In what unpleasant, surprising ways have you been rejected?

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I've had people stand me up, delete their email account, etc. I keep thinking I'm in OK standing with people, only to find that they quietly made themselves unavailable. I wish people had given a clue, but prior to the instance, they give no hint that anything is wrong...

My friends (and several dates) have often stood me up (I now have a 15-minutes-past-agreed-upon-time rule, when I leave the agreed upon meeting place; I refuse to drink four or five cups of coffee waiting alone at a table). My e-mail messages to friends have bounced back (telling me that my friends deleted their usual mode of contact without warning me). Same thing with telephone numbers, etc.

I send e-cards to my family and friends for their birthdays and Christmas which usually get ignored. Another of my rules says that, if a family member or friend hasn't communicated with me in a year (365 days) or more, I delete them from my contact list. It then becomes their job to find me IF they wish to contact me.

My life has been very much less stressful with these personal rules.

A lot of people in social situations will outright not speak to me. I could be two feet away from them saying their name, and they would continue to ignore me. This could account for well over 75% of the people in the room.

I found that this response to me was so common, I essentially quit socializing for about a 4 year period of my life, and spent almost all my time not at work alone.

I've had a specific group/branch of my family tree change their e-mail addresses, and one of them even dismantled a very elaborate website he had painstakingly created, which happened to have been how I managed to find these family members again after decades out of touch with them. I'm not saying he necessarily did that to get rid of me, that would sound paranoid, but it was certainly odd that this whole particular set of people, who are close with each other by the way, and whom I found at the same time (one put me in touch with the next, initially) all just disappeared off the internet, to me, at the same time. My suspicion is that when they learned of my circumstances, which to ME seemed like I'm keeping things going quite capably, but to THEM sounded like I might be a hobo looking for a handout (they all happen to be successful and well-off) I think their assumptions made them want to shut down contact.

They were utterly 100% wrong, by the way. I may live at a more modest level but I never dreamed of trying to sponge off them, but because I simply wanted contact with family -- my own parents had died -- and this part of the family think they've got something beggars want to beg for, they dropped me. It still hurts.

Other stuff -- stood up by an ex who strung me along making me think we were getting back together. He left me waiting in the pouring rain at London Zoo. So I just went around the zoo by myself. I prefer the company of animals anyway, so there.

Friends have changed e-mail address. User name on message boards (not this one). Back in high school, my best friend had drifted away, so I latched onto two girls, but it's only later with hindsight that I realized they continually edged away from me around the playground at breaktimes, and I was too unaware to realize they were trying to drop me a hint to get lost.

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I really don't "put myself out there" enough to be rejected. However, my freshman year of high school there was a girl that I really liked. I was talking with some friends of mine about the prospect of asking her out on a date and a female friend of mine stated that she'd already asked out this girl and was told that she wasn't interested in dating. I suggested that perhaps she just wasn't lesbian, but in hindsight I suppose that if that was the only prohibitive factor that's probably what she'd have said.

So, I slipped her a note (unfortunately, I did this during the last period on a Friday so all weekend I was worried about what she thought of me) and she replied with a note of her own in which she was very polite and even included a few compliments, but wrote that she really wasn't interested in dating until after she completed her education.

That was the only time I ever put myself in a position to be rejected. As for friendship, I usually just find that I've made friends without knowing it. For example, I used to manufacture certain hand-crafted specialty products and developed a relationship with a man who sold similar products to the ones I produced. He was extremely well read and I loved it when he would tell me about famous philosophers (a topic in which he had great interest). We used to just sit in his home and talk for hours. Eventusome of thoseally, (and I don't remember the context) he reffered to me as a friend of his. That's when it really sunk in that in addition to our conversations we had each done quite a few favors for the other & had a level of emotional investment that might make that title valid.

Another example would be when I was on house arrest a few years ago and (despite being fairly introverted) longed for someone to talk to other than the two or three members of my immediate family who came and went. I did a bit of outreach online and formed what Cory Doctorow might refer to as a "tribe". We were essentially an online surrogate family who provided emotional support for the outcasts of society.

For reasons I won't go into in this post, I found myself unable to use a computer for a few years. The members of the tribe assumed that something terrible had happened to me & when I finally returned, I was immediately flooded with messages from people saying that they missed me and were worried about me. About half of the old members were no longer logging in regularly, but one member who had been with the tribe long enough to remember me said that they were devastated when I left because they thought of me as their closest friend.

Everyone in the group (myself included) was there as a result of severe emotional issues. Looking back, having someone invest so much in a relationship with someone they met online was probably unhealthy for some of these people. One of them even figured out where I lived and the names of the members of my immediate family (presumably by brute forcing the password for my email account, which, at the time was just four lower case letters. Obviously, I've been more careful since.)

Wow, I deviated a lot from the original subject towards the end. I suppose the point is that I don't get rejected often, but only because I'm quite reclusive unluss I feel forced to interact with people who have serious issues.

I had a date leave with somebody else.

I went to a monthly gathering. They wanted to go to a place I'd not approve of. Rather than say, "We're going here...if you don't want to go, we'll see you next month," they gave me a bogus place. I showed up 30 minutes early. Over 30 minutes after we were to meet, someone came by and gave a BS answer that they were going to call it off due to no interest. I knew something was wrong because the place had a special event that night requiring a cover charge to get in (something I figured the planner would have known), and I suspect someone driving by was looking at me (earlier) when they went by.

A week later, I read online that they had a good time at the place I would not have gone to, and when I inquired, they claimed others showed up right after I left.

The sad thing is that I KNEW all the time they were lying to me, but I didn't know what to do about it.

It was that last time I ever did anything with that group.

I've been rejected so many times, mostly through secondary school. I think that is mostly the cause of social anxiety I have today; I'm often too afraid to get too friendly with people in case I get rejected and feel stupid, even if it's quite obvious that the other person is willing to be friends.

My most recent rejection was rather hurtful. I really liked a man who I'm not saying he definitely liked me back but he did show that he was flattered and wanted me to flirt more, by winking at me and making me feel more special than the other customers and holding my hand, all that sort of stuff, which made me think ''oh, he seems to enjoy my attraction to him'', and if he showed signs of backing away from me then I would have noticed and stopped flirting so much (just because I have AS doesn't mean I am oblivious to non-verbal signs). But then he told his colleague (who I have got friendly with) behind my back that he doesn't know what's wrong with me and that he hasn't done anything to encourage me to flirt with him, then a few weeks later his colleague told me that he has asked her out once before, even though she is not interested in him in the least and is not the flirty type. That might not sound like a rejection to others but it does to me. It's made me feel quite worthless, and I also wish his colleague hadn't told me all this. I am hoping she is lying, but she sounded so sure.

really really slowly.

More than one instance of someone, male or female, quite obviously coming on to me - and I mean touching me or embracing me in an overtly sexual way - then later denying it and coming up with the most ridiculous excuses for why they behaved that way.