Romantic Rejection Causes Long-Term Harm
While people can learn to take romantic rejection less to heart and maintain their composure when it happens, it’s also important to learn NOT to underestimate romantic rejection’s potential for causing much long-term harm to a person’s psyche. Even to the most self-assured person, romantic rejection has clear costs as follows:
- It harms by depletes long-term confidence,
- Repeated romantic rejection can promote neurosis, depression, and psychosis,
- It can trigger depression and thus, can cause all the symptoms associated with depression, which can be quite harmful and difficult if not impossible to recover from.
- Romantic rejection interferes with ability to concentrate.
- It weakens motivation – even in unrelated areas of life such as work.
- It might strengthen food, drug, and alcohol addictions,
- Too much romantic rejection creates a false sense of futility regarding the achievability of one’s Big Dream. Get shot down too often, and you may decide to give up pursuing your big dream.
- Love rejection encourages withdrawal from social circles – isolation.
- It can lower immune system function and thus indirectly harm the body by allowing opportunistic illnesses to set in.
- Rejection in love can increase at-rest stress levels, and most of us know these days just how gravely harmful chronic stress can be.
- Frequent romantic rejection may promote obsessive behaviors such as trying more than once and too often to date a girl who’s already rejected us.
In short, too much romantic rejection, without sufficient time between each occurrence for healing, can harm our physical and mental well-being over the long term. So, though stumbling upon love rejection while pursuing true love cannot be avoided, we should not subject ourselves to needless rejection as it injures us. We ought to avoid romantic rejection’s negative effects when practical.
Some folks equate romantic rejection with progress when they get it, in the sense that the more lovers who turn them down, the closer they are to finding one who will at last accept them. “Let’s say you have a pool of 10,000 women,” a therapist once said. “Your goal is to quickly rule out as many of those as you can, so that you’ll reach the ones who like you faster.” The underlying assumption here is that at least someone in that pool of 10,000 will in fact find us attractive. In this light, romantic rejection appears as a holly grail, to be sought out rather than avoided. But as mentioned, it also stifles motivation to keep trying, which may in the end prove more debilitating than avoiding it in the first place. Too much rejection creates more fear of it, and if we become too afraid, we may not be able to try at all to overcome rejection.
Plus, when striving for solely a high rejection count becomes the sole object, we can end up recklessly approaching too many of the wrong lovers, which can itself be socially harmful to us. We may suspect them to be wrong, but to get the rejection count up, we approach them anyway, thinking that they’d eventually warm up or that somehow, we’d get used to romantic rejection and no longer fear it. But the best antidote to the fear of romantic rejection is to find sustained acceptance, not more rejection. Getting more romantic rejection should not be the object. The healthier object should be to get acceptance.
Many fellows ignore body language in their quests for more rejections. Thus, they disregard what the lady wants (or does not want). No matter that she turns away as they walk closer. These arrogant chumps try relentlessly to start conversations anyhow. Sometimes, the woman relents and talks to them. Indeed, I’d seen so many men do this with eventual success that it seemed a prudent behavior, even though invariably it was received badly on the first attempt. One man described a woman’s protective shell that he said, must be penetrated like cracking a nut. It really is a war, these pesky men say, because ladies intentionally play hard to get in order to test the man’s resolve. (Obviously, these men have little faith in her sincerity). Give up when she seems bored they caution, and you lose the battle because she’ll deem you of faint heart, and as such, undeserving of her trust. Take no as her final answer, and you’ll never enjoy a lovely beauty on your arm. Nonsense! They ignore the wearing-down effect repeated romantic rejection generates.
As a means to acceptance, we can easily abuse romantic rejection by seeking it indiscriminately, just as we might overindulge in exercise on the way to a healthy, fit body. The result is our endurance of excessive negative effect. Work the body too hard without enough rest in between each workout, and you’ll wear out your joints, promote arthritis, and reduce the long-term benefits of training. That is, should you become arthritic, you’d not be able to continue to work out as vigorously, and some of the routines you simply would not be able to do, period. Clearly, the future effects of overdoing exercise in the present would limit the benefits you could gain in later years. And over the course of a lifetime, exercise improperly managed as a youth can actually cause reduced average fitness, just as the chronic dieter can wind up heavier than those who never dieted at all.
Likewise, subject yourself to too many rapid-fire love rejections without allowing sufficient time for reflection and mental repair, and you’ll probably experience some of the symptoms I’ve listed above. Too much romantic rejection can exacerbate the very condition (loneliness) that you’re trying to eliminate. So at times, it’s wise to avoid love rejection rather than repeatedly confronting it. If you seek rejection rather than acceptance, pain will be your reward; not the love that you want. Romantic rejection indeed causes long-term harm. So please do not subject yourself to if if you do not have to. Good luck.
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Tags: Afraid Of Rejection, Love Lonely
May 7th, 2011 at 8:45 pm
For a time I’m ashamed to say, I tried mimicking the proverbial pit-bull that just doesn’t let go. Sometimes I talked to their backs, hoping that the women would eventually face me with intrigue. But that never happened. In fact, I felt all the more foolish, when they’d get up and leave, for my having failed to pay head to their non verbally communicated wishes. Ignoring their initial body language made rejection a more shameful experience than it needed to be, and that further intensified my fear of it.
Perhaps this technique works for some men, but not for me. What’s the point of approaching at all, if all you’re after is romantic rejection anyhow? I came to expect rejection so much that a woman agreeing to dance with me left me stunned, as I was unprepared for a Yes response.