Background: It's the early nineties, I'm in my mid thirties. My live-in girlfriend had left me about three years prior to move back home with her parents in another state. Sad, painful, exhausting, and very, very lonely. I didn't know how I was going to survive I was so depressed. After this, I allowed no women other than those absolutely necessary (work, etc.) in my life as I'd had it with them.

A few months later, I finally started to work out and get in shape. Went at it for a couple of years and started to look pretty good. I got significantly more attention from women even in casual encounters (retail, etc.). I became very cynical, as in "sure, women don't care about how a guy looks. I know better.". I couldn't be bothered with any of them. Pretty much full MGTOW. I had a pretty decent life. Not perfect, but free.

The strange story: I was in the YMCA machine room by myself one night about 15 minutes before closing at 10 PM. On the air-bike just getting some cardio in before I left. Out of nowhere, this gal in tights I've never seen there before comes into the otherwise empty room and walks around for a minute before plopping herself right in front of the bike I'm on (literally not four feet away from it). She starts doing the splits, ass toward me - the roll your whole pelvis over kind where the ass is tilted up in the air on the back side of the split. I was stunned. I'm thinking "what? why? doesn't she realize how this looks?". I was honestly so taken aback I didn't stop pedaling for about a minute as I contemplated what to do next while trying not to stare (I'm human). After I collected myself, I just got up and left. I suppose I could have said something, but I knew almost instinctively at that moment it couldn't possibly end well under any circumstances.

I don't have the foggiest idea of why she chose to do that on that night. She had a whole empty room to choose from to stretch in and here she was almost in my face with that wide-open ass crack. This was before the internet, so maybe she needed some sort of attention from someone. Interestingly, I never saw her there again.

Probably the most unnerving thing that's ever happened to me in a gym (I think).

Unfortunate moral of the story: While temporarily satisfying to leave her there on the floor, I think the mental accumulation of experiences like this one contributed to my eventual cracking and getting married a couple of years later. It pays to stay connected to what brought you to the MGTOW lifestyle. As I've said elsewhere, MGTOW today does not guarantee MGTOW tomorrow. It's a process of constant, daily renewal. I eventually lost that connection. But that's another story.