"If You Can't Love Yourself, How the Hell Are You Gonna Love Somebody Else?"

For extended portions of my adult life, I was celibate.  For a period of about three or four years, while I was exploring becoming a Roman Catholic priest, this was part of an intentional program--I was "voluntarily celibate," or "volcel" to use the term that has become popular in the Discourse.  But, for the rest of that period, I would have rather not been.  So, most of my adult life has been spent as an "incel."

Now, as it turns out, this is no longer true.  And, truthfully, it is great.  I would not go back to the way things were 18 months ago for any amount of money.  But that is only tangentially related to actual sexual activity.  Sex is fun and nice and makes me feel like I am desirable and powerful and that is wonderful.  But far, far better is lying in bed, fully clothed, with someone I love in my arms, talking and laughing.  If my choices were sex every night with a different woman and no sex but cuddling every night with the woman I love, I would take the latter and not think twice.

What I was missing was not sex, but love.  And, to be more precise, love of a particular kind.  What I wanted was someone who could say "yup, I freely pick you, over and above everyone else in the world."  Because the truth was that I had a number of situations in my life where I met wonderful, smart, dynamic, incredible women who said, "oh Mike, I would pick you. . . except for this other person."  I came in second a lot in my romantic life.  And that is a pretty terrible feeling.  I thought it meant that I was broken in some way.  Useful, sure.  Interesting to be around, definitely.  But not someone to be picked as the one and only.  I thought people were seeing something in me, and it was causing me to be consigned to a permanent silver medal.

And, I was right, but not in the way I thought at the time.  I thought that if someone picked me to be The One, then it would validate me as a person who could be loved in that way.  I needed someone else to fix me, and in their refusal to fix me in that way it demonstrated the need to be fixed.  And, until someone freed me from that status, that is who I was--broken, flawed, unlovable.

The problem is, when you set things up this way, the other person, the potential object of your affections, becomes, well, an object.  That person is a tool that is there to fill the empty space inside you.  And that's not love.  You cannot truly want the good of the other in an unqualified way if you simultaneously need the other person to prop up your psyche and make you whole.  That self-preservation instinct will always be at war with wanting the best for the other person.  And this is true no matter how truly you want to love the other person.  Good intentions cannot cover up the underlying problem.

I don't know if any of the people in my past saw this and had it inform their decision-making, or they sensed it and had it impact them on a subconscious level, or if they had no idea and this is coincidence.  What I do know is that I spent years of work getting to the point where I could look at myself, cognizent of all of my manifold flaws and imperfections, and be content with that person I saw.  I came, through time and work and the assistance of a wonderful counselor, to love myself--to feel that I was complete in myself.  And, soon after coming to that place of peace, I met Danielle.  You could say that it is coincidence, but I don't think so.

Danielle is a big fan of the show Ru Paul's Drag Race.  Ru Paul ends every show with the line "if you can't love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?"  Whatever other virtues the show has, that line is spot-on.  If you can't love yourself, you can't love anyone else.  And, if that is true, you really should get to work on fixing the first part of the statement.

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Why am I telling this story?


Many folks have taken aim at the stats here, but I think that is a distraction (an interesting distraction, but a distraction).  I don't think you can seriously dispute that there is a segment of young-ish men who are isolated and alienated from society, and their complaints in large measure revolve around sex and lack thereof. 

The author of the tweet seems to think that greater sexual liberalism will allow for those who are currently not having sex to, well get some.  The only way I can see this being even remotely coherent is liberalism regarding laws around sex work.  Whatever you think about sex work (and I am not really opposed on balance), the problem is that's not what the incels are asking for.  They want sexual relationships--a person who will have sex with them in the broader context of some sort of partnership.  

Some of the incels, I think, don't really care about the degree to which they are instrumentalizing the woman who would be part of these proposed, facilitated relationships.  In other words, they don't really care about the other person thinks or feels about the relationship, they just want them to fill their needs.  [Indeed, I think to the extent there has been a change in long-term relationship patterns, much of it can be explained by the fact that women are not as often economically coerced into relationships with these sorts of guys as they used to be].  

But some of these guys are at least open to a true, mutual relationship.  For those guys, none of what the Twitter poster is talking about will fix their problem.  No other person can fix their problem, and no program can, either.  This is going to be controversial, but no religion can fix their problem, nor can any therapist.  Those two things can help, but they cannot truly address the real issue.  No, there is no substitute for looking inside yourself and making peace with what you see.  Only you can do that.  If you don't do that, if you don't get right with yourself, you will push the person you want to find away.

I cannot say what each person needs to do to come to that peace.  I cannot even fully recreate exactly how I did it for me.  As I said, it was slow, and it came in stages, and then one day I saw myself in a different light.  So maybe I am not being much help here.

But, I am very certain that whatever the path is for each particular sad, lonely, disaffected young-ish man out there, it is not about finding or coercing women into being sex partners for these guys.  No orgasm can fill the hole inside yourself. 

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