Combating The Shame Of Rejection

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Inspired by audio journal episode   AJE-2010-05-07-19-30.

As I said in the previous post   here, needless rejection should be avoided.  To summarize: A needless love rejection is one where you experience more pain and humiliation than necessary, to find out if that lady you like so much, likes you back.  Dating requires some risk, but not excessive risk.  Risking foolishly not only hurts too much, but it can damage you psychologically by creating insecurities that not even the best therapists can help rid you of.  These will plague your love quest with undue hardship.  So take the possibility of being rejected seriously, and don’t ask her any more than you must in order to figure out her wishes, and don’t linger once she’s made it clear that she does not desire you.  Do not pester, and as a general rule, do not retry very often.  If she says no, she probably means it, for years to come.  So give her those years, before you ask her out again.   Subjecting yourself to needless rejection will probably make you unduly afraid of love rejection. 

As long as we’ve shown her all the consideration, respect, and sensitivity we can, then we should not be embarrassed or shamed, should she reject us anyway.  Once we’ve stopped the excessive strutting, asking for too much too soon, and the too-frequent retries, any rejection that we still get does not make us universally bad people.  Experience shows that ladies usually reject us for circumstances beyond our control to fix, and beyond theirs as well.  So why blame them?  Why blame ourselves?  Doing so only angers us at them, and pointlessly shames us besides.  Even if they deem the fellow as   the reject,  it’s never valid for him to draw that same conclusion about himself. 

Rejection is usually not personal; especially once we’ve eliminated any bad-choice components from our approach.  That is: Getting Rejected typically does not occur due to things about ourselves that we could have controlled, or should have.  Once we’ve incorporated politeness, respect, consideration of her needs, and gentle-but-not-brutal honesty into our getting-acquainted routines, her response becomes the choice of the gods or destiny; we are neither responsible for a yes nor a no answer.  Primarily, it’s nature that defines who we’re attracted to, and who’s attracted to us.  Any choices that we could rightly be held accountable for, are secondary and so, for the most part irrelevant.  So, we cannot be faulted much for another’s dislike of us, and so, should not feel guilt or inadequacy when ladies shun us. Realizing just how little we actually do control about ourselves can help us to be less afraid of rejection.

While she may deem us unworthy when she scoffs at us, that opinion is not universal fact; though it may feel like it.  In fact, the only universal truth she can state with any authority whatsoever is that she personally does not find us attractive.  Period.  Anything beyond that, such as hateful glares, insults, and demeaning comments, is just blusterous and meaningless.  Why? Because she’s neither qualified nor empowered to evaluate our worthiness; unless we give her that power.  Therefore, her words should not be allowed to diminish our self opinions.

She has no right to put us down for trying; at least, not for   trying the first time. Indeed, the simple act of polling her does not make us bad, and asking her out does not reduce our universal worthiness, no matter what her response is.  There’s nothing wrong with inviting her to a date, unless of course, we know that she’s already happily involved with someone else, or we’ve asked her recently but she declined.  In these circumstances, asking her anyway would constitute the needless risk of our love being rejected (rejected love) mentioned above, that we’re well advised to avoid.  It may also show her that we do not respect her wishes, which will offend her and thus, net us a much more poignant rejection than necessary.   She may publicly humiliate us by shouting at us to get away from her.  So the trick is to ask without needlessly offending her.  Once we’ve eliminated that needlessly offensive part from our love questing strategies, there’s then nothing wrong with asking. 

Asking does not decrease our worthiness.  Nor does her response actually; no matter how inhospitable that might be.  She may not like that we asked, and in fact, may object boisterously.  Never mind that though, because it’s beyond her purview to shame us for asking.  She has no right to do that.  All we were doing was testing her availability.  So we should neither be ashamed to ask, nor feel like we’ve committed a grave sin by asking, should she reject us.  We all deserve to be happy in love, even if she denies our request to get happy with her. 

In fact, her response to our date request does not determine the appropriateness of our query at all.  In other words, we should never conclude after receiving a rejection that we were wrong to ask in the first place.  Indeed, in light of today’s diverse cultures, how would we know what she’d say?  She may berate us for asking, and she might even suggest that our asking was inappropriate. But she’d be wrong because the outcome of a poll never determines the rightness of taking the poll.  The conclusion of the poll may reveal undesirable answers.  But the degree to which those answers are wanted (or not) does not invalidate the need to take the poll in the first place, to seek those answers.  We would not have those answers unless we polled for them to begin with.  So it’s irrational for her (and us) to project backward and harshly refute the poll’s necessity because of what we learned from it.  Whether she accepts or rejects our date request, it is always right to ask given that the conditions above are met. 

Rejection and how we interpret it can be by far the greatest opposing force to wining the love quest.  If we regard it too little, then we needlessly offend others, and make ourselves more afraid of rejection.  But if we take it too much to heart and confuse unnecessary rejection with necessary rejection, we become overly anxious and fearful, and deny ourselves  the opportunity for true love.  We don’t seek it because we fear the seeking process too much.  Indeed, the more afraid of getting rejected we are, the less we’ll approach new ladies.  The less approaching we do, the less likely we are to find a dream girl who views us as dream guys.  It’s all about the numbers; the more we try, the more we’ll succeed.  So to make the love quest as painless and rewarding as possible, we must put our rejected love into the least hindering perspective.  We should not take it for more than it actually means, and through this writing, I hope I’ve lessened its negative connotations for myself and all who read this. 

Take care, and happy hunting.

Tom Hesley

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