogynist, in fact it can be argued that the 4chan incel crowd feel the same, which is where all the talk about "Chads and Staceys" comes from, where they, like you feel not attractive, feel like they have bad social skills, and get angry at the world for not holding their hand like a baby through it instead of making an effort to do better themselves, even if it takes a long time, a lot of effort, a lot of pain, and a lot of rejection.
But as I said elsewhere, you obviously need help. We all need help. But you won't be able to move forward until you accept help and accept your own part in how all this works instead of all the blame being on external factors and external actors. We absolutely play a part in how others perceive us and judge us, and we can't always blame others for those rationally made judgments if we're giving them good reasons to hold those judgments.
Whatever. I don't have a case. Certainly not one that would benefit from any amount of help. I'm clearly past the threshold of being helpable, so what's it matter? You're just witnessing the off-venting of years of pent up cynicism. Don't expect it to be prosocial or beneficial.
And I don't know, maybe if society didn't ostracize people for being unable to get laid then you wouldn't end up with a large group of maladjusted angry miscreants forming an online community centered on their shared aspects of identity?
Maybe if "involuntary celibate" wasn't an insult, then guys who don't get laid would be able to get over it and adjust as regular members of society. But if they're ostracized for it, and treated as if their worthiness as a person is somehow lesser because they don't get laid, then maybe it's not entirely their fault that they're bitter and frustrated at the world?
If "vagina" is treated as social currency, then what the fuck do you expect to happen?
The thing is here, you're the only one seemingly holding it up as social currency. I think you really need to think about that. Because I have close friends who are asexual, they're not and never have been driven by sex, and they're some of the funniest, most thoughtful, most artistic, most pro-social people I have in my life. Genuinely one of my best friends has had one girlfriend in his life and has been celibate by choice since, and he is one of the most prolific artists I know and I wish he could get a foot in the door with his comedy writing, because I think his stuff should be on television or other media. I listen to the albums he has released regularly. He has a vibrant social life and many friends and literally no one cares that he has no interest in sex.
If you think "people who get laid" hold it up as a social currency, you're the one who actually holds it as a currency.
I don't hold it up as social currency, but just cause you can name some exceptions doesn't mean the trend isn't a big one. If it wasn't treated as social currency, then why would "incel" even be an insult? "He fucks" is often left as a compliment on posts where someone says something cool. "You can't even get your dick wet" is often said to people as a way to degrade them.
Maybe your social circle is healthier than the ones I grew up in and was exposed to in my early adulthood. Good for you and all your friends, I guess. When people found out I was a virgin when I was 18 (it was by choice at the time as I was abstinent until 19), they treated me like I was less than human.
And you think that doesn't leave a long-term psychological impact that lasted deep into my twenties? "Oh no, gotta get laid so people will respect me." Don't act like it's something I made up in my fucking head.
Asexual people often complain about society viewing them as lesser, different, or incomprehensible due to their disinterest in sex. Why would that be the case if society didn't treat it like social currency?
Psychological studies have been done and shown that women tend to ascribe more subjective attractiveness to men who get laid. So it's not even just men doing it to each other.
Incel is an insult because people like you make it your whole personality and are bitter sad sacks who make it the worlds problem instead of choosing to look inward. People give up and insult incels not because they can't get laid, but because they make their whole lives about it instead of finding anything constructive to do with their time like my asexual friends do. If you think people actually make fun of incels because they don't get laid and not that they fail to see how their shitty fucking attitudes is why they don't get laid while latching on to anything to try to justify it except their own shit behavior and beliefs, you're missing the forest for the trees.
Also, I didn't get laid until I was 20. You are literally reaching for any, and I mean any, reason for this to not be your fault and to justify being bitter and angry and unlikeable.
Seriously man, and I say this with no ill-intent or judgment, you need a therapist. This is way too much for me, an internet stranger, to unpack. I go to therapy for chronic depression that I had long before I was diagnosed with cancer when the depression got worse. I often feel like the universe taunts me by giving me everything I've ever dreamed of and then slapping it out of my hands and pointing and laughing. I'm not blaming you for anything, but we all have time to grow and the ability to grow and change and not be the person we were raised to be with the limitations placed on us. I was sent to an extremely small private Baptist school where the only "friends" I had were the same 18 kids from kindergarten to middle school, and I was mostly bullied and ostracized by them. My mother was overbearingly Christian and lacked education herself and had trauma from losing her first children to being kidnapped by her ex-husband which led her to being overly controlling because she would panic about losing us the same way. My extended family was similar to yours, it sounds like as well. I am by no means conventionally attractive and have been overweight the majority of my life.
Our experiences and trauma don't define us. The pain and problems we suffered aren't what make us who we are unless we allow them to. That bitterness you hold for it all, that deep contempt for a world where you assume everyone is going to reject you or judge you before even giving them the chance to do so is a choice, even if it doesn't feel like one. I just try to let such judgments roll off my back, because they will always be there, there will always be someone else judging us or rejecting us. I learned that in high school when I found out there was some kid who hated me and thought I got all the attention from women because of one of my few friends who even had a boyfriend who wasn't me. It made no sense because she was just my friend and was dating someone else, and it just made me laugh, because it was so patently absurd.
The only blame I can lay at your feet is your unwillingness to be open to the opportunity for things to be different instead of crawling inside a shell of self-protection by rejecting others before they can reject you, and even then I can understand why your trauma makes that hard. It's been hard for me in similar ways, but I promise you life is easier if you don't do that. I promise that you don't have to reject everyone to protect yourself, and that you're doing yourself more harm and disservice by doing so than you would by being open to the opportunity for something good to happen for once.
What probably makes me the saddest is how much how you speak reminds me of my longest-lived relationship, and the one that troubles me the most about it ending, where she felt like no one would ever love her and people would always judge her for her mental health problems and she had endless panic about being abandoned. I spent so much time and energy trying to prove to her she was worth loving, and that she shouldn't let people's judgments impact her, and that I wasn't going to abandon her. You deserve someone who gives you that kind of effort and time as well, but if you don't allow someone giving you that kind of time and effort to allow yourself to grow and accept that things could be better, try to change your outlook, you will end up still bitter and blaming the world just like she does, which is what ultimately ended our relationship. I worry for her a lot still.
I've been in therapy. I understand the tools and techniques. I've done CBT, DBT, ACT, and others. I've been in residential programs, inpatient, intensive outpatient, regular outpatient, you name it. It can give me a place to vent, get me geared up with tools and excited to start again, a new start, a fresh day, whatever.
But when I go back into society with all my tools from therapy, I still get the same response as always. People don't like me, they never have and they never will. And I got tired of being gaslit by my therapists that my problems were all in my head and I just need to reframe them.
I've had a decade of adulthood to "grow," and I focused intensely on self-help, personal growth, all that stuff. I followed every avenue I could find. And at the end of it all, people only thought it made me self-absorbed. Any social skill I've tried to learn and practice, people sense the unnaturalness and think I'm being a manipulator with some sort of dark psychology techniques. No, it read about "mirroring" and stuff like that in books on interpersonal communication and conflict resolution. Not some narcissist's field manual.
So I have two choices: be awkward and cringe, but genuinely awkward and cringe; or try to be normal, but in a contrived and inauthentic way. I cannot be genuinely normal. That option is not available to me.
Sorry about the traumas you've faced, and I'm glad you could come out on top of it. But you need to recognize that you're the exception rather than the rule. You can't expect everyone to turn out well just because you did.
I spent most of my early twenties as a recluse. I spent my mid-twenties trying to overcome my social anxiety, social ineptitude, and generally trying to integrate into society. I was constantly buffeted by judgement and ill-will, but for years I didn't let it keep me down. I kept trying. I was persistent.
By my mid-to-late twenties, it began to seem insurmountable, my frustrations grew, challenges escalated, and I started cracking. I think there were also some external factors like being doxxed/cybergangstalked, threatened, harassed, gaslit, and all kinds of nastiness. I couldn't prove anything so my doctors called it psychosis.
Anyway, my anxiety reached a crescendo and I began regularly fighting panic attacks. A couple breakdowns later I had my first trip to the mental hospital, which was only more traumatizing. I've been in others since which were more professional, but I'm fairly certain that first one was torturing me (both physically and psychologically) under cover of "treatment."
It was the beginning of a long, slow spiral. I fought to stay afloat all along the way, but things only got worse the more I fought it, like quick sand. It was a long tumble, with plenty of bumps all along the way. I even got arrested at one point for "disorderly conduct" while having an acute psychological episode.
Anyway, several trips to the psych ward later, multiple times in residential therapy, I've given up on thrashing. I don't go in public anymore. I don't even go to the fucking grocery store, say what you will but I get them delivered.
I'll probably never be able to get hired again, even without the apocalyptic nosedive the job market is taking. Even if I could convince someone to hire me, I probably wouldn't be able to hold a job for very long.
I've spiralled too far to try to make a recovery, especially when for every five steps I try to climb, I end up falling thirty. Don't try to give me hope, I don't need that poison.
Yeah, the person you describe in your last paragraph sounds like me. But it's a lot less endearing to be a man and need constant reassurance. Women like that have a chance. I don't.
I already am, dude.
I can tell. I tried to be supportive and understanding here instead of just ragging on you, which I definitely could have. You have rejected it out of hand with excuses of why it just makes sense for you to be bitter and hateful. I don't know what else to tell you. That's on you.
Also, I definitely don't think I'm the exception rather than the rule considering how many men I know who have had similar traumas and are also well adjusted adults who don't blame the whole world for their problems.
If people can't blame the world for their problems, then why the fuck should any of us care about systemic oppression? It's the same logic. Blame the people who suffer for their own conditions.
If my problems don't matter, then no one's do. Or am I some special exception where everyone else's problems matter except mine?
It's absolutely not the same logic. You not being able to get loving people in your life as an individual because of a bad attitude and outlook is not in any way the same as systemic oppression. You are not being systemically oppressed because your shitty outlook and attitude makes you not likeable. You not having people who like you in your life is not anything like people being kidnapped in the streets for being the wrong race or having the wrong politics, being denied legal counsel, food, water, or reasonable living facilities and then being disappeared to a country they've never been to. The comparison is honestly laughable.
You're desperately looking for any way to justify being an angry bitter sad sack. I don't know what to tell you.
Mate, I may or may not be qualified to diagnose anyone and don't know this person intimately, but they're giving off serious cluster B vibes. You can't argue logic with a cluster B personality that doesn't want to hear it. There's the world we live in and there's the world they fabricate, and the harder you push them toward reality, the deeper they delve into their denial of it.
Am I unlikeable because I'm bitter or am I bitter because I'm unlikeable?
It's the first one, I promise. The second one is just the excuse you give yourself. It's a choice you're making to be bitter and unlikable, as much as you want to pretend it's not.
Okay, then I'll go back in time and tell my five-year-old self that it's actually my fault that I'm being picked on, that I'm just genuinely unlikeable and need to stop being bitter.
Maybe then I'll earn my dad's approval, and everyone who's taken advantage of me, bullied me, or treated me like a pushover ever since will magically respect me.
You're an adult, and you don't change it by telling your child self that, you change it by having some fucking self respect and not blaming every person who has mistreated you for why you should never trust or be kind to anyone else ever. Your own inability to accept your own lack of boundaries when it comes to being taken advantage of or treated like a pushover is evidence of that. I've been hurt too, but I also see when I made mistakes, didn't set clear boundaries, and how that impacted the situations a great deal. I have also seen when my own bad attitude has led people to dislike me, and so I dropped the bad attitude, because it hurt me more than helped me, and honestly, I'm much happier for it. You really ought to try it sometime.
So if I have weak boundaries and let people take advantage of me, then it's my fault and I can't blame others?
But when a woman has weak boundaries and gets taken advantage of, it's not her fault and she can blame men as a whole and take it out on men who had nothing to do with it?
Do you not see the double-standard here? Doesn't that reinforce gender stereotypes where "Men just need to take it on the chin, be a man, be tough. You're responsible for your own destiny. Not women though, they're subject to conditions and don't have any agency or control over their lives."?
Whenever I point this out, people get upset. As if I'm the one advocating for the stereotype. I'm not. I'm pointing out how it endures in the common mentality that we're discussing here.
That's odd because out here in the real world people absolutely let women know that it's their own lack of boundaries that led to being taken advantage of, and nobody gets upset because no one is being a petulant ill tempered dick about it when they do so. You are literally living in a fantasy land you've built for yourself so you don't have to face your own shitty attitude being part of this.