Rejection That Makes No Sense

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Just curious: When you say he wasn't entitled to it, do you mean not entitled to knowing you were breaking up with him or not entitled to knowing the reasons why? It almost seems to me like a person you're breaking up with is entitled to at least know they're being dumped, particularly with a LTR and not necessarily with a single date.

BTW, I think something like fear of retaliation to just cut off communication with someone is a perfectly good reason, especially if that means someone's life is in danger. The only problem is if someone is intensely jealous, fading that person doesn't stop them from finding where you live/work/play and doing something horrible, and could actually intensify those emotions.

Last edited by AngelRho on 12 Aug 2014, 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

From what I understand, fading has to do with any kind of complete severance of communication, regardless of the relationship. You could fade someone after the first date, and it's still considered fading. It's just first dates don't carry with them the same expectations as a months-long relationship would.

I agree with you that at the very least, unless there's good reason not to, then the person who doesn't want to continue the relationship should let the other person know that.

But you do need to have some kind of relationship, which is recognised as such by both people.

Well, I get it?there has to be SOME kind of relationship. You and I have a relationship, if nothing more than WP acquaintances.

We're focused more on romantic interests, but I've heard about "fading" applied to friendships as well. You have a "bff" and then for whatever reason they just cut you off. Next thing you know all your friends at school are laughing behind your back because of something on Facebook, which you have no idea because you got unfriended and your "bff" acts like you don't even exist. Happens in middle school ALL the time, and makes me glad I don't (yet) have pre-teens. But my day is fast approaching...

Does she even know your name? When she got the facebook request would she have known it was from you? Did you tell her who you were when you made the request? If she doesn't know it is from you, she might have simply declined it because "some strange guy is friending me on facebook - decliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine".

However if she knows full well it's you, the person she seemed smiley-nervous around, then there is no other explanation than for some reason she doesn't want to be your facebook friend or anything else.

Passive aggression is usually the route taken when people want to do something but not appear "mean". Or they just don't want to deal with whatever.

He was entitled to know I was leaving him, but he wasn't entitled to know why. Even though I'm sure he'd figured it out.

I just stopped liking girls. There's no point for me, if they won't ask me out or try to get to know me. The man shouldn't always have to do the work to get someone to like her. Not a mysogynist, but I get disgusted by some girls that are nothing but egotistical and selfish.

I dunno, it may be just me, but not telling him why seems kinda passive-aggressive.

yeah, I used to think that, too, and then I had a lot of experience with it. And what I found was the same thing that a lot of women find: you're trying to be a decent person and civil, and the guy's being an ass, crowding you, demanding more "chances", telling you you're crazy, insulting you, trying to bargain with you, physically restraining you from leaving, in general behaving very, very badly.

Some women have it worse: the guy beats them up.

So I'm not a fan of the explaining anymore. If the guy's a decent and reasonable human being, by that time there's nothing much to say anyway. You've already had the fights, and you say, "I don't think this is working anymore, and I think this should be the end," and the guy says, "Are you sure about that," and you say, "Yes, I think so." And that's it.

Were you exes always that horrible tarrantela?

This thread has been on my mind because I have been wanting to post exactly this. ^^

I would never "fade" on an LTR, but there have been a few times that I went on one or two dates, and they were getting creepy enough for me to stop answering their calls/emails with no explanation, or just keep putting them off until they stopped calling. Luckily, when I was on the dating sites, I had the foresight to not attach my real name to the email address I gave out, and I have a Google Voice phone number that I gave out to men I met through the dating sites. None of them ever knew where I lived except the one who I ended up in an actual relationship with.

There were also a few who I corresponded with that I never met, and at some point in the correspondence I tried to gently say "hey, this isn't working for me." The response I got from the majority of them was a scathing reply saying essentially that I was a fool for not wanting the magnificent-ness that was them. OK, if I hadn't been convinced before that I wanted nothing to do with them, *that* would certainly have done the job.

See, I think all of that is reasonable.

Fading someone does no harm if there's no attachment or commitment there at all. I think if you go so far as to sleep with someone and you fade them, you've been too intimate with that person physically and emotionally. You should at least say, "hey, that was a one-time thing," or "hey, I don't mean to hurt you, but I feel it was a mistake," or "hey, you were cool until you cracked that joke about my friends" or "hey, all you do is trash your ex" or "hey, you've got some emotional issues I'm not prepared to deal with this early in a relationship," or "hey, you've got a bad reputation as a fader and I assumed you were probably going to dump me next week, anyway--sorry for the misunderstanding, but I've already got another date this weekend." At least if you KNOW you're going into NSA or ONS you know where you stand with someone, you know the relationship is over before it began, and you're not going to get faded that way. Having an arrangement is not fading. Not calling someone back after the first date IS fading, and mature adults aren't really going to get their feelings hurt over that. If her toothbrush is in my bathroom and she vanishes off the face of the planet because she just now decided "she's just not that into me"? No, there's nothing I can do about it, but I think if we're decent people we owe it to each other not to waste someone's time letting them think they're in relationships when they aren't.

It's an unfortunately common thing. The number of women who have the same stories, combined with the number of men who say, "Wow you must have had some real doozies", makes me think that a whole lot of men are actually unaware of their own behavior in breakups. Or maybe a whole lotta men think it's justified when it's them, in their particular situation? Or minimize it down to nothing afterwards, recognize that they behaved badly but won't look squarely at just *how* badly. I don't know.

My stories are actually pretty mild -- been argued at and insulted, and blocked from leaving, and harassed with barrages of phone/text messages, and occasionally a man's refused to go. I've never had a man beat me up or drag me into bed to "prove" to me how much I still wanted him, or make one last conquest, or something. But that stuff happens too. There's a reason why DV shelters and advocates say that a woman is in the most danger when she's just broken up with her partner. They've got the stats to prove it.

I've met few men who react well to hearing that it's over, and that (combined with how my ex talked about his first wife) was one of the reasons I was really, really reluctant to file for divorce. I think the fact that my ex-husband had time to decide that divorcing me was a brave act of self-preservation saved me and our daughter considerable trouble -- if I'd filed, I think we'd be paying for it to this day.

Anyway. Yeah, for too many men, if you give them a reason, they'll set to trying to demolish the reason, and you have to fight your way past them to get away, because they refuse to hear the "It's done" part.

@tarantella: Where do you FIND these guys? Wow!

It's not just men, though. Everyone is like that. A lot of us (men and women) are unaware of our behavior, especially if we perceive the relationship as "meant to be" or "worth fighting for." I happen to be male, and I've been on both sides of that. How I ended up being the obsessed, rejected lover one time is still a mystery to me. It happened once, never happened before or since, and I think it was really the type of girl she was that pushed me to the brink of insanity.

Some people look at their love interests as possessions, as some other girl flirting with your man being a threat and it being your man's duty to you to put an immediate stop to it OR ELSE. Before we got married, my wife and I agreed that we belong TO EACH OTHER and once we get married, there's no way out unless someone dies (naturally, of course). We agreed that we do not find certain things acceptable that others do and we'll keep our promises to each other even if it means fighting to do it. That means we both take certain roles within the other person's life, so we avoid a lot of problems that a lot of couples have. Frantically obsessed, possessive men and women view each other as toys, often overlooking the fact that they justify their own behavior while being irrationally intolerant of same in their mates. There's no real agreement as to what is really best for everyone in the relationship as long as one person demands more and holds back from the other.

In the one really bad experience I had in this regard, being "that guy" just sort of sneaked up on me. But I think who I was with at the time had a little to do with it. More so than not understanding our own behavior, how we become obsessive stalker types, is how our behavior affects other people. We can, without meaning to, subtly manipulate people into acting that way without being aware that we're doing it, which is what I felt was done to me at one point. What happened to me that radically changed my behavior was so deep and complex I still can't figure out what happened or how she got me to act that way--it would appear to be my fault, but I've never been like that with anyone else, so I have a difficult time accepting the full blame for that. All water under the bridge now, of course, but I never, EVER want to be like that again and often ponder everything that happened. That's not a character flaw I ever wanted to be guilty of, so whether it's her fault or my fault, I just write the whole thing off as a fluke.

AngelRho, it really isn't a terribly uncommon story for women. Aside from a few men that I never really even got started with (those one- or two-date guys), I've been the dumper about as often as I've been the dumpee in long term relationships. Even those get tricky sometimes. As tarantella says, ideally, both parties would be adults and say "ok, if it's not working for you, then yes, we should go ahead and call it a day." But that's rarely how it goes.

If you want to look at it from a scientific/evolutionary perspective, oxytocin is likely responsible for this scenario being such a common one. For both men and women, oxytocin acts as a bonding hormone. That manifests in women as nurturing. It manifests in men as territoriality. That's a gross over-simplification, but you can see how that could set up this dynamic where women say "buh-bye" and men's instinctive response is to go "NO! MINE!"