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Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Hello Doctor,
I’ve been trying to get out of my rut by doing things that make me happy like going to my gym more, playing piano (learning Chopin) as well as staying focused with college, which I admit didn’t think was for me until I decided to get back on the horse after 8 years and now I’m getting good grades.
However, there are times when I get anxious/overwhelmed in public and the fear of rejection still scares me. And certain sayings like “you’ll find someone when you stop looking for them” have conditioned my brain to just keep to myself most of the time and be passive, even when someone catches my eye but my mind tells me to avoid eye contact. It seems like an oxymoron why we find things when we’re not looking for them. And the more I avoid it and try to escape with my earbuds or watch Netflix, the thoughts just keep coming back.
But overall, rejection still scares me. There was one time when I met a Venezuelan girl during a Halloween party couple years hosted by a mutual friend of mine. Had I not the courage to ask her to hang we wouldn’t have been a thing. So in this case, I wasn’t looking. I continue to do what I have to do in order to break the monotony but anxiety will still linger.
Analysis Paralysis
I want to introduce you to the concept of “take it seriously, not literally”. What you’re doing right now is using the idea of “it’ll happen when you’re not looking” as a means of avoiding the risk of rejection by not just taking it literally, but taking it to absurd lengths. And let’s be honest, if you already know what it means to find something when you’re not looking, and you have a concrete example of how it worked, then you know that your current approach is not the same thing.
Here’s the thing about rejection: you will never escape it. That’s not a judgement about you, your social skills, your looks or your value as a person; it’s just a matter of fact. Not everybody is going to like you, especially not in the way that you would prefer to be liked, and that’s ok. That doesn’t mean you’re inherently deficient. It just means that this particular person either didn’t see what they hoped to see in you (or that you hoped that they would see) or that you just weren’t right for them in that time and place. The transphobic wizard lady famously had her manuscript rejected a dozen times by publishers before going on to become one of the most successful writers in history. Those rejections weren’t about the quality of the book or the writer, just about the publishers’ opinions.
(We will not be discussing the relative merits or lack thereof of the books themselves, thanks.)
The fact that you aren’t immediately appealing to everyone at all times is, in fact, a good thing. Being a few peoples’ shot of whiskey is inherently better than being everyone’s cup of tea. Broad appeal is shallow appeal – people may like it well enough, but it’s not necessarily what they’re craving or will go out of their way to seek out or something that will stay with them for the long term. You can browse the best-seller lists of books for any particular decade or century you like and you’ll see that the books that sold the best weren’t always the ones that became classics. Shakespeare was famously less successful and accomplished a playwright than Christopher Marlowe, but it’s Shakespeare whose work has echoed through the ages.
Or to put it another way: only 10,000 people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, but everyone who did went on to start a band.
You can’t be everyone’s favorite flavor and you shouldn’t want to be, if only from an efficiency and time management standpoint. The effort it takes to try to persuade someone who’s basically neutral or mildly interested into being actively or strongly interested in you is not and will not be commensurate with the reward. That’s time and effort you could be putting towards finding someone who is into you, as well as cultivating the aspects of yourself that make you a more desirable partner.
This is why rejection isn’t something to be feared, just accepted. It’s understandable that rejection is scary; it feels like a judgement on you as a person. But really, all rejection is just one person deciding that you’re not right for them – either in that moment or in general. You make those same decisions all the time, too. After all, you’re not falling in love with every person you see and you’re not pursuing every single woman you encounter with the ardor and obliviousness of a cartoon skunk or horny Japanese high-school student with an alien roommate. You’re tacitly rejecting – or if you prefer, not choosing – people all the time, not because they’re awful people but simply because they’re not your particular type or flavor. If you can accept that someone can be a perfectly lovely individual but that you’re not remotely attracted to them, then why would that same logic not apply to you?
But here’s the important thing: by trying to avoid the fear of rejection, what you’re ultimately doing is reinforcing that fear. Avoidance just makes the thing you’re afraid of that much larger and more present. Because you avoid the discomfort that comes from rejection, you become afraid of the possibility of rejection – that is, the likelihood of feeling the fear of rejection rather than rejection itself. Continuing avoidance – that is, avoiding feeling the fear of rejection – becomes avoiding times when you might encounter the fear and thus you end up making the world you occupy smaller and smaller.
Which leads us to the way you’re misusing “it’ll happen when you’re not looking”. The idea of “it’ll happen when you’re not looking” doesn’t mean that you simply wait in your apartment until God decides to chuck a woman through your window or a horny single woman kicks your door down, it means that sometimes you get so caught up in the pursuit of the goal that you end up tripping yourself up.
You’ve undoubtedly encountered this before in other areas of your life. Video games are a prime example. If you’re stuck on a boss fight in a Souls-like game and you keep dying and getting sent back to a previous save point, you get frustrated. You want to get back to the boss arena ASAP and take on that fight again… but now you’re frustrated. It’s making you sloppy as you try to rush through to get back where you were, which means you end up making more mistakes and getting bodied by random enemies, which sets you back further. Now you’re even more frustrated and angry because you can’t even make it past the trash mobs and have to get through those, which makes you sloppier and more careless and wash, rinse repeat until you start doing experiments in how deep you can embed your controller into drywall.
However, when you take a break, step away from the console and come back to it a day or two later, you find that things flow much more easily and you ultimately hand the boss his own ass and move on to the next stage of the game like it was nothing.
This is how it is with dating. When you are laser-focused on trying to find Mr., Ms., or Mx. Right to the exclusion of all else, you get frustrated. You get sloppy. You make mistakes. But if you step away and just live your life, you’re relaxed and in your element. You’re doing things you enjoy, with people you like spending time with and wouldn’t you know it, that means you’re in a much better mood, you’re much more comfortable and you’re better positioned to connect with people and show them your best, most attractive, most authentic self… precisely because you’re not trying.
So not looking doesn’t mean that you refuse to make eye contact and just stand in the corner waiting for someone to take pity on you. That’s just attempting to avoid the fear of rejection by displacing it onto someone else and hoping that other people will be motivated enough to do the work for you. Not looking means you go out and live your life – ideally in ways that bring you in contact with other people. The saying that luck is when preparation meets opportunity is apt here; by doing things you enjoy out in public, you’re putting yourself in position to meet other people who enjoy the same things. That increases the odds that you’ll meet someone who’s actually compatible with you while also making it easier to connect with them; after all, you already know you have these things in common and can start off the conversation by talking about your shared interest.
But this still requires being willing to confront the possibility of rejection… and it’s only through confronting it that you realize that while rejection is unpleasant, it’s not damaging. It affects you exactly as much as you allow it to. And until you actually face it head on without flinching and let you feel what it actually feels like instead of hyping it up in your mind, you won’t see the difference between the rejection going on in your head and what’s actually happening in the real world.
If the idea of going out and actively seeking a person to date is too intimidating or is getting frustrating, that’s fine. But going out and living your life in a way that puts you in fortune’s path does make it much easier to meet folks… and in ways that make it more likely that you’ll meet someone who’s right for you, instead of rolling the dice based on very limited information.
Again: the point isn’t that rejection doesn’t sting; it absolutely does. But it means what you allow it to mean, not an objective judgement that everyone agrees with. Avoiding that sting just makes it worse and ultimately just makes you more afraid of rejection and everything surrounding it. The only way out is through.
But again: you want to take things seriously, not literally. Especially when taking it literally is just an avoidance mechanism.
Good luck.
Hi Doc,
I had been with my ex for 8 years before we split. I wasn’t happy in the summer, I told her and it all blew up and we called it quits. I got back in contact 2 months later, saying I missed her and that I wanted to give it a go. She agreed to meet and we agreed to work on it together. I went away for 6 weeks with work, during which point everything was ok, spoke all the time. Got back and for 2 days it was great. Then after a weekend with our separate families, she came back saying she didn’t think she loved me anymore and that she didn’t think it could work, which I believe is from what her family said after she told them everything bad I ever did after the breakup.
This turned into another argument and ended in me getting angry and her leaving the house and claiming that I had scared her.
A month later, I reached out, as I still love her and want this to work. She is saying that she can’t forgive me getting angry and that she is scared of me. I’ve been to therapy to learn how to cope with my feelings and how to be a better person, but she’s scared I will be the same and is holding herself back from wanting to see me. Do you have any advice?
Many thanks
Hulk Smashed?
Hoo boy.
So this is what we in the dating advice biz call ‘a rich text’. What we have here, HS, is a lot of little nuggets that, when put together, paints the full picture as to why your ex isn’t feeling it anymore.
As regular readers know, I have a series of questions for people who are hoping to get back with an ex, questions that need to be answered before they make the attempt. They are:
Question #1: Why did you break up in the first place?
Question #2: Has the reason why you broke up changed?
Question #3: Why Now?
Question #4: Do you miss THEM, or do you miss what they represent?
Question #5: Are they right for you, NOW?
The reason why I have people ask themselves these questions is because things often haven’t changed. As a result, you end up going through the 12” dance remix of your first break up – it’s the same song, just faster and with a more intense beat.
And oh look at what happened with you: you basically had the same break up as before, but now with the extra twist of having gotten angry enough with your ex that she’s afraid of you.
Part of the problem is that you’re not accepting that maybe your ex ultimately decided that she didn’t want to date you all on her own. Blaming this on the supposed Svengali-esque manipulation of her family neatly ignores the possibility that with a little distance and talking things out with people whose judgement she trusts, she came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to work out. That’s a disappointing outcome, to be sure… but it’s still ultimately her decision.
The fact that you blew up at her over this ultimately confirmed to her that she was correct to not want to continue a relationship with you. Whether you were arguing over her conclusion, her agency (whether she was manipulated by people for malicious reasons) or whatever else, you were ultimately telling her that she didn’t have the right to feel or think the way she did about things. And while it’s understandable that you were hurt by this decision, trying to overrule or argue her into changing her mind is not going to work. Whether her family did or didn’t tell her about “all the bad things you did” is irrelevant. At the end of the day, it’s still her decision. You can disagree with it or think that how she arrived at that decision was faulty… but it’s still her choice to make.
To be honest, I’m not entirely surprised she still doesn’t want to see you, even after having gone through therapy. I’ll tell you what I am not seeing in your letter: recognizing what you did and why it was wrong. Nor, for that matter, am I seeing you take ownership of your mistakes and understanding why these might affect someone’s interest in a relationship with you.
Those “bad things” you did? However bad they were or weren’t, they clearly were enough to at least give her pause and make her reconsider things. You have to accept that; not recognizing or acknowledging how they made her feel about a future relationship with you is going to tell her that things likely haven’t changed.
The same goes for not accepting that you scared her enough that she doesn’t want to see you. You frame it as “holding herself back” – as though she wants this but isn’t being permitted. Again, you’re not acknowledging that this is how she feels and instead attributing it to something restricting her own agency. Your framing of the situation is minimizing your actions and making it seem as though you feel entitled to have her back as a partner but it’s being thwarted by outside actors, rather than she made the decision on her own and doesn’t want to have more to do with you.
So, cards on the table: I don’t think there’s any hope of getting back with her – certainly not now, and likely not at all. If you want even the molecule of hope that things will be different, then it’s a matter of deeds, not words. If you have actually changed and become a better person, you’re going to have to show it through your actions. And the first step to that is going to be respecting her decision and moving on. The longer you insist on trying to get her back, the more you’re going to push her away, because it’s telling her that the things that broke you up have not changed.
The next step is going to be living your life with authenticity and integrity. That means living as the person you say you’ve become… which is also going to include taking ownership of your faults, flaws and mistakes. Until you do, you’re just confirming for her that nothing has changed and getting back with you will be a repeat of the last time she gave you a chance.
However, as I said: you’re still going to have to do this honestly, without the goal of getting her back. You have to be doing this because you want to be a better person over all. Otherwise all you’re doing is putting on a performance for an audience of one… and she’ll know that as soon as the curtain comes down, the performance is going to end. That means accepting that you’re likely not going to get her back and not trying to get her back. If she’s going to decide to try again, it’ll have to be her decision, made without your involvement.
But, I hear you cry, how is she supposed to know you’ve changed if you’re not there to tell her or show her? Well, that’s going to be up to fate. Maybe she’ll hear through the grapevine how things have changed and you’re like a different person. Or maybe she won’t. Or she may learn that you’re doing much better but still decide that some wounds run too deep to be overcome. That’s a legitimate choice for her and one that you’re just going to have to accept.
There is no path forward here for you that still involves her. You’re going to have to go and be a better person for the sake of being a better person and let the dice fall how they may. If the stars align and she reaches out to you, then you have the opportunity to start a new and different relationship, rather than continuing the one that you very definitively ended.
But if they don’t… that’s how it goes, and it’s on you to accept it and move on.
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