Hi there, whoever you are. I am a 24-year old guy, and I have never had a girlfriend, not even those "childhood girlfriends" at ten or whatever. Not only have I never had a girlfriend, I have never slept with anyone, I am a virgin. This is the story of my upbringing, my story so far. I was brought up in an English working class home by my mother, and my sisters. I am the youngest of four children, and my three elder siblings are all sisters.

As a child, I was always the quiet one of the family, and I was always sort of fat, from as long as I can remember, like I never lost my baby fat or something. So as a young, quiet, fat kid, I always had ammunition to be teased about at school, and this got even worse at six when I was told I had to wear spectacles (I remember one of the boys in that class laughing with his friends when I started wearing them, along with a remark I remember to this day, something along the lines of them being "belly bouncer glasses"). You get the idea…

So I always stayed the "quiet" one, even to this day, I was always the outsider in any group, and I always thought if I didn't say anything people wouldn't tease me, but they did just the same. At home, my family I suppose always looked after me, it wasn't like I was abused, but any punishment consisted of my mother dishing something out, then each of my three sisters would make me do various stupid little tasks for them as punishment, like there was always some excuse to make me make a cup of tea for everyone or make me walk the dog, wash one of their cars, cut the hedge, stupid little things to do. I always ended up getting the shitty end of the stick at home (excuse my language)

So at school I stayed out of the way of people to avoid being teased, and at home I stayed out of the way to avoid being told to do x, y and z. As a result, I never really made that many friends, and I never really contributed to any groups of people I hung around with, so often I would drift away from them, because of situations like times when I wouldn't be able to find them for ages and they would have planned something and forgot to invite me. That happened a lot in school.

I went through my teenage years without many friends. After school I normally stayed in and on Saturdays I would go out on my bike to make my mum think I was meeting friends, then I would go and buy loads of sweets with my pocket money, then ride somewhere quiet where I could be on my own, and spend a few hours there eating all the sweets, before going back home again for my tea. Sunday afternoons I would do the same, or visit my auntie who would always give me cakes and biscuits to eat whilst I was there, and a load more "for the journey" (which was a 2 minute bike ride). So a pattern emerged from all of this, a vicious cycle of backing away from people and hiding myself away, and eating lots, because I was always really bored at home, probably because I spent so much time there. And this was before the Internet. My choices were TV (four channels), radio or reading. So I ate for something to do more than anything else.

When puberty hit me, it hit late, and meekly. My voice just gradually got lower over about a year. I didn't start shaving for another four. And I became extremely paranoid about the size of my manhood, which added to my already well developed weight and spectacle neuroses. As you can probably guess I never really got together with any of the girls that I fancied, and I never trusted any of my friends to say I fancied a certain girl in case word got back to them.

On the few times that I did admit to fancying someone, word would always get back to the person involved, and the response was always "eeeewww!" when they found out, which would make me want to talk to other people even less. So I stayed quiet and out of the way throughout school and my teenage years in general.

When I was a teenager, my only two real friends were two people I had met through the air training corps (or "air force cadets"), but the problem with these two people were that they were going out with each other. So again, many times I would be left alone when they went on a date or wanted to hang around alone or something like that. In my early teenage years, I did manage to get one solitary kiss, during a game of "dare" when I was thirteen. I was extremely nervous and don't recall much of it to be honest, but it was my only experience.

A few weeks after that, another game of dare was arranged, but in the meantime I had fallen over (face first) and had grazes all over my face, and a split lip, so I couldn't join in. at the time I took this to mean I wasn't "meant" to do that kind of thing, I was meant to be single. And that was my total sum of sexual or romantic experience.

The remaining few years of school consisted of me being extremely shy and quiet and not making many new friends. Gradually, any sexual or romantic inclinations towards others faded, and I spent most of my time feeling sorry for myself, and thinking that nobody would ever want a relationship with me. I eventually left school and went to college.

This was even worse for making friends as most of my class lived in a town a fair way from me, and hung around together, so there was a lot of not knowing who people were talking about, and I didn't want to ask "who?" every time there was a conversation.

When I left home to go to university things didn't even look up then. Instead of actually being at a "university" with its own campus and student night life etc, it was a college for local kids that actually offered university courses, so once again I was left friendless as all my course mates had their own friends as they already lived in the area with their families, so I also had to pay rent on top of everything else so I could hardly afford to be there. This led to evenings in drinking lots of cheap lager and eating lots of chocolate and crisps, and getting ever more depressed. Eventually, through my overindulgence, I got all the way up to 21 stones (about 295lbs).

Throughout those few years I hit absolute rock bottom, whilst I was at college I more or less had a nervous breakdown, and decided to either commit suicide or carry on and see what could happen. The only reason I didn't commit suicide was because one of my friends would have had to find my corpse. Having said that, once I had that awful horrible experience, I did try my best to improve myself and I have since managed to lose some of my excess weight.

During this time I was a little infatuated with one of my flatmates, probably as she was a female who was A) willing to speak to me, and B) seemed to actually enjoy my company! So this kind of spurred me on to lose weight and feel a little less like a blob of fat with a face, although I still have problems keeping the weight off, and I am still far too heavy for my height. So since my weight loss has happened, I have had more "chances" of getting together with, or talking to, attractive women, however I am still as shy as I was when I weighed my heaviest, so I have actually turned and walked away (how rude am I???) when attractive women have spoken to me, because I simply "HAVE" to get out of that situation immediately, as I just don't know what to do!

I am still a virgin, I still haven't had any sexual experience, but I think that the one thing I have realised is that incel people don't have a tattoo on their forehead that makes them stand out a mile from the rest of us, rather we all think that we have. In recent times, I have been getting a little better talking to people I find attractive. I still blush really easily, and I still get too embarrassed too easily, but I am slowly but surely becoming a more social person, and the increase in being social will eventually lead to increased chances of forming relationships.

I hope that at least one or two of you will identify with some part of the story, and if I help just one person, this has been worth it. I am still a fully fledged incel, but I think that I am young enough to get over this problem and lead a relatively normal life. I think maybe that bad experience of hitting rock bottom was good for me as it happened at a young enough age for me to have made improvements.

My best friend occasionally mentions this, the fact that I used to be quite hard work on a night out, as I would spend most of the time staring into my pint, whereas now she can leave me to chat with others. I am by no means the life and soul of the party, but I have progressed to being able to sustain conversation with other people without blushing or walking away, now its just the women I am attracted to that make me do that. But still, it's progress.