Dating Rejection Can Be a Miracle in Disguise  

It’s difficult enough to feel happy, thriving and prosperous – even for successful career women – so when you add a painful episode of rejection into the equation, self-esteem can take a hit and send our once high-flying egos down an unprofitable, unhelpful rabbit hole.

Fear of rejection can be debilitating for many women — especially those who unintentionally (or intentionally!) use working as an excuse to avoid romance altogether. It can also easily be a paralyzing reason for those unwilling to take a risk with emotional intimacy: a deep-seated fear of rejection can be so strong that some women are unable to perpetuate any intimate relations whatsoever.

But if we let our fears of rejection run our relationships and keep us from trusting and opening our hearts, we will never have the opportunity to truly love and be loved.  So let’s take a look at the dynamics of rejection, and why working thru a fear of it can help you in the long run.

The Birth of Rejection

If we live in fear that every date, relationship or marriage could end in devastating and debilitating rejection, we must look into the past to find out where this belief system first derived.

Nobody likes feeling rejected, but as infants, we felt slighted many times when our mother walked out of the room while we were in our cribs! We all grew up with some sense of subconsciously protecting ourselves against feeling rebuffed. It’s only human.

However, if every woman who suffered rejection as a child or young adult let fear stop her from pursuing meaningful relationships, procreation would cease and the world would simply end.  The problem is when the rejection suffered from parental neglect, a previous break-up,  or loss of a loved one is so severe, it leads to being closed-off indefinitely, in order to protect ourselves from future pain. In turn, this can lead to disproportionate amounts of fear, loneliness and isolation.  The key however to a fulfilling emotional life is to view the pain as a temporary condition, not a permanent one.

The Inevitable

The crucial step in being able to move on from that temporary emotional paralysis is to always remember that rejection and heartache are inevitable in life — but if we stop ourselves from giving fully to a relationship in fear that we could end up crushed, we lose a lot more than that relationship.  We lose the opportunity, over and over again, for connection.

Taking a risk of being rejected can be scary, but there is not much we can do to escape the perils of rejection in certain areas of life. After all, we must risk rejection every day in order to find our strengths, most notably in our working lives. The problem is only when being rebuffed or treated with dismissal is taken as a deep, devastating personal event; that only damages self-esteem and weakens the foundation for receiving.  So, again, it must be viewed as a transitory episode in our lives, and be examined for what it can reveal (see more below on that).

Positive Rejection

If we want a relationship with substance, we must learn to value our personal, emotional selves, and temporarily put aside our agendas, spreadsheets and board meetings. The more we let ourselves be open and susceptible to the unpredictable outside world, the more we allow the wonders of life in.

I use the word “rejection” loosely because it really is just another gift we receive from life telling us we’re heading in the wrong direction. Rejection, if viewed properly, is actually life’s way of re-routing and giving us what we want in the long run. We sometimes take an accidental detour down the wrong road. When someone rejects us, we may not understand why in that moment, but it may become crystal-clear later on that it was for the best, and we may breathe a sigh of happiness when we realize it. So, arguably, failures can become our biggest successes.

Strength From Rejection

We only get one shot at this life, so we may as well live it to the fullest. We may not be able to avoid rejection, but we can approach it with more understanding, rather than with fear that it will demolish us.

So if and when rejection does surface, stay with the pain and go through it – it’s the only way back to our true selves. Rejection is out there, hiding around every corner, unavoidable. But if we use it to our advantage by learning what we want and don’t want in a relationship, it is a win-win situation.

The real truth is we are never really rejected; we are only given chance after chance to learn more about love, grow into our real selves and finally have the courage to present our gifts. And in order to experience true joy, we can take the notion of rejection and turn it into what it really is—a miracle in disguise.