Here's how it works, for incels/femcels

You are lucky enough to make an acquintance with someone.

If you are actually physically ugly - to the point that you know you would find your male counterpart disgusting (fuck me, I know a lot of you indict men for it - now I realize, if you're ugly, it's easy to commit that sin because the bar of who is "more attractive to you" is so long) - you will be lucky for friendship. It is typically not even a question that if you are over 25, they will not be single. So even just to have them as a psychic presence in one's life will be all you can hope for.

But what's far, far worse is this - since this will probably happen at work (if you are lucky enough to be employed), that can end.

That's the reality. If you get out of college with no close friends and no way to make them, no people who might hook you up, nothing, you're going to be alone...possibly for life. For ordinary single adults, it is an entire job seeking friends, letting alone mates, and maintaining appearance - hair, body, face.

And I'm young, chronologically, but I feel so fucking old. It feels like an emotional death sentence. It gets worse with time, actually, not easier.

I'm in my 30s, it took five years to become employed, and instead of spending my days alone, humiliated, send out resumes that were probably immediately flushed, and going on horrible job interviews....I spend my days with coworkers. For the first time in 5 years of miserable, humiliating, isolating contract work, I am an employee, and they are the closest things I have to friends. Obviously, that creates issues even for single people who aren't fem/incels. How can dating coworkers not blow up in one's face, as a femcel, when it's highly likely that person would only interested briefly anyway, then dump you?

I wrote elsewhere about a coworker who is leaving my city and transferring out....he is married. I knew this was coming. He has elderly family in another state.

I haven't seen him in the flesh since March 2020. If I go back to my office just to say goodbye, they'll use that as an excuse to force me to come back for good, I fear - I wonder if I could fight that, though, since they're gotten rid of my desk. And it'd look fucking creepy. But I digress.

And then it hits me - I'll never see this man again! Never again! He's going to move four hours away out of our shithole overpriced cesspool of a city, and that'll be that. And I laugh to myself - what can I say to him? "Please don't leave me"? "Please don't leave until I can say goodbye in person for the last time"? This man has a real life I have no part in. I hate myself for giving this much of a shit of a person who realistically only sees me as a coworker. He seems like a friend because he's so nice, not because of anything I hold over people.

Getting to see him, be around him, and hear his voice was the one bright spot of being in this office. Not wanting to disappoint him was a reason to work harder. It's a curse, being an ugly socially maladroit woman. You and your sentiments become a curse on other people, but there is no poison as wearying - other than terror, or humiliation - as unrequited affection for someone, friendship-based or otherwise.

I had accepted passively there was zero chemistry between this person and myself. I look at his beautiful face now and instead of fantsizing, I imagine my disgusting, putrid, hairy, smelly, PCOS-ridden, aching, ugly, animalistic body befouling him, making him dirty with a body I find so indecribably filthy and ugly.

But he was a confidante in this office and a friend.

I have never had the same hold on another person as they had on me, that I cared for. I have nothing of value to offer but blind love itself, and of course, being such a stupid, basic, pathetic POS, that admiration is held for people who have to fend off others' attentions, who are dragged down by their own popularity. By other's neediness.

That's all I get. I spent more time talking to this person than people who have known me for years. Getting to sit with this group in a conference room during lunch and talk about life, joke around, and enjoy the camaraderie was the experience I did not get in college nor have I had since. It's pathetic, how important this small source of pleasure was. I miss it all the time. I only had this sense of belonging and distinct history with people my own age in high school, before this office.

Proximity and the odd fantasy of resting a hand on his or holding him and getting to look him in the face was enough. At this stage, I think I could die of joy with that, if that's all a man wanted to do for me. That's all I'd ask of him, to be allowed to touch him and look at him, and be told he loves me, that my desire fulfills him. Christ, imagine being told your love - an unbidden curse, for ugly people, a source of bottomless humiliation and wrenching torment - mattered to someone you cared for.

I'm so beyond the point I'll ever enjoy being acted on in sex anyway. My skin is a literal hair shirt God sealed me into.

I wish I were like his wife. I wish I looked like her, not knowing anything about her. I cannot imagine getting to look like, be like, have the things necessary to have a man so good.

**And that's the point - again and again, even if someone comes into your life and provides you with some kindness and happiness, just for the privilege of being near them....of course they'll be taken and spoken for. ** You and I know it. Some of you have talked about the despair you feel finally finding someone kind to you in a class, a shared friend circle....people like the man I'm describing typically are hidden from wretches. They don't end up in the same place. They fly high.

It was dumb luck that brought me this person, and now, I am losing him, and I'm SO FUCKING UPSET, because the worry of what next year will be like at my job, in my city as it re-opens and it becomes abundantly clear how bad things have gotten - that isn't enough. Worry about everything that's changing isn't enough.

The thought of missing his departure is actually driving me so nuts I'm considering going back to to the office. I left my city a year ago when our office closed; it did a "soft" re-open in June to train all the new hirees, and they gave away my fucking desk! The office is full of 20 people per day, open plan. I would never go back to my office again, if I had the option. I painted myself into a fucking corner.

My mother's instinctual crazy and controlling behavior has upped during the pandemic. I can just picture her reaction if I say I'm going home in mid-November (his last week will be the first week of December), since she'll insist we spend the holidays together, etc. Every crime story she catches sends her reeling (she's not wrong, it's gotten significantly worse.)

I don't even have the illusion I would ever share a bed with this man. I would like to hold him in my arms once and make peace with the fact I'll never set eyes on him again.

I have never had the same hold on another person as they had on me, that I cared for. I have nothing of value to offer but blind love itself, and of course, being such a stupid, basic, pathetic POS, that admiration is held for people who have to fend off others' attentions, who are dragged down by their own popularity. By other's neediness.

If you are a femcel or incel, these people will come into life by accident. Not by something you control.

This has only happened one other time, for a temp job. I've mentioned that person in passing - like a slightly taller Seth McFarlane, and just that time, not drop-dead handsome, but that wasn't the point. He was a kind, generous presence in years and years of being treated like an ugly piece of furniture someone had brought in. And of course, I was only that to him too - a useless fucking temp, someone doing work they wouldn't hire someone to do. Gruntwork.

When you meet someone who makes you feel like that and under circumstances like that, you as a femcel will regret your entire life, your whole existence, the very course of your life - because the person you are exists to deny you something you can see and hear that makes you happy. Someone. It's an illusion, for you. People like that have real friends, real partners. Real relationships.

You won't. Not with anyone.

I still think of the expanse of his soft hands, or how he'd get down on one knee to kneel beside to talk to me. Or the smell of his aftershave. Even the memory makes me sick and aching with longing, head pounding, ears burning off my skull. Never was I more aware of myself, and never sicker I have to be me, than when a man does this to me. Like a fucking pig wishing it were human.

It's been five years since that, and I still think about it. It's so stupid and pathetic. I have to actively chasten myself to not wonder about how his wife met him. Or the spread of his soft, gentle yet masculine hands on her body, in a safe, quiet place. Or the years he must have spent wooing her, and how intoxicating it must be to be chased and desired and loved by such a man. Or how pretty she must be, when I listened to the tone of his voice when he mentioned her. Or getting to share a bed and history with him.

What would it be like to be moving towards a life with someone you want, who does not disappoint you or deceive you? To be worthy of a "good man", the sort of person you or I will only be brought into contact with by luck?

God do I envy the women these men love.

I know I'm assuming things and it's so easy to lionize people based on what little you know - to not see flaws - but I felt I knew these people long enough, listened to what they value, and how they spoke of those they care about, and it hits me like a fireball...this is what life is actually life for some women.

Both of these women - they got to meet these men in real life, not an office, not something that could end with a firing, stir them with desire and love - looking the way they look, thinking the way they think, being who they are. To imagine it...it would be like waking up one morning a goddess. I cannot imagine having the power to make someone change their own lives, to be with me, or having the control of my own life to be with the man I love - because I knew he loved me back.

Purgatory is the happiness of better, happier people. Your desire simply becomes an endless torment, a yardstick for what God chose to bestow on them and blisteringly withhold from you in a fist of iron. If you're a -cel by the time you leave college, unless you have the luck of a Powerball winner (I do know one such quasi-femcel, but only one, and she too met her fiance in younger years...dumb luck brought him back into her life)...you only hold onto the ones you admire, desire, and care for long enough to appreciate you'll never have them, or matter to anyone.

They'll always be taken, have been taken years before, by people who have been living normal happy lives all this time.

What do -cels get on the other side of this? Friendlessness, humiliation, an endless horizon of drab, color-leached ugliness, failure, fear, pain, and loneliness.

With each year I age, with each immeasurable loss and punishment - humiliatingly petty to normies, the fucking world to me - a chasm stretches so wide and so deep, I have to look away so I don't fall in.

I understand why people self-medicate. Life is excruciating and humiliating at once - how could I explain this to anyone but you all, without sounding like a fool?