Dealing with Rejection

Dating can be a scary process, and the potential rejection that sometimes accompanies it is many people’s greatest fear come to life. It can be painful to be turned down by someone, especially when you get your hopes up. However, any suffering caused by dismissal can be avoided; all you need to do is change your own mindset.

1: Don’t Take Things Too Personally
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when dealing with rejection is to take the entire situation personally. Don’t let yourself think “He/She rejected me because I’m not good enough”; remember, there are countless other reasons why an invitation could be turned down, and many of them are quite reasonable and innocent.
Try to think about it from the other person’s perspective; they may have a lot going on, and your particular request or engagement might not rank as highly to them as it does to you. This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, just the way of the world. Not everybody will prioritize things the same way that you do, and often this asymmetry will lead to rejection. Keep that in mind, and try not to treat any dismissal as a personal wound.
Honestly, even saying that you were rejected is a good example of society’s tendency to make this a personal issue. A better way to think about it is “your request was rejected”; not only does this correctly attribute the issue, but it helps to take the spotlight off of you.

2: Treat Every Experience Independently
A big mistake to avoid is to overgeneralize an experience when faced with rejection. Remember that all situations are different, especially when dealing with unique people. That means that different outcomes are likely; a declination with one person could easily result in acceptance by another without any other variables being changed.
It’s completely foolish to allow any kind of rejection to discourage you from making any future attempts of the same nature. One bad experience doesn’t determine the outcome of the rest of your life, so don’t give any particular dismissal too much credence.

3: Look at Rejection Realistically
This is arguably the point of this entire article, but here I’m going to lay out an average situation in very simple terms for clarification. Let’s say that you’re interested in another person and decide to take a chance and ask that person on a date. Unfortunately that person declines your request (for an undisclosed reason). Now what?
You probably feel bad, as most people do. But why? Have you lost anything in this whole transaction? It’s not like being rejected robbed you of all of your worldly possessions and left you in a ditch somewhere. Quite contrary, the situation is almost exactly the same as it was before the invitation was made.
By that logic it would only make sense to feel like you did beforehand. Being turned down doesn’t directly harm you in any way; in reality you’re only lamenting over what could have been. Feeling bad over potential is one of the most foolish things that you can do, simply because potential is created and destroyed en masse each day. In that sense rejection is just the closure of an opportunity, and that isn’t a very significant loss when compared the countless opportunities that we ignore each day in lieu of more preferential choices.
At its core, a dismissal is simply the word ‘NO’ packaged up to make it seem more important. It’s like a really big, fancily gift wrapped box with a very small, unimpressive response inside. Are you really going to let a tiny two letter word determine how you feel?

4: Don’t Put the other Person on a Pedestal
Another reason behind the considerable pain of rejection is the fact that many of us hold the other party in a particularly high status. We “get our hopes up” so to speak, and this only makes rejection hurt even more when it does happen.
The fix for this is to avoid putting all of your psychological eggs in one basket. Think of it like a roulette wheel; if you bet everything each time that you play, you’re bound to suffer a devastating loss sooner or later. On the other hand, if you bet one dollar your chances of losing are the same, but the significance of the loss is greatly diminished.
Dismissal is going to happen; that’s just a fact of life. Trying to avoid it won’t make it go away, but it is possible to handle your affairs in such a way that you don’t get crushed when rejection does rear its ugly head.