Rejection

Rejection is probably the biggest fear related to dating and love. We’re scared to be rejected when approaching someone we like and even already in a relationship we’re scared to touch upon certain topics in fear of not getting a reply we’re expecting. Is rejection really that horrible, though? Can it have some positive aspects? Let me explore the topic today.

First of all, we’re often wrong with our assumptions about how other people feel about us and even about how we feel about them. We tend to tell ourselves that we’re scared of rejection but actually there may be numerous other gut reasons why we’re not addressing a topic (e.g we know that we only have chemistry with the person we’re interested in and the fear of rejection is real because somewhere deep we know a person would be right by telling us “no”). In a different scenario, a person we’re into maybe as cryptic about their feelings towards us as we are and disclosing how we feel will be reciprocated. Even if it’s not the case, however, we still earn more from telling them how we feel than from hiding it. After all, unless we know that it’s a “no” we can’t truly move on with our lives.

Moving on is exactly what’s sometimes the biggest benefit of getting rejected. Of course, we don’t like it and of course it hurts but it’s much better than to keep pining for someone who either doesn’t care about us at all or isn’t interested in us in “that way”. Sometimes we even have enough reasons to know that we are going to get rejected but it’s worth doing so just to hit our rock bottom. We got all the messages from the guy or a girl telling us that they’re not into us, but often it’s still good to address the already known so that the embarrassment can serve as our cold shower and make us realize that we need to start truly looking around again.

Why is rejection so hurtful? Because we’re slaves of our egos and we want the world to be the way we’d like it. If we want a person and the person doesn’t want us back we feel disrespected. It’s not difficult to find examples of that – every girl that has been cat called and didn’t reply has experienced the so called “rejected man” reaction. “Hi Baby!” says the guy you walk by on the street and when you don’t reply,  just a second later you hear that you have a fat ass and actually he wasn’t interested anyway. This trivial example shows how we work. We want things and people just because, often not thinking about whether we would actually be happy with what we got.

To sum up, simply be careful what you wish for. Rejection is often a sign that what we wanted wasn’t right for us and the main reason we feel bad when we experience it is because we don’t like to be wrong.