I’m back to being more like a normal human now, but I’ve actually spent a lot of my life as someone who would effectively be called an MGTOW. Of course, I never identified as such and I avoid people who do, because most of those people are seriously problematic.
In my case, I think it’s something that I internalized because I saw that relationships could cause people to get hurt, and some people much more so than others. I also saw some of the behaviours of men who were more aggressive and sexist, and was deeply afraid of being like those people.
Of course, my own self-image issues may have been a larger factor; I generally assumed that no one would be attracted to me anyway. I realize now that I probably still ended up being rude to or hurting some people because I tended to avoid people I might be attracted to, though.
Between those two issues, I also ended up repressing my sexuality significantly. It wasn’t even a big deal, really.
Later in my life I basically kept the same thing up, but more recently it has been because I want to avoid having additional ties to Brisbane, which despite being a major city is still kind of a rural backwater on a global scale.
Now that I’ve come out of a phase of depression I feel a lot better about the whole thing, and I feel like having a relationship is something I really could pull off, but I’m still mostly going to avoid relationships because I don’t intend to stay in Brisbane for that much longer.
That said, regardless of how I began the path and where I’ve ended up now, it’s completely possible that in some alternate world I would have ended up as a for-realz MGTOW, or worse. I didn’t end up that way, but it’s not that difficult for me to imagine a path that could have led me there. The thought horrifies me, but it seems nevertheless to be true, and I’m not going to deny it simply because I would be more comfortable believing otherwise.