I first came across Worst Boyfriend Ever during the real-time crescendo of his book: in September of 2024, right before he packed his bags and drove away from the double-life in Seattle he’d spent the previous few months chronicling in brutal and titillating detail for a fast-growing Substack audience.
A colleague of mine here at New Ritual Press had sent me his Substack and pitched the idea that its book form should be our next release. I was at first staunchly dismissive: the idea of someone billing themselves “the worst boyfriend ever” and writing about cheating on their girlfriend just seemed like the total opposite energy of what I needed in my life or wanted to promote at the time. The first article I saw was “Slut Review: Katie From Hinge”, and I couldn’t even bring myself to read it. Not that I was inherently opposed to the Manosphere and its adjacent literary exploits: quite the opposite, in fact. I just felt I’d already OD’d on this shit reading Delicious Tacos five years ago. I fancied myself to be in a position equivalent to David Foster Wallace in the early 90’s when a contemporary’s novel was pitched to him as the apotheosis of hyper-irony, and he responded that it sounded like trying to quell a burning house with gasoline. Like Wallace with hyper-irony, I’d come out of the red pill, but I thought it was time to move on lest we get stuck in the more downward, nihilistic elements that tend to take primacy with such literary and cultural disruptions after their initial purpose has been served. The underground sex blogs had certainly served such a disruptive purpose in the 2010’s, as had the dark triad posturing of Heartiste and Mike Ma, but hadn’t rehashing such androgenic tendencies become a cliché of its own? Mr. Omar King’s novel An Odyssey of Dingbats!—which I was deeply into working on at the time—felt like one antidote: still transgressive and not neo-sincere in a DFW kind of way, but maybe just good old-fashioned heartfelt and positive as a project. All in all, Worst Boyfriend Ever felt regressive and like a sign from God about precisely what I should not publish. But God works in mysterious ways.
Fast forward a few months and I’d be cursing the fact that Worst Boyfriend Ever: A Sensitive Young Man did not become New Ritual’s second release. The reasons for this had nothing to do with my initial hesitancy and everything to do with the fact that WBE asked for a ridiculously large advance 1 It might be gauche to bring this up here, but in WBE’s world candor seems to be always acceptable, so what the hell. And besides, I can’t really blame him for asking for a lot of money: dude lives in a van, his writing his last remaining asset., and because we had legal concerns about the book that have since been somewhat validated. Still, I couldn’t help imagining what the book would look like with our logo on its spine. As WBE started compiling the book in earnest, however I think it became clear to everyone that aesthetically, financially, and legally it had always been meant to be in the canon of self-published Twitter books. All the risk and reward of publishing controversial content—not to mention using a copyrighted image from Neon Genesis Evangelion as the cover—should belong to WBE, and so too should all the money his ever-growing, surprisingly gender-balanced, readership is willing to part with.
Photo by WBE
What had changed my mind on WBE was first meeting him in person, and then actually reading his writing. This is the wrong order of operations, I know, but in a world where we are all drowning in computer-bound text, meeting someone IRL and finding them intriguing is obviously going to act as a filter for which of the innumerable Substacks and PDFs we have thrown at us we should invest our time in. This had happened for me with Omar, and it happened again with WBE. I met him at the beginning of his van journey here in Los Angeles, at So-Ho House of all places, which is going to make both of us sound fancier and more connected than we are. We were there for a reading, but it wasn’t an especially compelling one: mostly entertainment-industry adjacent girls reading stories and poems about sexuality. WBE, my NRP colleague, and I left the room to talk about his book. “Not to be misogynistic, but it was getting a little too estrogenic in there”, I said as we sat down. WBE agreed, but qualified that he, of course, was extremely misogynistic.
And from there he won me over. Disturbingly, WBE gloats about having exactly this effect on people in his work (knowing how to flatter them just enough to be liked, etc.) so maybe I’m just another mark for his sociopathic manipulation. But I’d like to think we connected on the deeper level of literature. At some point during the conversation we discovered that David Foster Wallace’s expository deep dive into solipsistic narcissism “Good Old Neon” was mutually our favorite short story and that we both thought Neil Strauss was underappreciated as a serious literary figure. These two facts alone would have been enough to win me over and unlock my mind about the broader potential implications of WBE and his work: for the literary scene, and maybe even for me personally.
Worst Boyfriend Ever: A Sensitive Young Man is, as advertised, a story about a guy cheating on his girlfriend. Specifically, a young, upwardly mobile, white guy who can’t keep pretending he’s satisfied with his seemingly not-too-bad life as a Seattle marketing specialist in a seemingly not-too-bad long-term relationship with a pretty and loving Asian girlfriend. The narrator splits the difference between Delicious Tacos and Patrick Bateman, embarking on a double life fueled by a desire to secretly fuck as many girls as possible, utilizing dating apps, massage parlors, prostitutes: basically, whom and whatever he can get his hands on. Other things happen in the book—some of them are funny, some of them are sad, some provide food for sociological thought—but the sexuality and the compulsive need to step out of line of fidelity are the story’s core, eclipsed only in the very last act by a more general desire to escape not just the stable relationship, but the stable job, the stable living situation—really just any semblance of stability whatsoever—to go off and travel the country in a van. And this is where our hero ends his journey and starts his next one.
There has been a degree of ambiguity about veracity, but I operate under the assumption that every word on the blog—and now in the book—is true. WBE described this to me as the only way he knows how to write: experiencing something and then writing about it in precise and honest detail, a process of reporting which for him became an obsession in its own right and perhaps ultimately more satisfying than the sexual escapades themselves.
Because no, as sex-filled as the book is, it is not exactly erotica, and this brings us to one of the scariest elements of WBE and the one most rooted to his being a Zoomer. For as dark as Heartiste could wax, his descriptions of sex tended to be hot. Worst Boyfriend Ever, by contrast, reveals how deeply porn, drugs, and the internet in general have warped a generation’s neural pleasure circuitry. WBE’s descriptions of sex are of a mostly joyless performance aided by blue chew, the chief satisfactions being the conquest itself, and the narcissistic supply afforded by being perceived as attractive and sexually adept. Of course, the issues don’t begin and end in the bedroom, and WBE astutely and horrifyingly branches out to address the extent to which hyper-stimulated Zoomer life itself has become such a joyless narcistic performance aided by Adderall to work, Weed to relax, etc. This is one of those bigger themes just beneath the surface of the book, and perhaps the real link between WBE and David Foster Wallace/Infinite Jest.
In contrast to WBE: I moved to Los Angeles after graduation and have been here ever since and with a long-term relationship to match. I told WBE about the gf that night at SoHo House by way of explaining why I wanted to get home at a reasonable hour—the irony of who I was saying this to not occurring to me in the moment—and he asked how long we’d been together. I told him almost 7 years, and he didn’t sneer but congratulated me, expressing further interest about the whole thing and explaining that people and what made them tick–especially with regard to relationships, the opposite sex, etc.—was all he cared about. He compared his obsession to the sociopathy-tinged autism of PUA Tyler Durden in Neil Strauss’s The Game. It occurred to me that maybe WBE could be not just a Zoomer Delicious Tacos but a Zoomer Neil Strauss, stretching for broader sociological reflection based in rigorous lived experimentation and gonzo reporting. The possibilities for what future collaborations—or at least conversations between us—might look like blossomed in my mind: me the guy who has nearly always made choices toward stability, and he the folk hero who had recently made it his dharma to do the opposite.
Admittedly, I have basically an equivalent attraction to chaotic male behavior and vibes that PUA would say girls do, except for me it’s intellectual and creative as opposed to sexual. Put simply: I’m fairly stable and level-headed so I like to make friends with guys (and read books by guys) who are not, so I can live out other versions of what could have been my life in small doses 2 This process lends itself very well to essay writing and publishing, but perhaps less well to fiction which is probably why I’m much more prolific at the former activities these days. Call it shadow work. WBE and his work play well into this shadow work for me, and maybe they can for you too.
That the sexual content of the book represents that classic Manosphere trope of “stuff all guys think about but won’t admit much less act on” goes without saying but take also WBE’s climactic move of quitting his job to drive around the country in a van. Every guy with a wage job I’ve ever known including myself has considered doing precisely this—if only as a brief, escapist, thought experiment—but WBE is the only person I know who has actually acted upon it, and for that we must tip our hat.
The harsh honesty of Worst Boyfriend Ever: A Sensitive Young Man became the shadow cast by the heartfelt honesty An Odyssey of Dingbats! for me. I realized both could be essential pieces of our incipient press’s individuation, and tie into my own. I still think the red pill in its crudest form is something to be moved on from, but the stone that the builders reject must always come back around as the cornerstone. Sometimes you must descend, however briefly, to keep going upwards.
Or maybe it’s just that WBE is a very good writer. Every line is a laser-blast of honesty. He is never discursive, having a natural instinct for pacing and tension that lent itself well to a suspenseful, serialized blog and makes the book version a page turner. We’re drawn onward and onward by the promise that WBE’s secrets must eventually come to light, and that the results will be explosive. The Zoomer thing isn’t irrelevant either. “Zoomer Delicious Tacos” might seem like it must have already been done, but it really hasn’t, at least not in this focused of a manner. As the older millennial denizens of the original manosphere-to-literature pipeline begin to settle down, the playing field is open to younger talents like WBE who can report firsthand on such 2020’s coded topics as blue chew (“Viagra For Zoomers” being one of the book’s most standout pieces), legal weed addiction, and having been raised by screens.
WBE is rarely philosophical, exactly, in his writing: much of it is very physical descriptions of his attempts to get off or have fun. But at his best—channeling the misery of a captured animal in his lamentations of the sexual and spiritual imprisonments of modernity—he is striking at something like the thesis of Bronze Age Mindset, on how we all live within the confines of controlled space, and modern man has been put out to pasture. WBE shows all of this, never tells, and he shows it very well.
The Blog as of 4.15.25
I have read Worst Boyfriend Ever (the blog) only sporadically since WBE made his escape from Seattle. I see concerning bits and pieces here and there: reports of cocaine and dining-and-dashing in Miami, a photograph of his hand on a girl’s neck in the back of a New York City Uber, supposedly part of a consensual tryst. I think I prefer reading WBE in the curated book form and so will wait for that for the next big download to get the full picture. The last few months have certainly been difficult for WBE, with his notoriety rising and various doxxing incidents. His harshest critics would have us believe he’s a sex pest and doing it all to look edgy or cool, but whatever comes next, I’ll keep viewing him as a somewhat tragic anti-hero: following his worst and most depraved instincts so the rest of us don’t have to.
Buy Book: https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Boyfriend-Ever-Sensitive-Young/dp/B0F3XSJGSD