The Idealized Chad's Seed of Discontent

I didn’t know what hypergamy meant until I stumbled across it in a forum thread that read more like a manifesto than a conversation. The word itself sounded clinical, maybe even sociological. I assumed it was something academic. And technically, it is. Hypergamy refers to the idea that people—typically women—seek out partners of higher social status or economic position, choosing mates from a small percentage of "alpha" men. In anthropology, it was used to describe traditional marriage patterns, especially in class-based or patriarchal societies where marrying “up” was one of the only paths to security. Over time, the concept entered the language of evolutionary psychology, describing mating preferences linked to dominance, resource access, or physical health.

But in the corner of the internet where I found it, hypergamy wasn’t being talked about as a historic or biological trend. It wasn’t theory—it was gospel. A rule. A weapon. I was reading the writings of people who called themselves incels, short for “involuntary celibates,” and for them, hypergamy was more than a term. It was the reason they were lonely. The reason women didn’t love them. The reason their pain wasn’t a phase, but a life sentence.

According to this belief, all women are hardwired to pursue only the most dominant, attractive, and high-status men. Everyone else, they claimed, was effectively invisible. Not just unlucky, but structurally locked out of love. In this view, hypergamy wasn’t just a factor in dating; it was the only factor. Women were reduced to a monolithic stereotype from the prehistoric ages and declared guilty of a crime. If men weren’t born tall, muscular, handsome, charismatic, and preferably rich, they were out of the game before they ever got to play.

What struck me wasn't just the harshness of the worldview—it was how complete it felt. The forums and comment sections were filled with dense, internal logic. There were charts breaking down attractiveness levels, acronyms like LMS (Looks, Money, Status), and terms like “looks maxxing” (a desperate form of self-improvement). But behind all the data and jargon was something simpler: a story of exclusion. A belief that the sexual and romantic world operates like a rigged market where women trade up and men get priced out.

Hypergamy becomes more than a concept—it becomes a coping mechanism. If every rejection is because of hypergamy, then it’s not your fault. You don’t need to change or risk vulnerability. You’re not flawed—you’re cursed. That framing can be weirdly comforting. It offers a clear answer to the chaos of dating and connection. You’re not invisible because of anything you said or did; you’re invisible because evolution programmed women to seek someone else—and settle for you.

But that comfort comes at a cost. Once you accept that hypergamy is real and total—once you internalize the black pill, the belief that nothing can change—you lose your agency. You check out. You stop engaging. Not just with women, but with yourself. You start to see the world through a filter of inevitability. And then the pain curdles into resentment.

The cruelty of that belief isn’t just in what it says about women—it’s in what it takes from the believer. It tells them their story is already over. That they’re not the protagonist of their life, not even a participant. Just a statistic. And worse, it allows them to abandon accountability, because what’s the point of taking responsibility if biology already sealed your fate?

This belief—that hypergamy is a biological inevitability—becomes a prison. A totalizing script. You either meet the threshold for female desire, or you don’t. And if you don’t, nothing else matters. Not your kindness, your complexity, your effort. Not even your pain. Especially not your pain.

And what gets erased in this story is the woman’s agency—her capacity to make choices, to want, to say no, to change her mind, to desire outside the hierarchy she’s supposedly hardwired to obey. In both the incel worldview and the behavior of high-status men who justify infidelity by claiming women only want the best, she is denied the right to be human. One group resents her for not choosing them; the other uses her supposed nature to rationalize mistreating her. Either way, she becomes a mirror for male need—not a subject, but an object of narrative projection.

In this worldview, she can never win. If she chooses the successful man, she’s accused of hypergamy and shallowness. If she doesn’t choose at all, she’s accused of being broken or cruel. If she chooses someone not deemed “worthy,” her choice is invalidated. The woman, as human, is lost to the narrative entirely. It is a constant gaslight—the man saying, "choose me because I am successful" or "choose me because no one else has," but always, "choose me." Not for connection or curiosity—but because his identity depends on it.

The acute shame of rejection can paralyze a heart searching for connection. And in that paralysis, the mind reaches for stories to explain the pain. One black pill influencer put it bluntly: "What matters is your face. Everything else is cope." But this is only sometimes true—and never the whole truth. Because reality is more complicated. Rejection isn’t always systemic. Sometimes it’s circumstantial. Sometimes emotional. Sometimes it’s just life. The people incels long for, resent, or reduce to symbols are not abstract forces—they’re human beings, living their own messy stories. Attraction is strange, unpredictable, and rarely fair. But it is not fate. It is not fixed.

In a strange twist, incels have turned the tools of judgment they once aimed at women back on themselves. The scales they used to measure female worth—hot or not, Stacy or Becky—are now used to weigh their own perceived failures. Facial symmetry, chin angles, height, social capital—a pseudo-scientific language of self-hatred. They become both judge and condemned, obsessed with measurements that never tell the full story of a human being. In truth, it’s more telling that in their search for water, they ignored every warning sign and stumbled into the well itself—an empty, echoing trap. And once inside, it’s almost as if they weren’t looking for water at all, but for confirmation of their own despair. What started as external blame calcifies into internal cruelty. It is as though they’ve fallen into a deep well, and instead of calling out for help, they shout their rage into the dark. The black pill bounces off the stone walls, echoing back with more venom. There is no rope. No ladder. Only their own voices, getting louder.

The incel isn’t new. He existed in the postwar 1950s too, only then, he was promised a wife, a house, and a future in the glossy logic of TV ads and advice columns. And when that promise fell through—when he didn’t get the promotion, or the girl, or the respect—he was told to blame himself quietly. Or worse, to blame her. Media campaigns from the era often hinted at female loyalty as a reward for male performance. “The right razor gets the right girl.” “Be strong, be successful, and she’ll be yours.” These weren’t subtle suggestions—they were codified scripts. Today’s incel parrots the same script, just in meme format.

Actual 1950's Ad Campaign. The ketchup bottle simplified so a woman no longer needed a man to open it for her.

What changes the equation now is the internet. What was once private shame has become public ideology. What was once isolation has become community—a dark, self-reinforcing, performatively nihilistic one. The black pill lets them say, “I’m not even trying anymore,” when the truth is, they never got to try in the way they wanted. Or maybe they did, and the silence that came back was louder than expected. And in that silence, they told a story. One that blamed evolution, women, systems. One that kept them safe from trying again and took comfort in others like them, cast off by nature, left to the mercy of nurture. Or else.

But beneath the logic, the rage, the fatalism, the cry is still the same: Please see me. Please choose me. Please tell me I’m not unlovable. That is not monstrous. That is human. And it deserves a response—not of pity, but of honesty. An honesty that says: No, not everyone will choose you. No, love won’t always come. But yes—you are still worthy of being here. And despite rejection, you are still accountable for your actions. Your pain is real. And even now, it is possible to come back.

Because while we cling to entitlement—as if it were a shield—the hunter approaches. The primal presence of life, pain, and existence comes to claim us. And we resist. We scream: I want what I want. And what we’re really saying, quietly, desperately, is: I’m not ready to grow up and face reality. Because growing up means letting go of the fantasy that suffering earns us love. It means accepting what the Stones sang with brutal grace: "You can't always get what you want." But—"if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need."

If we want to connect—truly connect—in this digital age, we may have to evolve into people more human than we’ve ever been. Not more strategic, not more optimized, but more vulnerable. More honest. More capable of enduring ambiguity. Enduring futility. We may have to accept that despite all the fairy tales, there isn’t always a “one.” That some of us will want people who don’t want us back. That some of us may not get picked. And some of us want it that way.

That’s not fatalism. That’s the price of being human. And if we can sit with that—if we can mourn it without turning it into rage, without retreating into ideology—we might just find something else waiting on the other side. Not certainty. Not answers. But grace. And maybe, connection.

This is what hypergamy, out of context in its distorted form, robs from us. It pretends to explain desire while amputating possibility. It tells a story that feels true but leaves us lonelier than before. And it matters—because every time we reduce another person to a symbol, every time we use science to deny someone their humanity, we take a step away from our own.

Understanding the incel worldview isn’t just about diagnosing a subculture. It’s about seeing the places where we’ve all been tempted to believe we’re unworthy and entitled. It is about finding our personal seeds of discontent before the weeds consume the entire garden. It’s about noticing how easily pain turns into narrative, and how that narrative can trap us. And it’s about remembering that even when we are most lost—especially then—we are still capable of choosing another story. No matter how sincerely we want a thing, rejection is part of the human experience. We must become resilient to it. It cannot be intellectualized or ignored away. It is the inevitability.

The story of humanity requires one where being human is actual—versus performed—in all its messy, aching, uneven beauty. To be human is not to pass a test or play a part; it is to live without a script. The 'performed' version of humanity—driven by image, hierarchy, and roles inherited from cultural scripts—asks us to act our way into love. But the 'actual' human experience is filled with contradiction and grace. It means accepting our longing without certainty, showing up even when we feel unworthy, and daring to believe that connection isn’t won through perfection but offered through presence. Only in embracing our raw, real selves—not as archetypes, not as metrics, but as flawed and feeling people—do we return to the true collective story.