Comparing income inequality to relationship inequality is just about the most disingenuous thing I've ever heard in my life. I'll agree that people who work hard deserve more income than those who don't, I'll agree that the number one predictor of financial success is and was and always will be the financial success of your parents. It's shitty and it should change and we should try to change it.

But people aren't income. Love is not a financial relationship for which you barter and enter into an agreement. There is no "If I do dishes x number of times, or listen to you y number of times, you agree to provide me with z amount of romantic validation." To think thusly is not only to remove the agency of the person with whom you want to be in a romantic relationship, but to actually dehumanize them, to treat them as the chest of loot at the end of your quest, a chest you earned by, apparently, not beating them.

Love doesn't work that way. Love isn't black and white. Love is a series of serendipitous occurrences. It's a train wreck. It's an accident. One that one can prevent from happening by treating it like an algorithm or series of if - then statements. This is where nice guys begin to deserve the derision they receive. They don't want love or partnership or a relationship, they want a socially acceptable thing into which they can input code resulting in validation.

For a lot of people, the ridicule of "nice guys" and "neckbeards" may be rooted in the psychological satisfaction one feels in "othering" someone else, okay. But to pretend these men are the martyrs of an unjust system is, frankly, bull shit. People deserve income in exchange for work. People are not income.

No, you may not feel you deserve the "prettiest girl in school" to "prostate yourself at her feet", but you cannot expect to buy another human being (whatever their perceived "worth") by being nice.