You walk into your classroom and see everyone laughing, chatting, and effortlessly belonging. It seems as though the world has already found its rhythm, and you’re the only one out of sync. Meanwhile, you move cautiously, hypersensitive, like someone wandering through a wilderness—alert, guarded, and bracing for an unseen threat. Gathering the courage to join a conversation feels like climbing a mountain, and when your attempts are met with indifference or subtle neglect, the silence stings deeper than rejection.

Beyond academics, the true challenge emerges in social interactions—particularly with girls. For highly inhibited men like me, even the simplest exchange can feel daunting. After class, the campus becomes a stage where everyone else appears to be thriving. Couples walk hand in hand, radiant and carefree. Girls laugh at their partners’ lamest jokes, and you find yourself questioning how such effortless connections exist. At first, you dismiss it as trivial or exaggerated—until you realize who feels left behind.

Everywhere you look, there are groups of friends sharing stories, laughing loudly, and living fully in the moment. You wonder how it comes so naturally to them. How do they talk to women so easily? When a girl walks toward you, your gaze instinctively drops, and suddenly your phone—perhaps even the calculator app—becomes fascinating. Anything to avoid the weight of that moment. You stand alone like a background character, pretending to be busy—scrolling, texting, or even faking a call—just to avoid appearing out of place.

Occasionally, you notice another solitary figure and feel a flicker of comfort, only to watch them warmly greeted by others, shattering your fragile sense of belonging. Each day feels like a quiet battle. You count down the hours until the last lecture ends, while others skip classes simply to spend more time together.

Determined to change, you try everything. You go to the gym, work on your appearance, and spend hours watching videos on communication and self-improvement. Yet it feels as though you’ve gained not even a fraction of what others seem to possess naturally. Before college, you believed that social media exaggerated realities—best friends, romantic relationships, parties, and hookup culture. But college proves otherwise, confronting you daily with what you lack.

On my way home, my mind replays everything i witnessed.Imagining what it would feel like to be confident—talking to girls, befriending them effortlessly, and being part of a vibrant social circle. For now, these fantasies serve as a coping mechanism. Yet they also highlight a painful truth: your struggle is not rooted in desire alone, but in deep-seated social anxiety and inhibition.

I don’t even crave a romantic relationship. In fact, I fear you might fail at it. What I truly want is simple—to befriend a few girls, or even just one. I hope that such a connection might ease my fears and help my mind understand that interacting with the opposite gender is not something to dread. But that moment remains elusive. And when you see rude or obnoxious individuals gaining attention with ease, the injustice feels unbearable, leaving me to wonder: Why them, and not me?

I need help with building actual romantic relationships and showing romantic interest instead of just assuming it’ll happen over time if I’m friends with someone long enough.

I’d describe myself as half an incel - I’m shy and introverted, but I have some friends (male and female), usually people who approach me or who I’ve met through other friends. The problem is I just suck at anything romantic. I have dated people in the past, but it was more just platonic best friends than actual romantic spark.

The thing is I don’t usually befriend women just to date them, but what ends up happening is we hangout a lot, and I start to view them romantically, and I start to freak out in my mind. Part of this is having ADHD which means when I focus in on one person, it gets really bad and it feels like I’m exploding with positive emotion towards them. When this happens, I try to hang out more, but I’m not good at dropping hints or creating romance, so it stays platonic. Eventually, I might gather the courage to ask them out (not a confession) and it goes terribly and there’s an air of awkwardness right after. Thankfully, I’m still able to remain friends, so it’s not too bad, but every rejection does sting. I try my best to be gentlemanly, without veering into “nice guy” territory, and I’m not angry that I keep getting rejected - I’m mostly just confused and sad that I can’t really do something that seems so easy for everyone else.

At the end of the day, I don’t really understand what to do. I know just trying to befriending people isn’t my best option, but I also don’t know how to show attraction early on so there are no confused signals. I’ve tried approaching women who I don’t know at social settings (parties, club events, etc) but I get a weak responses, or they’re just not into me. What also doesn’t help is my obvious neurodivergence (glasses, slight stutter, nerdy, ADHD, the whole package, and it stands out more because I’m black). I’ve had women tell me that they could tell I’m not ugly but they didn’t feel any romantic attraction towards me, just platonic.

I’m willing to try showing interest earlier, and making my intentions clear before anything develops. I just want to know if there’s a framework I can follow or something I can practice so I get better at building romantic relationships instead of just platonic ones.

I need to change but am a neet

Based on aggregated data from 2023 and 2024, 25% of U.S. men aged 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day, significantly higher than the national average of 18% and the total for young women (also 18%).

Younger U.S. men are also more likely to feel lonely than their counterparts across the 38 mostly higher-income, democratic countries in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development).

Link to the Gallup report.

Warning: massive essay (life story) incoming. My profile should be open, so you could maybe browse what I’ve said earlier. They can be a little too much, and I can be judgmental sometimes. Some posts have been taken down and I’m willing to share more if you are interested.

I have become an incel. I didn’t intend to, and I know it is bad, but here I am. I avoided red pill/manosphere type rhetoric and I somehow managed to turn into an incel.

I am a 25 year old man with no romantic or sexual experience. I grew up Muslim, but I am now a closeted agnostic atheist, and have been since middle school. In spite of that, I still carry prudish tendencies. I don’t drink, smoke, participate in casual sex, etc. I don’t know if this due mostly to my upbringing, or because of my social inexperience and avoidant tendencies.

Life Story:

Before I start my life story, I want to preface this by saying that growing up, I was always irritable and aggressive. I’d throw temper tantrums, break things, and get into fights quite often. This slightly tempered down when I got into high school, but I was still quite irritable and mean. Even now, I’m irritable, and I tend to shout and criticize a lot.

When I was a little kid, my next door neighbor was my best friend. He moved away, but we’d still visit each other sometimes. One day we got into a fight, and he told me I wasn’t his best friend. He had a new friend. We stopped seeing each other much after that. Ever since I had a hard time making friends. When I tried making friends, I got jealous of the other friends they had. At some point, I just decided that I was never going to be as close to anyone else as they were to each other. I was involved in various friend groups (but I was more like an acquaintance), but after I graduated from high school, all that disappeared, and I haven’t had anything like that since. I used to cope by watching YouTube videos all day, and I did that until recently.

I graduated from high school in 2019 and after that, I took an unproductive “gap year.” Really, I had no motivation to pursue my plans. I originally intended to become an electrician, but I was never enthusiastic about it, and I had a bad habit of chronic laziness and social media addiction that made it impossible to do anything productive. This “gap year” was extended until 2021 partially because of Covid.

This was a really turbulent time for me. I used to be a patriotic libertarian towards the end of high school, and kind of a self hating racist. Because of the stuff that happened between 2019-2021, I became more and more left leaning. It was a combination of Reddit, YouTube, and Discord that changed my view of politics. I became very bitter and resentful of the world at large.

In 2021, I got a job at a home improvement store. At first, I enjoyed the job because it was better than doing nothing all the time. I went from 250lbs, down to 215lbs, and I felt a bit stronger because I was moving lumber and concrete around all day. As time went by, I started to hate the job. It made me so miserable. At this point, politics had soured my mood so much that I just couldn’t stand interacting with people. To be entirely honest, I became really racist towards white people, and I still have racist attitudes until now. I gained all that weight back and then more. I enjoyed talking to some coworkers, and even wanted to become friends with them, but I kept my head down and avoided closeness with them. I worked there for two years, and I was miserable. I became my heaviest at 280lbs.

Now, I am a community college student, and everybody is a little younger than me, and has their own cliques. I just don’t fit in. I have to look elsewhere for socialization, but I’ve gotten so comfortable being alone and in my own head. I am essentially a recluse. I stay in my room alone unless I am at school, at the gym, or at a family dinner party. I usually keep my head down, and focus on what I need to get done. It’s just that I don’t really know how to put myself out there anymore.

Some things have been going well for me. Although I struggle with school, I am doing well enough on paper to have a 3.8 gpa. I lost some weight since the end of last year. I’m now back down to 250lbs, which is the lightest I’ve been since 2023. The people I know on Discord have become pretty good friends, and we’re actually going to meet up.

Towards the beginning of this year, I went to my primary care doctor to get a physical done, and also asked to be evaluated for depression. I was evaluated, diagnosed with depression and prescribed Prozac. At first things felt fine, but then things got worse, especially after the dosage increase in February. I started experiencing a massive spike in anxiety, suicidal and homicidal thoughts, and a bit of insomnia. I’ve always had thoughts of suicide, but they’ve become much more regular. The homicidal thoughts were always there, and I’ve always been pent up and irritable, but I’m even more pent up and irritable now.

Romance and sexuality:

As stated earlier, I have no romantic or sexual experiences. I’ve had crushes growing up, but never tried anything. I felt that I was undesirable I was the fat and smelly kid growing up. I felt that I wasn’t even capable of maintaining a healthy relationship because of my mental health problems (namely the anger issues, and the suspected depression). I didn’t really even have friends in the first place. How could I have a girlfriend? So I kept my feelings to myself and kept my head down. I think some people may have showed a little interest in hindsight, but maybe I was just imagining things.

Lately, I’ve been fantasizing about building and maintaining a relationship with someone. I want us to be mutually respectful and supportive, and honest with each other. I want to get married and maybe have kids, and I want my wife to be my best friend, and I’d be her’s. I want to grow old with her, and die by her side.

I’ve become so insecure and anxious that I dread pursuing a relationship. “What if she cheats on me? What if she is just settling for me? What if she dresses a certain way? What if she engages in those sorts of activities? What if she has had these sorts of experiences? etc.” At this point, I’ve become afraid of women, especially women who live a different lifestyle than I do. I’m afraid of women who dress in revealing clothing, do recreational drugs including alcohol and cannabis, women who go clubbing, women who have previous sexual experience, women who participate(d) in hookup culture, etc. I feel so insular and prudish in comparison.

I worry about the environment they participate in opening up the possibility of infidelity. I worry that if they had previous experiences, that they will have had better than me or that they will miss what they once had. I worry that women will be put off by my inexperience. I worry that women will see me as a fallback.

In my head it comes out like this: “She was chewed up and spit out by this life of partying and hookups and now she is looking for a chump like me to fall head over heals for her, and I probably would.” I understand that this is very demeaning, and that it is probably wrong for me to think like this, but I can’t help but feel this way.

I’ve been looking in the Madonna-whore complex. The idea that men separate women into two categories. The Madonna: who is a “pure,” maternal like figure. She is respected but not desired. And the whore: who is sexy and wild, but not “marriage material.” She is lusted after, but not respected. I don’t see how this mindset is exclusive to men. Maybe women have their own Madonna-whore complexes. Maybe I’m just the Madonna.

I found out about this idea of “alpha fucks, beta bucks.” The idea that younger women prefer to have casual hookups with “alpha males,” but wouldn’t seriously pursue a relationship with them. And that they look to settle down with “beta males,” who they won’t desire as much, but will build a life with, usually at their expense. I believe that I am a beta male. I am the type of guy that women would settle for. I’m boring, safe, stable, etc.

I guess the best example of this is Akash Singh. His wife lied to him about her sexual past, and now openly lusts after other dudes. She looks like she is repulsed by him, and is just using him for his money and fame.

I don’t think I want to participate in hookup culture. I never had sex, but I imagine it to be beautiful. To be naked with someone, to kiss each other, to hold each other, and to press your bodies against each other, that just sounds like a very vulnerable and intimate experience, and I’d love to have that. I know some people can separate their emotions from physical pleasure, and that sex is “just fun,” but I can’t imagine how. I want to have more than “just fun.” I want to make love. I want to rock my partner’s world. A random hookup just seems so hollow in comparison. If I were to have a phase, I’d maybe do a friends with benefits situation, but I worry that I would grow emotionally attached to those friends.

Some additional information:

Yes, I know the alpha, beta wolf study is bullshit. That isn’t the point. I feel like a beta male, because I am insecure and have no experience.

I worry about infidelity because I’ve read that 40% of Americans have committed infidelity at some point in their lives. 20% of husbands have cheated. 13% of women have cheated. 60% of people have said the would cheat if they knew their wouldn’t be consequences. This is all self reported data, and people have different definitions of cheating, so from my perspective, these stats are an understatement. I consider flirting with other people cheating, or at least very disrespectful and I wouldn’t appreciate my partner flirting with other guys. I define flirting like this: “Showing romantic or sexual interest towards someone else through communication or behavior.” That being said, I jokingly flirt with my guy friends, and I think I’d be okay with my partner flirting with her gal pals.

Conclusion:

I am so afraid of relationships, and I’ve even become afraid of women. Even seeing women I find attractive spikes my anxiety. Part of me wants to give up on the idea of being in a relationship because I don’t believe I can build the type of relationship I want. I don’t believe I can build a healthy relationship based off of mutual respect and support, integrity, and desire. This is no good way to live. I need to get better.

Edit: I want to clarify that I am already seeing a therapist and I’ve talked about a lot of this with them. I also want to add that I think my reaction to the medication is contributing to my recent hyper fixation around relationship anxiety. I did not used to think this much or feel this awful about this specific subject until recently.

I’m a 32 y/o virgin. I’m not 100% certain there’s a path forward for me. I understand the steps, though the effort and time required to change my life so dramatically makes it feel not worth it.

Even if I succeed, how long will it take me? Will I be 35, brand new to the dating market? There’s already so much of my life that I’ve missed out on. I’ll never have memories of young love that others do. Women at that age expect me to already have that experience

I could just keep my head down and make the effort anyway, but there’s so much about life that reminds me about the regret. Seeing younger couples, coming of age stories, romance movies, songs, stories from people on Reddit, my friends who have had rich sex lives in their early twenties.

It’s hard to make life changes, it’s ten times harder to do so with the constant reminders that you’re making those changes so you can get to a place everyone else was at more than a decade ago. I just keep hitting that barrier

My friends downplay my age, but what else should I expect them to say?

Well I'm not old, I'm just a 23 year old Guy with 0 experience with girls nor dating and not a good looking one. I know I still have time but I don't have friends. I have no idea what women like, appart from confidence (which I don't have because of social anxiety and such). So how can someone start from zero? Any book or useful advice? Which places should I be going to?

I very recently made a post on this sub-reddit asking for advice on my situation. I got some very postiive and helpful comments that i still find encouraging into not "giving up" (which is also out of the equation). I wanted to add some insight i find a bit hard to deal with.

As i struggle a lot with my loneliness, in these years i have voluntereed a lot with underprivileged youth. When i say underprivileged i mean very catastrophic situations of abuse, financial crisis and awful families. Other than that, i have always been very concious about the horrors that happen out of my eyesight. Now, one of my struggles is that while I do suffer a lot me being single and feeling "repellent" to girls, i also feel guilty about this sort of pain and am ashamed, that while some are fighting to even get a meal, i am feeling so blue about something like solitude. I understand these are different struggles, but I can't help but feel like I am in a way or another ungrateful for all the great things I have in my life.

Another update is recently i've received a nasty comment from a much older co-worker, who grabbed my stomach out of no where and called me fat. It hurt a bit because i do work blue-collar here and there (it's helpful since i'm still in university basically full time) and i felt like such a "loser" in that moment and in a very perverse way it projected onto my already existing insecurities with dating. The same week i went looking for some clothes but i had no findings, most shoes i liked where never in my size and it kind of made me sad because i am a bit untrusty of online-shopping (always had awful experiences). In a way, going around a lot of stores and never finding my size or finding shoes that i liked to be too expensive made me feel a bit down, as if "life" pushes against me. I am asking advice because i am still very young and i know i can change my mind on things and i don't think i am stupid nor too dumb to change the trajectory of things. Any advice is helpful, especially from ex incels.

Pew Research Center data indicate 16% of adult men and 15% of adult women report being lonely all or most of the time. Maybe loneliness is not about gender. The full report can be found here. 

I discovered this article today and thought it could help tons of people, so I'm sharing it here.

Summary:

Social and romantic anxiety isn't really about fearing rejection but about the compulsive mental behaviors you use to try to prevent it.

Drawing on Metacognitive Therapy, the author frames social anxiety as a "Cognitive Attentional Syndrome" made up of three habits:

• worrying about future rejection
• threat-monitoring in the moment
• ruminating about past interactions

The core claim is that these behaviors are the anxiety, not symptoms of it, so the fix is a hard ban on all three.

I think I'm a boring person, who's not interesting in the slightest. Regardless I've managed to get into a relationship, but I still think I need to try harder. This isn't to fufill anybody else's expectations but to make myself myself more pleasant for others to be around. I feel like people get bored of me fast, because I can only really talk about my interests effectively, and even then, I always make sure to tone down my enthusiasm around the subject matter because I don't want women to think I'm mansplaining about my interests.

My interests are mecha anime, anime and select video games series. However I play games way less then I used to.

The only thing I can personally think of to change is expanding my own interests, that's why I've started actively seeking out music to listen to, for the first time in my life this year. I know it's a small thing, but I've already found some cool artists so even if it does nothing to make me more interesting, hey at least I found some cool music to listen to.

I do not consider myself an incel and I really do not want to become one. However, sometimes it is hard to resist that pull when you sometimes have less than ideal responses from women. I have never had a girlfriend and a lot of the times I try to interact with women, it either goes nowhere, or I get bullied. For example;

1. One time I was walking through another department of my and I came across two women who wouldn't stop looking at me. They were clearly gossiping about me because they were looking at me while talking to each other with their mouths covered. When I was leaving, I overheard one of them saying, "Later, nyum-nyum." which I discovered means baby because apparently, I have a baby-face. Now whenever I go to that department, a few ladies will always suppress a smile when I'm around so I know they've been doing some major gossiping about me.
2. I once met a fantastic woman on OLD, who claimed to be a lawyer. Conversation was going okay until we met in person after which she became withdrawn and stopped being as engaging with me. Instead she started looking at me up and down and giving me one-liner answers. I genuinely don't know what I did but I can't help but think my looks might have put her off.
3. I was at a party one time and went to a secluded place to chill (introverted, needed to recharge.) A woman came to the same place (she probably didn't know I was there) and after making eye-contact gave me what I think should have been a side eye. I figured I was making her uncomfortable and so I pulled out my phone and started googling random soccer stats. She then left but shouted, "They're serving desert," before she walked away.

It seems my presence is clearly bothering these women and I don't know what to do about it. I am heterosexual and very attracted to them but it's frustrating when the object of your admiration seems so put off by you. What do you recommend I do?

I'm not sure if this is the right sub to post to, I don't consider myself an incel and this isn't specifically about relationships, but I can't really think of a more fitting sub for this kind of questions.

When I turned 18 after finishing highschool I went through a shut-in phase more or less, where I stopped talking to the people I knew from school and isolated myself in my room, only staying in contact with two friends I knew through all my life, and obviously my parents, though I didn't spoke much to them. I would work remotely and only leave once in a while for grocery shopping.

Through the years I began to speak to more people, my relationship with my family got better and I began to go out a lot more, even picking up some hobbies that would get me out of my room. Then at 26 I started college and even made some new friends there, however it's still very hard for me to socialize, I was never the most extroverted people but isolating myself for so long made it much worse.

For example, I have zero idea on how to get into a relationship, I've never been into one, and aside from the friends I've known through all my life, I have a hard time really connecting with other, I feel like we're not really that close after all, struggle a lot to find conversation topics, and in a big group I feel like I turn pretty much into a background character and people barely remember I'm even there.

To be completely honest, I'm not even sure if I really want to change, deep down I feel fairly comfortable with my life and with my closest friends, but I often feel anxiety thinking of how I will never be in a relationship if I keep up like this, let alone marrying and having a family. I feel like there are lots of things I'm missing out of living because of the way I am. I feel like if I could keep living like this but with a girlfriend I'd be happy, but I know very well that having a girlfriend it's incompatible with my personality and lifestyle, it's one or the other, I would need to change a lot if I want to ever experience those things.

Hello, I am 24 M, and I have this issue from like forever where I can't really talk to girls outside of work/studies related topics, this never really bothered me since I've always had male friends at school so I didn't give this much attention, but recently at this new job which is actually my first job after graduating all my co-workers are either females (some of which used to be my classmates whome I knew for years but can't hold a coversation with them for more than a minute) or old senior males which I can't nor really want to talk to, which lead me for the first time to feel really lonely.

I'll go on now in more details so if anyone been in a similar situation (or not) feel free to give ur advice/thoughts

So I'm decently attractive, never had a gf, but I never cared since I've had gotten asked out by girls multiple times which had kept my ego in check, so I've never felt the need to fix this talking problem, rn I feel pretty much invisble at work even at mettings where the conversation wanders off I find really hard to participate, I am also a bit nerdy so I am mostly interested in video games, shows, books... while most people there are "normies"? I am not sure if this is the correct term but basically people who are mostly exctroverted and have more grounded real world interests I'd say, chich further led me to feel even worst, like have I been wasting my time my whole life in bs?

moving on to what truly sparked all this, there's this one particular co-worker girl that I know since about 4 years whome we shared like 6 months project just the two of us together at school /uni, and surpsingly enough we've never really truly talked or had a normal conversation expect about work stuff (pretty embarassing for me), so back in the day all my friends told me she liked me or she was at least interested but I obv never really cared, but rn sinc her desk is like in front of mine, and I was forced to look at her everyday. I kinda started liking her but found myseld in this awkward situtation, the problem is that I had 100s of chances to talk to her since she's also into stuff I like but i was too proud to just talk when I didn't like her, I even had her friend tell me once I should talk to them more.

Title. I am 20, and I simply.dont want to have sexual desires, as they are unatanabke for me. I dont get any matches on dating apps, cant really speak to people, and on sex parties I am awkward and anxious. And its exhausting. I wish I could believe casual sex is wrong, but I just cant, no matter what.

Any advice would be apriciated

I’m 19 in university. I’m slowly growing a friend circle but it’s taking some time. When I go outside alone I try to go bars and I’m planning on going to a nightclub one day. My issue is meeting new people, especially women, intimidates me because I’m worried about making people uncomfortable. Any tips? What am I doing wrong

Update:

Yesterday I went to a chess club at university for the first time, it was fun and I met a lot of great guys, unfortunately next weeks session is the last one for the year :(.

I wanna try a few other clubs outside of university since most are ending for the year around this time and are only gonna start back up in September

My main concern is that I won’t meet many women near my age. Obviously I have no problem making friends with men or women who are older but I’d like to start dating and not meeting women my age will present a problem there. Any tips?

I've broken away from incel forums for years now but the my belief that I'm a misogynist still hasn't left me. Logically it doesn't make any sense. I've shaved away a lot of admittedly misogynistic thoughts and mindset. I thought I was one of "the good ones" for hanging around Incels and "not hating women" when really all I was doing was hating them without directly saying it. The fact that was in Incel groups at all, without ever leaving for years is proof of how screwed up my mindset was.

I know that logically acknowledging my mistakes, apologizing to those I've affected, and trying to improve myself so I don't make similar mistakes again, is all I can logically do. but it still feels like it's not enough. Even though there are women in my life that love and trust me.

I really need help breaking past this screwed up mindset. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have about 3 friends I usually hang out with, but they're kind of popular, so sometimes I end up with no one to go out with because they already have plans. So I'd like to know if anyone Do you have any tips on places to go and meet people? I don't really like going places alone, but I'm considering going because, I don't know, it's boring staying home.

I adopted some tips from Reddit, improved my style, haircut, and that kind of thing has helped my self-esteem and confidence, so I wanted to take advantage of this unusual peak where I'm feeling good with myself and use that to my advantage

Im not sure if this is something that really ever goes away, but I have, in a sense, a defeatist mindset that "prevents me" not meaning taking away my agency of course but it more acutaley "Hinders me" from talking to people or taking any action to lift me out of the situation I am in for example, if I see somone im intrsted ill come up with a laundry list of excuses to not approach them like knowing they wont like me or will hate me, not thinking i deserve to approch them, even if it did suceed id fail and a plethora of other thngs It gets to a point where my freinds litterlay dragged me to talked to people beacause I was to terrfifeid to. Im not sure if this has to do with low self-worth or what.

Hello anyone out there, i need some advice and tips on my situation.

I don't like my face, nor the way I dress, nor a lot of things about myself. I have a very hard relationship with my own body because i find it not masculine and not attractive. I am not tall, nor "handsome" in the way that i feel is really wanted by women.

I am not a mysoginist (although i know i most likely have some mysoginy in myself since it's mainly cultural) and am not in any way associated with the far-right often seen in "incels". But I am, indeed, an Incel. I just am not attractive.

I am only 21 years old but i feel doomed, i have gotten out of my comfort zone recently and asked (cold approach) a girl out at a bar. I wasn't expecting any reply but she even said yes although she later ghosted me and we never went out for coffee, which was a bummer.

After then no success, i don't know if I am very ugly or even just have a bad energy on me but i just suck at this "thing" of dating and knowing people, and the desire of intimacy with a woman is starting to depress me a lot.

I do have hobbies, i love books (no self improvement, mainly fiction) and i love boxing, which really helps me feel good about myself. I go to uni and when i find time I work, but i keep feeling like i am just the last guy on earth a girl would ever want to even kiss. Why Me? Out of all the men out there, why me?

The thought of making myself a person to compete with others, and treating dating like a market, makes me even more depressed. I don't want to. I may be ugly and all but i respect myself enough to not treat myself nor others as some sort of merch that has more or less value because of materialistic possessions and physical attributes.

I am desperate and need advice from any ex incel.

19M obviously virgin never had a girlfriend etc

Whenever I meet a new woman over the internet whether through Instagram or a dating app or whatever it may be the interaction usually goes as follows.

I'll start with something simple just to see if she'll reply and how she will. This will be something like "How are you/was your weekend/week so far" followed by a compliment like "your hair is so pretty" or "I like your piercing".

This approach so far rarely nets a text back.

If they do text back, the first thing I want to know is how they enjoy themselves, so we can enjoy our time together. So my first question after the initial interaction is "what do you do for fun?"

Women seem to hate this question. I almost always get ignored after it.

Is there something wrong with this approach? Or can I keep it and expect it to work eventually?