Repetitive Rejection is NORMAL

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The vast majority of men deal with several, sometimes dozens of rejections before anyone accepts their overtures. Rejection isn't something unique, or elaborate. It's the way our culture is built.

The primary difference between those normal guys who actually get a girlfriend, and one of us who sits alone on a Friday night, is that after being rejected, they get right back up and start pursuing someone else. They refuse to let it get to them.

It's the same way with relationships. Only a fifth of relationships lead to marriage, and half of all marriages fail. When a normal guy gets slapped around a bit, he takes time to nurse his wounds, and then gets right back out there.

Perhaps even more importantly, cheerful people are instinctively more attractive, and normal guys recognize that. Even if they're not in a good mood, they fake it, because they know how beneficial that can be for them.

And faking a cheerful disposition isn't just on the level of 'putting your best foot forward'. Smiling when you least feel like it actually makes you feel better. The more you act like you're in a good mood, the better you'll actually feel.

Instead of trying to fight biology, and live in a fantasy world, why not try doing what works, and has worked for millions of years? Remember, we live on Earth, not Mars.

totally agree. i think theres rly no great life
secrets just simple truths too dang sympul
for us to look upon (. . . as serious) truths.

Though I can relate to what you're saying about cheerfulness, I've been flatly chastised by women before for smiling too much, so supposedly it wasn't endearing to them.

I agree on the most part, but I don't really agree with this. Smiling when I'm feeling terrible/angry etc is actually painful.

Maybe you need to distract yourself from what's making you upset before you can smile, that's what I have to do.

It really all depends on whats worrying/angering/upsetting you and how bad it is.

Well yeah, rejection is in our culture. Whether you are racist, gay, religious, you will be rejected a lot along with doing rejecting, even women. As a man, I reject a woman as soon as I decide not to approach her, or decide she's not worth the trouble.

Statistically speaking, the more you care about who your mate is, the less likely you are to find one, this goes for men and women.

Take me for example, and why I have a limited dating pool.

There are 6+ billion people in the world. Roughly half of them are female. But I'm looking locally.

Of these 3 billion females, 150 million of them are living in the United States at this given time.

Of these 150 million women, 33% are under 15 or over 65, so my pool is now 100 million, but since I won't date younger than 18 or older than 28, 5/6 of that 100 million are the wrong age. So my pool is now more like 17-20 million, and how many of them do you think are married or dating someone?

So in the United States, taking into account only age I have only roughly 17-20 million potential mates. Now imagine I only want to date Jewish (some girls might), or Muslim. Imagine I'm gay. There are a million reasons to reject someone as a potential mate, and the girl sitting alone in the park who tells you to 'piss off' only needs one reason.

For arguments sake, say I wanted a Catholic woman, aged 18-28 who is living in New York. My total pool is:
9.5 million women total
1,425,000 (15%) are 18-28
541,500 (38%) are Catholic.
God help me if I was racist too.

So out of 500,000 women (many who are probably married or dating), I'd have to find one with acceptable looks, personality, and an infinite amount of other deal breakers.

At least more than half of marriages end in divorce and most relationships break up, so I'm a little less worried.

I want to add one thing: everyone gets rejected. Not just men. I'm a young, I hope you would call attractive, female and I've been rejected. I guess that's just life.

Some say God gave men big egos so they could handle rejection. Evolution says women are the choosier sex because we have to go through childbirth. Those theories fit together I guess, lol.

All agreed, good post.

Vanilla_Slice

Wouldn't a smaller ego be more conducive to handling rejection? I had the biggest superinflated ego as a kid, thinking I was the best thing to walk the earth and all that, and it all came crashing down on my first rejection (which resulted in a 3-year depression). But in the end, I have to thank that lady for rejecting me because it brought me down to earth. And now, I can handle rejection much better. Not great, but better than that first one by a long shot...

I've never thought about it really, I've just heard people say that. In my mind I tend to equate big ego to lots of self confidence. But often there are those guys that just put on that show of self confidence, or when their egos get hurt they suffer quite a blow. Honestly I think I'm just thinking about a couple guys in my life who have both large egos plus huge self confidence.

It's a matter of taking the rejection for what it is -- that particular person not seeing you in the role you would like for them. The mistake we make with ego is to draw universal or global conclusions from it -- "This person doesn't like me, therefore I am worthless and unlikeable." If you win 9 times out of ten but let that one loss blow you away, you're losing perspective and your ego is not doing its job. The conclusion you should draw instead is "this person doesn't like me, but there are a lot more people out there, and some of them WILL like me."

I did learn that part after a while, and was finally able to get over my first rejection. I didn't start seeing myself as being unable to be liked until several years later, as the rejections piled up and the only sign of acceptance was a short one-month relationship that didn't work out...

Even though I have a pretty happy life, wife, long-term marriage, and some relationships under my belt, I can relate -- I have a hard time keeping friendships and seem to wear people out. It just seems to be a matter of finding those people who can take you and who like you long term. It's not an easy process, believe me.

There's a difference between hard and impossible. Singing in a chorus for Beethoven's 9th symphony is hard. Finding a woman that would like me is impossible.

We've conversed online for a while -- I still find it hard to believe. I've seen some pretty reprehensible/hideous/annoying people who still managed to find a GF and/or get married. I think at this point, your attitude is the blocker, not you.