Love-shy.com

Women seem wicked, when you're unwanted.

Love-shy.com was the longest lasting forum in the incelosphere; lasting 17 years. It was a place explicitly dedicated to incels and/or men shy of romantic relationships. It was founded in 2003 and shut down in 2020. It is described in reliable sources as an "old-timer" board, as a place for men and women perpetually rejected or extremely shy of potential partners to swap stories and causes of their situation. A passage of the site's FAQ read, "It is possible for a person to be both incel and love-shy, and most are both, and most are both to some degree or another. For instance, a person could originally be incel, then suffer large numbers of turn downs, and eventually become love-shy and unable to approach.” In 2011, an up-close documentary of the personal lives and opinions of multiple members from the love-shy.com forum was made called, "Shy Boys IRL".  This documentary and its director, Sara Gardephe, was later used by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to help explain the sexual frustration in certain incel communities in its reporting of the April 2018 . In a report to the CBC's The National, Sara Gardephe described the various incel community attitudes toward society as, "I think they just want to see the world burn a little bit [...] punishing us for not seeing their pain".

Mr C., the admin, shut down the site in early 2020 and did not give the database to anyone. He also did not redirect the URL. A mod from his forum started a new site from scratch in early 2020, which is still up, with many of the same users, called love-shy.net.

History
Love-shy.com started around 2003 according to The Wayback Machine and other sources.

According to Sara Gardephe, the director of Shy Boys IRL, the forum was founded after men from the discussion section of the IMDB page "The 40 Year Old Virgin" wanted to expand their discussion to an entire forum (not kidding). They identified with the plight of the character Steve Carell played. Although as the forum was founded in 2003 and the movie was released in 2005, this is unlikely.

The forum for a couple years was adminned by an admin named Rammspieler who has been described as toxic and fostered an anti-feminist tone on the board during his stay, that left an impression on sites that track misogyny. Later, Rammspieler suffered a personal misfortune and adminship was handed over to Mr. C., or Michael, the current admin, who is featured as Michael in the documentary called Shy Boys IRL. Rammspieler after he left, did an AMA on Reddit, apparently with a change of heart about the site's more extreme posts. Unlike Rammspieler, Mr. C has a much stricter moderation style. In an interview with Michael, Elle Magazine stated that Michael claims to disown any misogyny left on the board, which he describes as still a cesspit but with some more moderate members to act as a buffer. The interview also contains the following sentence, "While Michael says the vitriol and indignation are misguided at best—'By becoming resentful, you're not going to endear yourself to many women. I may have some of the same feelings, but I deal with them' [says Michael]."

Mr C. shut down the forum in early 2020, not long after deleting their section which explained what inceldom was. A mod and "historian" from love-shy.com named Ieatboogers created an interim space called LSlifeboat as the forum was shutting down. After it shut down, he created a new, very similar site, called love-shy.net.

Examples of sexism and stupidity during Rammspieler's adminship
The website during Rammspieler's adminship was a hangout for Nice Guys™ and was particularly bitter. At this time, users were allowed to state beliefs such as the claim that all women were brainwashed by feminism — particularly all American women — and thus are heartless, gold-digging whores and cockteases who foolishly deign to date Bad Boys™ who beat them instead of poor, sweet Nice Guys™ like them. For this, are to be held in utter contempt. How very nice. The sentiments expressed at Love-shy.com were at times truly terrifying. Things such as praise for serial killers and a suggestion that a law should be passed that makes it illegal for women to turn down dates are among the crap that has turned up there. One can only hope that these are trolls. Check this out:

Fun fact! The historians of the future will probably determine that the above quote is the most absurd statement of the entire Internet. Bonus fun fact! The above quote is listed at place 7 in FSTDTs top 100 list of stupid things said on the internet.

Yeah, damn right it'll never happen, bub. If any people who aren't maladjusted monsters reading this need a moment to go and punch something, fine, we'll wait.

Other bizarre talking points have included:
 * Discussion plans to create robot women to have sex with (which itself might be a decent idea), and believing that you're not a virgin if you do this.
 * Seriously comparing the "suffering" of people with their made-up disorder to the experience of Jews during the Holocaust. [dead link] (Note: "made-up" refers to "love-shyness" and not to social anxiety disorder, which is existing and treatable.)

As preoccupied as they are with their newfound titles, the truth is that most single men who don't relentlessly pursue one-night stands fall within that definition — the fundamental difference (between an incel and a guy who has just been single for six months) being that a normal guy won't stoop to blaming women for that fact, never mind all women.

Love-shyness as a mental condition
Love-shyness was a term coined during the 1980s by deceased professor of psychology at Humboldt State University and Montana State University, Brian G. Gilmartin, who published two books about what he coined as "love-shyness", and acted as a consultant for Japan's population problem during the 1990s, including free trips to Japan. In 1987 he argued for love-shyness to be treated as a medical condition and for society to take it more seriously. He based his book on a series of interviews and questionnaires, as well as previous studies on the topic, for example, Dr. Philip Zimbardo's research, which he considered faulty data collection.

Definition of Love-Shy
Dr. Gilmartin defined love-shyness as the following :
 * 1) He is a virgin; in other words, he has never had sexual intercourse.
 * 2) He is a person who very rarely goes out socially with women, dating no more than 4 times.
 * 3) He is a person without a past history of any emotionally close, meaningful relationships of a romantic and/or sexual nature with any member of the opposite sex.
 * 4) He is a person who has suffered and is continuing to suffer emotionally because of a lack of meaningful female companionship. In short, he is a person who desperately wishes to have a relationship with a woman, but does not have one because of shyness.
 * 5) He is a man who becomes extremely anxiety-ridden over so much as the mere thought of asserting himself vis-a-vis a woman in a casual, friendly way. This is the essence of "love-shyness".
 * 6) He is a man who is strictly heterosexual in his romantic and erotic orientations. (Gilmartin did this as he thought including homosexuals would lend credence to a stigma of love-shy men being gay-in-hiding)
 * 7) He is male. No female love-shys were studied.

Data Collection
He chose people for interview/questionairre as followed :
 * 1) 100 single, never married men, btw 35-50 years of age who met his love-shy criteria.
 * 2) 200 single, never married men, who were college students and between the ages of 19-24, and who met his love-shy criteria.
 * 3) A comparison group of 200 single, never married men, all of whom were very self confident and non-shy vis-a-vis the opposite sex. These 200 men were all (a) full-time or part-time college or university students; and all of them were (b) between the ages of 19 and 24 at the time they were interviewed.

Conclusions
Through his data collection, Gilmartin concluded, among other things, that love-shyness was associated with avoidant personality disorder, abusive upbringing, relatively high education level, and generally poor mental and psychological health. His work also explored such topics as violent fantasies by love-shy men.

When psychological conditions are analyzed, usually the mental state is most focused on. However, physical symptoms are just as important. In Shyness and Love, Gilmartin cobbles together a list of physical symptoms he believes characterizes love-shyness based on the percentage of men he interviewed who were shy of romantic relationships with a particular medical problem. Correlation does not imply causation however.

Gilmartin's work contained a lot of detail from many interviews with men shy of romantic relationships and was deemed valuable enough to be reviewed by contemporary psychology in peer reviewed academic journals at least twice and Gilmartin's last book The Shy Man Syndrome had a forward by E. Michael Gutman, President of the Florida Psychological Society 1988-1989.

As with most self-diagnosed disorders, and especially one as nebulous as this, it is very questionable whether users at Love-shy.com actually suffer from a common ailment, or simply from a variety of character defects, poor social skills and other problems contributing to their failure with women. In some cases, this may include genuine mental health conditions, or neurological conditions such as Asperger's syndrome, which is mentioned in the site's FAQ about love-shyness. Be that as it may, the community's unhealthy focus on collectively nurturing personal butthurt, along with overt misogynistic hostility towards women, is hardly likely to help users overcome their relationship problems.

Incels
A new breed of love shy has made its appearance as of late: the incel. It's essentially the same thing, although heavily influenced by the manosphere and PUA communities.

The men who frequent Love-shy.com sometimes self-identify with the Manospherian term "incel", short for "involuntarily celibate male". This word aptly captures the sentiment of the entire page: "it's not our fault that we can't get laid!". More specifically — according to Love-shy.com — you're considered involuntarily celibate if you haven't been able to find a romantic partner within six months (due to a definition of incel published in the Journal of Sex Research ).

Before his death, Gilmartin used the terms, "incel" and "love-shy" interchangeably as can be seen in a recovered clip from the abandoned documentary "The Incel Project."