When I was younger, I wasn’t sure there was a feeling worse than loneliness. I was a shy kid growing up in the silo of a Texas suburb; shy with such crushing effect that I’d once sat on the floor of a classroom, eyes bulging and face going red, while teachers and students taunted me and tried to bribe me with money to speak. I was desperate to have a boyfriend, someone who loved me, but I couldn’t even look a boy in the eyes. I sought comfort in online spaces, in the dark safety of my room, cossetted and cradled in my monitor’s glow like a nightlight. There I discovered that I had a voice, that I could be funny, witty, and creative, and people were interested in what I had to say. The first time I won a “Daily Deviation” on the website DeviantArt for one of my short stories, I realized maybe my conception of myself as this mute, abased thing could be altered.
Yet even as the internet nurtured me, it inculcated me with a version of reality that was entirely inside my head. My first romantic relationship was entirely online, and after it ended I discovered there was a feeling worse than loneliness: It was being lonely and seeking out poisonous ideologies that glittered with the promise of relief. The Internet is full of explanations for people’s failures and new ways to feel hopeless, but I was young and vulnerable and didn’t understand how destructive those ideas could be.
My post-breakup loneliness seemed to demand explanation, and I could always find someone on the internet willing to offer me one that would affirm my pain. But it was a vicious feedback loop. In seeking to ease my loneliness, I only perpetuated it.
Some days I believed I was neurodivergent and my romantic failures were just an accident of my birth. Other days I dabbled in nihilism, and accepted that all life was a squirming and repulsive blot upon nothingness. Other days I read about famous and brilliant writers who failed at love, like Leo Tolstoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edgar Allan Poe, and told myself that my misery was a byproduct of my genius. At one point I convinced myself I was a lesbian. I would trawl lesbian dating forums and fantasize that I could run into the embrace of a soft and motherly brunette, ignoring the problem of men altogether.
Yet all of those explanations were obliterated the first time I fell in love. I mean, really fell in love, with an actual boy in physical space. All of my preconceived notions about who I was and what the opposite gender meant to me could not survive his kiss that turned me into a shaking wreck. When he held me in the cold woods behind his house, my knees pressed together and my sneakers full of sticky burrs I’d collected along the path, I realized how much I’d flattened myself by seeking explanations in the wounded places on the internet.
There were so many philosophies that could not survive contact with reality, especially when it came to love. The love I found did not bend to the ugliness of maladaptive cope. It did not lay down in the face of statistics and ideologies that claimed it should not exist. It simply was.
Relationship prospects can look grim in the modern era. Gallup reports that we’re self-assessing as lonelier than ever, and Barna reports that only about half of American adults are married, down from two-thirds in the 1950s. The data is concerning, but we should be more concerned by how we actually got there, and what happens to people when they believe the promise of love has been snatched away from them. They start to see the opposite gender not as a romantic prospect, but as the enemy. This perpetuates a cycle of hostile interactions, as these negative attitudes shape the way people perceive and engage with others, which in turn elicits negative responses in turn.
Many forums, newsletters, and social media groups are ostensibly centered around the topic of how to find romantic success, but on further inspection they have more sinister intentions. Places on the internet like the subReddit r/BlackPillScience may at first appear impassioned and rational, but they end up spawning a dark pessimism that distorts everything through a limiting lens. The “Blackpill” is a philosophy that states physical attractiveness is the most important factor of dating success, and people post studies to corroborate this claim, such as how height affects marriage prospects. Other sites, such as The Female Dating Strategy, post articles about how women can learn to avoid “low status males” and their exploitative ways. In one article titled, “Do Looks Matter For Attracting a High Value Man?” the author asserts that “No matter how beautiful you look, the majority of men will still be and act like trash.” FDS rejects the mask of scientific rigor that upholds the blackpill, but instead asserts moral authority. One provides data, and the other provides anecdotes. But both view the opposite sex as hostile.
Love becomes then, not a grand adventure to be undertaken, but a thing that undermines rationality and risk assessment. Love can only be accepted once the potential source of that love has been thoroughly beaten down and defeated in the face of your rightness, its danger wrung out, its violent potential stripped into docility. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “Every religion or philosophy is at bottom an attempt to solve the problem of existence.” For Schopenhauer, the problem of existence was that suffering is fundamental to having a will that can never be fully satisfied. These online movements dispense creeds and rules and facts as talismans of protection against suffering. If inside every woman is a cheating whore, and inside every man is a vile rapist, then maybe we can convince ourselves that disappointment is inevitable, that love is something to be avoided.
It’s not that there aren’t good things that can be gleaned from a cultural focus on gender. If a large percentage of Gen Z men fear approaching women or initiating dates, then anything that would mobilize them into action and self-improvement is a step in a positive direction. Manosphere writer Rollo Tomassi warns against “one-itis,” or the concept of soulmates, in his book The Rational Male—and if a man is hung up on finding a specific woman to suit his rigid preferences, then perhaps this advice could embolden him to seek out different possibilities. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote in her 1987 book Intercourse that “every mother’s son is a potential betrayer,” which might guide women to approach potential dates with more prudence and caution. But these are not comprehensive frameworks of life. As Carl Jung warned in Psychological Types, “Theories in psychology are the very devil. It is true we need certain points of view for their orienting and heuristic value, but they should always be regarded as mere auxiliary concepts that can be laid aside at any time.” Truth may appear in any system we create, but if the system also produces confusion, pain, or bitterness, it is worth reexamining.
A recent viral video clip shows internet personality Justin Waller giving dating advice to a fellow influencer who goes by the name Clavicular. Walker tells Clavicular that taking women on dates is a “waste of time and money” and claims that he only takes women out to eat if he’s with other men. He says, with a punctuated flick of his cigar, “We talk business, and I genuinely ignore her the entire time.” This is a flattened projection of how relationships should work that falls apart beyond the camera: If he dismisses the woman’s attention as not worth seeking, then he never has to feel the core of his being exposed as potentially being unworthy. I can’t imagine, for instance, my grandfather, an Oklahoma farmer and dairyman married to my grandmother for almost 60 years, ever uttering those words. Would the woman you believed wasn’t even worthy to take to dinner drive out to the fields with you to deliver a calf during an ice storm? Would she raise her children to honor you and your legacy, teaching them how to be responsible and good adults? Would she hold your hand as you died and carry the memory of your last breath inside her, swollen with the kind of grief that can only come from devoted love?
If a person is so obsessed with heightism and hypergamy—the belief that people, especially women, always seek partners of higher status—and filling their head with statistics about how the majority of women like men 6-feet or taller or how men prefer younger women, they might be closing themselves off from an unexpected encounter with romance. Some studies claim we make around 35,000 decisions a day, and 95 percent of those are subconscious. The heart does not desire only what we parse and understand with our rational mind; that feeling of so-called irrational love is most likely a composite of thousands upon thousands of judgments that we can’t even fully understand. This feeling is often the subject of many a romance, such as when Jane in Jane Eyre starts to fall in love with Mr. Rochester, who is at first described as ugly and plain:
“And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire.”
Sometimes the solution to escape a false representation of the world really is, like the internet meme, to “touch grass.” The internet is a wonderful place, and has given us so many opportunities, but if you allow it to, it can unhook you from the intuition humans possess that grounds us to the real. If you were to step away from your computer or phone and go outside in a public place, you would see, as Bruce Lee once said, that “the truth is outside of all fixed patterns.” Yes, you would see beautiful young women holding the hands of tall men with sharp jawlines. And if that’s what you were focusing on, maybe that’s all you’d be able to see. But look a little longer and you’d see old and weathered couples, their shoulders pressed together. You’d see doting men pushing women in wheelchairs, exhausted couples toting a bevy of giggling children. You’d see all kinds of unprepossessing people in worn clothing, laughing, their eyes bright and alive.
Maybe you’d realize no mutilating box of ideology can ever contain all that which makes your relationships with other people so special. Maybe you’d realize their love for life made them beautiful.
