The Reason Some Men Lose Their Shit Over Rejection
By: John Tompson
Tags: Dating Advice, Futility, Coming Of Age

When I was a teenager in the mid-late 1990s the way things worked in dating was boy is interested in girl, boy asked girl out and girl said a) yes, or b) no. If boy experienced b) he did one of two things: he either dusted himself off and moved on or he dug himself a hole to jump in and dig out of.

Then the 21st century happened and everything changed. I’ll use myself as an example here. I moved from Chicagoland in 2002 to Portland, Oregon where I still live. At that time I was working long hours in retail and used to frequent a restaurant in 2004 where I struck up a friendly rapport with one of the servers there and over a number of weeks I got the courage to ask her out.

She replied with “I’m flattered” and agreed to go out with me right before her 3 week trip to Chile. She called me on the day we were supposed to meet to tell me she had friends in from Florida (where she was from) and wanted to hang out with them while they were in town. I just happened to have the next day off as well and didn’t think anything of the attempt to bail.

The next day she picked me up at my place in SE and we went to this pan-Asian fusion cuisine place downtown. 24 year old me had no “game” in terms of dressing for the occasion but we ended up having a really good time. My inexperience led me to get my hopes entirely up thinking that when she came back from Chile that we would continue where we left off.

When she came back from Chile I resumed my routine of visiting her and was totally wrong about the situation. 24 year old me did not handle being blown off very well. Don’t tell me “I’ll call you” and not do it. It ended badly and I had a hard time getting over the experience because I didn’t understand what had happened and took it very personally.

I had gone out on a date with someone who was not interested in the first place. Or put another way, I was rejected before we even went out and no matter how good or great of a time we had this was going to go nowhere. Which finally brings me to the point of this story.

Fast forward 17 years…

In the dating game, men face rejection that is as incomprehensible to women as the physical process of giving birth to a child is to men.

It would be very easy to blame women outright for this reality but it’s just not that simple. Dating is no longer an intentional act between two people in search of a relationship. Men find themselves on the regular rejected before they’ve even gotten to the date.

And some men want relationships so much but are so self-centered they lose their shit over being rejected. It’s not once. It’s not 10 times. It’s probably more than 100 times if someone’s working at it. It’s beyond ridiculous.

The solution is not for women in healthy relationships to dole out dating advice to men. Women in healthy relationships need to stop doing that yesterday. In the hetero sense, women and men actually have a relatively level playing field in dating itself but when it comes to relationships women can have a relationship in 30 seconds if they want one. It just takes a solid “bat signal” and he will come. It does not work that way for men. Americans are generally oblivious to this fact, but the rest of the world knows it.

The solution is for women and men to date intentionally, or not at all.