Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, I still believe that the more we approach, the greater our chances of finding a true love become. However, when I adopted this overly simple strategy in 1990, I was surprised to encounter such a high percentage of   romantic rejections. I mean, many dating books advise men to expect just one out of every one-hundred women to respond favorably. But with me, that hits-to-misses ratio was more like one out of every fifteen hundred. No joke!

Plus, I’d underestimated the cumulative negative impacts of too frequent rejection on my psyche.  Through all that, I came to understand that I was taking the romantic rejections too personally. Back then, rejection affected me as would a punch in the face, sending me reeling for weeks sometimes. I came to detest it as well as the women who issued it. The more   love rejections   I received, the more hurt I got and the more afraid of rejection I grew. 

So I had to bow out of the game for a year or so in the mid 1990s to learn to desensitize myself. To that end, I entered therapy, read several books on coping with love rejection, and tried to savor life without women for a while. The therapy proved a success, though of course, I still don’t like rejection. But today, the female utterance of the word No, doesn’t produce the searing anxiety it used to. I don’t feel as slighted anymore, because I understand that ladies are as powerless to control who turns them on as I, and so could not be rightly blamed for finding me wanting.  See    here    for more details on some of the potentially harmful effects of romantic rejection that I’ve encountered through the years. 

It’s bad to seek rejection just for rejection’s sake because one needs to have an eye toward any wisdom the experience might contain; wisdom that’s easy to miss if all you’re worried out is bumping up the numbers. At times, I lost sight of the real goal (a beautiful lady saying yes), and actually felt a sense of accomplishment when I got a no. I reasoned that the love rejections were evidence that at least I was getting out and trying, rather than sitting on my butt at home doing nothing at all. This was certainly true enough. After all, I wouldn’t have accrued the rejections by sitting around at home. In a sense, the rejections were indeed strong evidence that I was at least playing the game. No, I wasn’t   winning   the game. But since one must first   play   the game in order to win, I found comfort in knowing that I was one step closer to winning, by playing, and accruing the romantic rejections.

This worked for a year or two. My pride in my monumental efforts to defy my fear helped offset the humiliations I encountered. It didn’t matter whether she said no or yes. Success at that point I measured by how often I could bring myself to ask, irrespective of how she responded. But soon, that sweet part of the bitter-sweet taste of rejection disappeared. No longer was it good enough just to get out there. No longer was I proud of being able to work up the courage to ask a woman to dance. And finally, no longer did I feel any sense of accomplishment by having gotten far enough to be told No. Getting rejections thus became child’s play. And then, once the thrill of victory over successfully making the attempt faded, only the humiliation remained. Thus, sustaining the motivation to keep trying grew difficult, particularly once I moved here to Altoona in late 2001. Even today, it’s not [so much] the fear of being rejected that keeps me from approaching more women. Rather, it’s the resignation that they’ll just say no anyway, so why bother?

Romantic rejection is all the more embarrassing when one realizes that he could have gotten the same information without risking so much. Why jump head first into a pond to see how warm it is, when you could have just stuck your toe in and learned the same? Throughout the 1990s, I dismissed the validity of non verbal communication. For me, the toe test was insufficient and potentially inaccurate. It wasn’t good enough thus, for a woman to just give me a dirty look as I walked toward her. Simply looking at her and observing her reaction did not absolve my responsibility to genuinely move past my fear, and actually talk with her. Just reading her body language didn’t count. No. I expected myself to actually   ask   her if she’d care to get acquainted. Of course, by this time in the typical scenario, she had already answered that several times with dirty looks, by moving away, and such, and was clearly frustrated that I paid no mind. So, not only did I get rejected, I also got many judgmental stares along with disparaging comments and unfavorable epithets. In this way, the bite of romantic rejection felt much more painful than it might have, had I acted smarter and with more sensitivity.

To wrap this up then, the   costs   of focusing only on increasing the numbers of women approached and rejections received, and not enough on improving the approach techniques, would be:

1. Too much wasted time and excessively hurt feelings.  Why ask a lady out when you’re virtually certain that she’ll say no anyhow? 
2. Needlessly frequent and severe rejections.   It’s one thing to simply be told no. That’s humiliating enough.  But it’s quite another (and more painful thing) to be told no with the added message that she thinks you’re a fool, particularly when you have indeed acted like one.
3. Loss of one’s good reputation. Asking the same woman out too often can make you into a stalker in her eyes as well as her friends’.  When numbers are the only game, we often forget who we’ve already approached, particularly when approaching hundreds of women in a night Women talk crassly about insensitive men, who appear to be on the make.
4. Missed opportunities to learn from rejection. If you don’t consider what happened and learn from it, you’ll be no more likely to get a Yes the next time. And who wants to keep repeating the same mistake? Take gamblers for example. They’re never content to just sit back and play the game. They’re constantly looking for ways to improve their odds of winning. The man seeking a mate should also be forever on the look-out for new angles.
5. Wasted resources   such as needless money spending. Often, guys buy ladies drinks and other gifts, even when they strongly suspect that she doesn’t like them. Yet they do so hoping to   melt her heart.   What a waste however. While such strategies might work on the so-called gold-digging lady, they will not on any woman whose only agenda item is to exchange love with a desirable man.
6. Less time for other pursuits. If one’s constantly out in the bars working the numbers, he’ll miss out on other, perhaps more enjoyable pastimes. To me in the 1990s, bars were a necessary evil one had to endure in order to meet women. I didn’t like them, but couldn’t think of any other places where so many available and desirable women congregated, and thus where my chances of finding a lover would be higher. I would have much rather spent that time attending ham radio club meetings, shopping for CDs and books, and tinkering with computers. However, these activities weren’t often frequented by sought-after women. Yet now that I’m aware of the futility of meeting someone in a bar, not to mention the fact that I don’t drink anymore, I find these days that I make very much more time for hobbies than ten years ago.
7. Too many dead-end relationships. When all we care about are the numbers, it’s easy to become entangled in a relationship with a lady who isn’t   the best.   That is to say, that without careful prior consideration of the woman’s desirability, we can end up approaching ladies who look great from afar but cease looking so good as we move closer. I’ve on occasion glanced women across the room that seemed perfect. Then I rushed over (before someone else would snag them) for a dance. Sometimes they’d say yes and next thing I knew, I’d be on the dance floor looking at her before me and wondering where her charm had gone that had been so plain but a few moments ago.

From the preceding list, it’s easy to glean the many practical advantages of working smarter while targeting more than just raising the sheer numbers of approaches:

1. Better Overall Mood. Less shame, less depression, less wasted time chasing relationships doomed to failure from the start, more liked in one’s social group, and more time to pursue fun hobbies.
2. Less Need for Therapy. This grows from item 1.
3. Improved Self Confidence and Self Esteem   due to less squandering of the self on needless rejections.
4. Improved chances of finding Miss Right. If one is not consumed in the wasteful efforts of needless repeated rejections and dead-end relationships, he can aim his resources where they’ll count more, and only subject himself to rejection from truly eligible women.
5. Fewer Wasted Resources. Follows from item 4 above.
6. Better Reputation. With a better ability to   read the situation,   a man is less likely to make unwelcome advances in which he goes needlessly too far. Women like knowing a guy is sensitive to their wishes, and will talk well of he who heeds them to others, even if they don’t consider him attractive.
7. More Time and Energy For Other Pursuits.   Questing for the right relationship can be exhausting because not only does it take considerable time and effort to troll for girls, but the chronic rejections make the search doubly taxing. If a man is working smarter, and is thus presumably getting fewer rejections, this would seem to bias his overall experience in the quest to the positive and thus make it less draining on his psyche.
8. Better Effectiveness in Work and Career.  With fewer rejections, and a resulting better overall mood as mentioned in item 1, the man would concentrate better, be less irritable, and thus, do a better job at work. As a result, his coworkers would like and respect him more and likely push for promotions for him where applicable. This in turn would give him more resources (buying power), and as you know, women prefer richer men, even the ones who can’t accurately be typed as gold diggers.
9. Longer Lasting, Happier Relationships. If a man selects more eligible mates to begin with, he’ll be happier with his choices for longer periods. While it’s true that he won’t have as many dates since he’s choosier, those that do present themselves will be more completely fulfilling. As a result, he’ll
   A. Treat them better,
   B. Respect them more,
   C. Be less given to abusing them, and
   D. Be better able to accommodate any unusual proclivities in them.
   In short, he’ll be better equipped to accept them as they are and thus, won’t as likely seek to change them. Potential friction shrinks therefore, and the lady will feel more genuinely loved (because she would in fact be).
10. Enhanced Desirability. Given items 1, 3, 6, and 8 above, the man would be deemed more attractive, and so his chances of attracting the lady of his dreams would go up.

There, does that answer your question?

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Combating The Shame Of Rejection
• Tom’s Views –> Romantic Rejection Causes Long-Term Harm

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 at 9:47 am and is filed under Acceptance, Advice, Attraction, Beauty, Concepts, Desparation, Honesty, Letters, Loneliness, Obesity, Obsession, Physical Attraction, Receiving Rejection, Rejection, Self Esteem, Therapy, Trust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.