Of Incels and Romantics
On the latest episode (204) of the always excellent Caribbean Rhythms podcast, BAP defines the true nature of the so-called “incel” and delineates the history of the term, which has become corrupted and misused as it has gone mainstream. I did not know much of this history as I’m too old, but in hearing that the essence of the incel is basically a sensitive young many who is a hopeless romantic, I belatedly realized that I too was an incel before such term existed. Like most if not all teenage males, I didn’t have nearly as much sex as I wanted, which if I’d had my druthers would have been at least three times a day in my late teens and early twenties. But more than that, I was hopelessly torn between my base libidinal cravings for copulation and my idealistic longing for true love based on some kind of deep, transcendent, spiritual connection—the sort of thing you hear about in doo wop songs. I wasn’t looking for a soul mate per se, because I wasn’t looking to get married young, but I wanted to meet and date women who were both beautiful and interesting, who stirred my feelings and excited my heart and mind as well as my loins. To adapt the psychology of Gurdjieff, a woman who could engage all my “centers”: physical, emotional, intellectual, and even what he calls the higher emotional and higher intellectual centers, which are not easily accessible for most people, because most people (normies, in contemporary terms) are asleep at the wheel.
I did manage to find a girl like this, exactly two and only two times. The first was when I was seventeen, and then not again until I was twenty-seven. I am a believer in the Three Great Ones theory put forth by Chazz Palminteri in A Bronx Tale: you only get three great ones in life, they come along every ten years like the great fighters. Except he got all three of his when he was sixteen, and I only got two. That happens sometimes.
In both cases, these were short-lived relationships, whirlwind romances. I fell in love more or less instantly, and I fell hard. I experienced heights of happiness and pleasure that I’ve never found anywhere else, and when the relationships ended, I experienced the worst heartbreaks of my life. When I compare these to the long-term relationships I’ve had, there is no comparison. The long term relationships tended to start off slower and last a lot longer. Whatever passion was there at the beginning slowly dissipated over time, such that when they ended, there was bitterness and sadness but no heartbreak. It’s the difference between sudden death and a long, slow, fatal illness.
I suppose if you could somehow compare them energetically, the long term relationships were just as powerful as the short romances, but the energy was stretched out over a much longer period of time, so it was never as powerful at any one moment. The great ones had the voltage amped up, concentrated; they were like being on drugs, not in a soporific way but rather with heightened perception and abundant energy. When someone asked Gurdjieff what it was like to have the higher centers be active, he said “Everything more vivid.” They are the only times I can recall being so happy I could not suppress a smile.
After the first one, I looked for the next one right away. This made dating a series of disappointments, both because sometimes I was unsuccessful in getting the girl I wanted, and at other times I could get her, and she turned out to not be what I wanted. I would sometimes fixate on girls who were unattainable because they were taken, and I would project onto them the fantasy that they were the kind of quality girl that I dreamed of. Indulging in unrequited love is a perverse kind of masochism.
If I understand BAP correctly, it would seem that contemporary “incels” have something like my situation, only much worse. I was not particularly good looking or charming as a young man, and I knew fuck all about female psychology, partly because I had been mindfukt by popular culture, but I did manage to have girlfriends at least sometimes, and I was fortunate enough to have really great romances a couple times, even if they didn’t last very long.
But then I think that’s a key element of powerful romance: by its nature, it can’t last. You either break up and get your heart broken, or you stay together long enough to get sick of each other. The Chilean writer Miguel Serrano, a hopeless romantic about both love and politics, wrote a mythological account of his great love affair with a young woman who died in the prime of her life. Carl Jung wrote a foreword to his book The Visits of the Queen of Sheba, and Serrano reported that after reading the book, Jung told him, “If you meet the Queen of Sheba, don’t marry her.”
There are several ways of looking at this advice. On the one hand, there is the classic division between love and lust. Jung himself seems to have been a practitioner of their compartmentalization, if the events of his life dramatized in the film A Dangerous Method are any indication. (It’s a worthwhile film about Freud and Jung in the early days of modern psychology.) Jung was married and apparently had a typically placid and subdued marital life, but also had an affair with one of his students in which he indulged his wilder sexual appetites. This sort of thing was the norm not only in Europe but in other societies such as Japan. I posted a passage about it from Yukio Mishima on X.
On the other hand, it’s not simply a matter of love and lust, it’s also a matter of the distinction between idealism and practicality. In the Mishima book that I excerpted—his commentary On Hagakure—he says, “The ideal presented in Hagakure may be summed up in one expression, ‘secret love,’ and Hagakure maintains flatly that once love has been confessed, it shrinks in stature; true love attains its highest and noblest form when one carries its secret to the grave.” I said before that unrequited love is a form of masochism, and it’s no surprise that it appealed to Mishima. But does it represent a viable path for the modern “incel”? (For those who think that Mishima advocates this because of his homosexuality, note that the Troubadours of the Middle Ages also advocated secret and unrealized love, which became the tradition of courtly love.)
BAP says that the modern incel is correct to cling to his romantic ideals against the nature of contemporary culture. I think probably so, but I would add that it depends on what he does with those ideals. If you read The Rational Male by Rollo, he advocates the opposite: get rid of all your “bluepill” false beliefs about women and love. He deconstructs the female psyche much the way Buddhism uses analytical meditation to counter physical lust. (In this practice, you imagine the woman you desire as flesh bag full of shit and blood and pus and other bodily fluids, imagine what she would look like with no hair, no skin, no fascia, etc., and you do this until your desire for her is gone.) For Rollo, by understanding the female mind with its many human, all-too-human qualities, you can short circuit your romantic idealization of women and stop suffering from “one-itis,” the belief in a soul mate.
If you believe that there is “one perfect girl out there, just for you,” it’s probably worth your while to read Rollo and try to get rid of that particular illusion, which can only cause you suffering and be used against you. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem plaguing the modern incel. Rather, like myself in my younger days, they are not looking for The One, they are looking for authentic romance and passion in a world that is increasingly devoid of them. Women are mindfukt by the culture, and increasingly they are physically, hormonally sick as well. (The two go together since hormones strongly influence psychology.) Men have similar problems, but even if a man manages to extricate himself from the muck and mire of contemporary sickness, to become healthy and strong and looksmaxxed and whatever else he needs to do to feel good about himself as a man, he still has the problem of finding a suitable mate, even if only for a short term romance.
As aging men are wont to do, I think about what I would tell my younger self if I could go back in time. “If only I knew then what I know now,” etc. I know some of what I would say, but I’m not sure how much of it would pertain to young men today, who live in a very different world. I do think that, regardless of the many changes that have occurred, the division and compartmentalization that Jung and Mishima talk about is the best way, insofar as it is the only really practical way. What it means in practice is that you keep your ideal view of love and romance, but you also recognize that the world is the way it is, and women are the way they are. Whether you decide to get married or stay single is of secondary importance—what is primary is that whichever you choose, you do so without illusion. You’re probably not going to meet the “woman of your dreams,” and if you do meet her, you might heed Jung’s counsel not to marry her, unless you want a long, slow disillusionment.
For those men who choose to marry, I think it’s better to marry for practical reasons rather than for romance: will she be a good mother for your children (if you want children), will she be a good companion, does she come from a good family, and other such considerations that usually take precedence in arranged marriages. You should look at your own marriage as though you are arranging a marriage for someone else, except the “someone else” is you. Of course you should and probably must have some affection for each other, but that isn’t the same as love in the sense that the Troubadours meant it, and it doesn’t necessarily mean love that is overflowing with passion and intensity. That sort of love may produce robust children, but it is not necessarily or even likely to be the foundation of a long and stable marriage, precisely because it is ephemeral, unstable, fleeting. Therein also lies its value and preciousness. (Therein also lies its danger, for it clouds the mind like nothing else and you may well get caught up thinking you definitely want to marry this girl because you’re definitely going to love her this intensely forever.)
If you have it in your nature to want and seek this rarer love, you have a few options. You can be single and chase passion wherever you find it, if you find it. You can satisfy your lust with simple affairs, or with prostitutes, as you prefer or as your circumstances allow. If you marry, and if your marriage does not fully satisfy your sense of romance, as will almost certainly be the case, eventually if not more or less immediately, then you likewise have several options. You can have affairs on the side—this is the “traditional way” despite what modern “trads” say to the contrary. Some men are ok with this, while others are not, either because of conscience, or lack of practical options, or because the risk to their marriage is not worth the reward, which is fleeting. You aren’t any more likely to find true passion in an extra-marital affair than you are as a single man; if anything, you are far less likely. So the other option is for the married man to have his “secret love,” as Mishima calls it: unrealized, unconfessed, therefore unrequited and never fulfilled.
If that sounds like a recipe for Thoreau’s “life of quiet desperation,” that’s because it is. If none of the options I listed above sound particularly good, you’re right, they’re not. No matter which way you cut it, chasing after after an elusive and quite possibly illusory romance, whether as a single man or “on the side” in a marriage—or trying to turn your marriage into a prolongation of romance, which, despite what all the self-help books say, is not possible—is going to end up wasting a lot of time and energy, and producing a lot of disappointment and suffering.
And this is my problem with holding on to the ideal of romance that today’s incels seem to have. It is fundamentally unsatisfiable. Even if you find a great love and have a whirlwind romance that is as great as you hoped it would be (it’s never great in the way you expect it to be, but it can indeed be great) it will be over in the blink of an eye, and be nothing but a memory, and you’ll be the guy at the bar saying “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” as the bartender cuts you off for the night, just like he did last week and the week before.
I wish I could tell you that there is a secret way, a magical technique to sublimate the desire for impossible love and romance into something else that isn’t as painful and problematic. In The Symposium, Socrates recommends transmuting the desire for love and pleasure into love of wisdom, i.e. philosophy. He may have been hinting at esoteric practices similar to what is also found in certain yogic and Daoist traditions, which are long since lost in the West. So that option doesn’t exist today. And even if it did, I suspect Socrates was being more honest when he said that it was a blessing of old age to finally be rid of the lust that drove him crazy in his youth; in other words, it wasn’t some magical asceticism that rid him of his desires, it was the simple decline of aging.
In the end, the only practical path is to cultivate what Nietzsche called a “pessimism of strength,” to cultivate yourself to the greatest degree possible while trying to rid yourself of romanticism as much as possible, at least as pertains to everyday life. If, as the Hagakure suggests, you keep a “secret love” somewhere in the deep core of your being, guard it well against the world. And if someday Aphrodite should smile upon you and you meet one of the Great Ones, enjoy her with everything you have, appreciate every moment with the fullest awareness you can sustain. And when it’s over and your heart has been torn out, shredded and trampled upon, mourn your loss for a little while, and then get up and get on with the rest of your life. Anyone who told you it would be easy, or would have a happy ending, lied.