Looking back, if there’s one emotional skill I wish I’d learned earlier in it’s positively handling romantic rejection.
It’s going to happen. How you dance with perceived rejection deeply shapes the quality of your life and relationships, from sex to dating to marriage to friendship.
We’ve all tasted relational rejection in one of its myriad forms. I spent a year in university feeling downtrodden that a female friend didn’t also want to develop a romantic relationship. I wrapped myself in a shroud of low-level misery.
It’s this fear of what rejection can become that makes many men, young and older, afraid of initiating connection, or letting go of the hope that a relationship will become romantic. Fear of rejection, whether over sex or other connectedness, is often still alive in the bedrooms and kitchens of long-term marriages.
Why is rejection such a potential powerful block?
Relationships and sex are about connection and belonging, fundamental to our survival as social animals. So romantic rejection can feel life threatening. (It’s partly why some men become violent.)
Fear of romantic rejection is also amplifies childhood wounds of feeling rejected or ignored by mom or dad. If rejection feels overwhelming, it’s probably drawing on early life pain.
Rejection is debilitating because it’s entwined with shame, the all-encompassing sense that I’m bad, unlovable.
How can you shift your relationship with rejection?
When you take a breath and start to do inner work you begin to unmesh rejection from your larger sense of self.
In this way, rejection is transformative—the heartbreak is a fresh invitation to reassess what you really want.
You might discover ways that you’ve avoided acknowledging what you didn’t want to see or feel. Surprisingly, you begin to see the relationship that didn’t happen making room for a more fulfilling one.
To reframe rejection is to see a larger story unfolding, one in which holding rejection with self-compassion is the path to a life filled with more of what you want—love, warmth and connection.