The Lack of Love : The Sacred and the Suffering Experiences of Female Involuntary Celibates

Sammanfattning: This ethnographic study investigates the reality of female involuntary celibates. To understand how the identification of being a female involuntary celibate has developed online in a shared online environment, I explore the experiences from women who identify as femcels and women who identity as forever alone women. Through the study, I found that a distinction between the two categories femcel and forever alone women needed to be made, since the two groups have different characteristics and different ways to cope with and understand their status as involuntary celibates. Moreover, I investigate how and why the lack of romantic love is such an important factor in these women’s sense of self. From a phenomenological approach, I apply several theoretical concepts; orientation, direction, habitus, initiation, and respair, which are all helpful in order to understand how the suffering connected to the lack of love results in a strong orientation towards the sacred, which is how I understand the femcel-based online environments. Several themes are highlighted in the study, where a complicated family history, mental health issues, and a focus on looks, are the most prominent themes. The thesis discusses how the women’s orientation towards the online environments has created a shared identity of being involuntary celibate, and how membership within an online context can create a sense of individual and collective autonomy which otherwise often are found in a romantic relationship. Furthermore, the thesis analyses and discusses the risk of individual constrain when collectively sharing an identity within the online, and finally how the identification of being a femcel or a forever alone woman differs from the interlocutors understanding. Finally, this thesis argues that the suffering both femcels and forever alone women experience has become a shared collective identity online, which in turn has given them an autonomy that they otherwise would have found in a romantic relationship.