Confessions of a Former Red Pill Woman

I briefly had a "red pill woman" pick-me arc

I met my husband, Nick in college, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-one. He wasn’t my first boyfriend (and I wasn’t his first girlfriend either) but there was something about him that felt really different to me: he was out of my league.

He was in a fraternity—not just a fraternity but the “popular” fraternity (he really didn’t seem like the type—not that he wasn’t cool, he just didn’t seem like a douche—and I actually thought he was joking when he told me.) Meanwhile, not only was I not in a sorority, but I was rejected from a sorority, and it wasn’t even the popular one, it was the lame one that let everyone in!

Nick’s fraternity buddies actually made fun of him for dating me. I’m not sure if any of it had to do with my looks (I feared it did; he insisted it didn’t) or my social skills (it was…probably that.) But either way, our relationship got off the ground as me being “the lucky one.”

This was new for me. Prior to Nick, I internalized all the Beauty and the Beast type messaging and assumed that unattractive guys were going to be better boyfriends. I almost exclusively dated guys who weren’t conventionally hot. The funny thing is that most of these guys didn’t even turn out to be good boyfriends at all—when I was fifteen, my boyfriend (whose nickname at school was, quite literally, “Ugly Fuck”) cheated on me. Instead of thinking, hey, maybe there’s no correlation with looks and character, I thought, wow, I’m somehow too ugly for Ugly Fuck.

Nick was the only boyfriend I had who I actually found sexy. In fact, when it was clear he was interested in me, I wondered if maybe he was a really late blooming virgin who just had no idea he was hot (this was not the case.) For whatever reason, he liked me. Maybe I was attractive in a way that only appealed to him, maybe my social issues didn’t matter to him because he was kinda weird too, or maybe I didn’t appraise myself correctly. Maybe all of it was true on some level. But regardless, I didn’t feel good about this. I actually didn’t like that I had scored someone I considered more attractive than me. It made me feel incredibly insecure.

Plenty of other things about our relationship made me feel insecure. Take, for example, that Nick considered us “exclusive but not boyfriend and girlfriend” for months before we became an official couple—a fact that I figured out at his brother’s wedding, where I was meeting his family but somehow not his girlfriend. Multiple women tried to break us up too—especially female friends of Nick’s who was “concerned” about him (maybe they feared that in sixteen years, I’d force him to wear a dorky Barbie and Ken Halloween costume!)

Please clap.

I loved him, but I didn’t want keeping him to feel this hard. Luckily, as we graduated college and entered the real world, we could finally escape the labels of “frat guy” and “weird girl.” But I suddenly had to contend with a new issue: I didn’t want him to drag out our relationship and never propose, a phenomenon I’ve written about before. I had gone into this relationship with the assumption that he was better than me, so I just wanted to improve myself so that I was on par with him, and hopefully, he’d want to marry me.

Around this time, I discovered a forum of guys who today would be known as “passport bros.” They were adamant that American women had become so manly, unattractive and obnoxious that they had to go overseas to find wives. This idea struck me with terror, as I immediately worried that I fit the description of the average American woman, and Nick might be tempted to look elsewhere. But the way they described the average American woman was nothing like me—slovenly, refuses to wear dresses or heels, has slept with 100 men, bitchy man-hater, can’t cook, doesn’t want to take care of a man. Why, I was nothing like this! Reading this description of American women actually felt like a huge ego boost because if that was the “average,” then I was way above average!

I was hooked. The more I read about how horrible “most” women were, the more I felt like an outstanding exception.

I immediately went down a rabbit hole and wound up on Return of Kings, a notorious site of the early 2010s which hosted various articles from a red pill perspective, some wackier than others. It was founded by Roosh V, a famed pickup artist who now has a Wikipedia page which is more than half taken up by the section titled “Controversy.” At the time, I had never heard of the red pill (or “TRP”,) but basically, it’s a concept marketed to men, especially men who have a hard time with women, and it’s not entirely wrong.