Monday, June 13, 2016

Dealing With Rejection

There was this one time I went out on a first date with a guy that I had met on a dating website, and his profile sounded perfect to me. Everything he said he was and was looking for, matched me, and what I was looking for also. To my delight, his pictures looked attractive to me, too. Upon receipt of his first message to me, I felt an immediate connection with him. We had a lot in common and similar interests. We set up an official dinner date, and he planned the details. When I showed up, it was a spectacularly romantic setting: I felt like I was walking into a Paris diner, on a beautiful sunset evening. He was sitting at the bar happily chatting with the staff. When he turned around, I was awe struck, he looked even more handsome in person than in his online photos! We strolled to our table, which the staff had carefully selected for us, knowing it was our first date. Our table was nestled next to a little crackling fire in an old-stone fireplace, on an outdoor patio with tiny lantern lights strewn overhead. Delicate white roses bobbed gently in the breeze next to me, while instrumental music could be heard playing in the background. We had the best first date of my entire life. Everything felt right, good, and the conversation went so smoothly. I felt like I could open up and really talk about a lot of things. He was so kind and chivalrous to me, it was refreshing. After the date was over, he texted me saying it was such a momentous night for him, that he had called his mom to tell her all about me, and asked when he could see me again. We planned to try to meet the next day....
     But....by the next day, he was noticeably being distant already. I tried not to put worry into it, but I couldn't figure out why it was happening. Then, he told me he needed a rain check and couldn't hang out that night afterall, so we planned for the next night. By 5pm the next day, I hadn't heard anything from him, so I texted him asking if we were still meeting, or if he'd had a change of heart. His reply sunk my soul. He said meeting me stirred up unresolved feelings for his ex, and he just wanted to be friends. He hasn't spoken to me since. I noticed he got right back on his dating profile though, uploaded an even more sexy revealing photo of himself, and to add insult to injury, he'd added to his profile that girls needed to be at least 5'6" to be compatible with him (I'm 5'4"). So it seemed I'd been rejected for being 2 inches too short for him. I was heartbroken. I know it was only a first date, but it was a profound connection and experience. I will never forget it.

     Rejection is a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes in life, things just don't work out, no matter how hard you want them to. If it's not right, it's not right, or perhaps it’s just not the right time. But holding onto something or someone who's clearly giving you the boot or signal that they don't want you, is reason enough to try to move on. You may never know the real reasons for being rejected if someone doesn't have the courage to tell you why to your face. It can feel difficult holding onto faith and having patience for the "right" someone to come along who will be the right puzzle piece for a happy romantic partnership with you, but when you realize you don't have any other choice in the matter, moving on and having hope for someone else may be your only option.

     It occurred to me over a week later that it seems like romantic-relationship-seeking is a series of rejecting people and being rejected constantly, until eventually you make a mutual match. Someone with whom you share a mutual attraction and chemistry with, and who also wants the same type of partnership that you do at the same time. If you really think about it, it’s a pretty magical occurrence for everything to line-up for both people to end up in a romantic relationship. Basically, your checklist and type of romantic partner that you want, seems to match the person, and you roughly match what they're looking for also, at the same moment in time. What people look for in a mate can change over time, as the person learns, grows, and evolves over the course of their lifetime. With each relationship, you learn more things: things you definitely don't want to put up with again, traits or behaviors that really don't work for you, but also discovering good things you know that work and are good to have in a relationship. With each relationship being unique, it's unpredictable how it will unravel. Some people find the love of their life very young, like in high school or college, and stay together their whole life. Some people, like a woman I recently met, didn't meet her most profound beloved mate until she was 64 and married him. And some people will marry several times in their life. People don’t always settle down with their ideal life-long partner the first time around. Sometimes you have to go through several epic relationships before you land on the one that may last for the rest of your life. You never really know, if you truly think about it, because no one knows how long they or their mate will live, or how each of you will evolve, and how the relationship itself will evolve over time. Each individual within the relationship is an evolving creation, and the relationship is a unique evolving entity in and of itself, and the two people may not evolve in a way that keeps them in alignment with staying together.

     One thing that seems important, is you have to do your best to CLEAR your last lover out of your life before you can properly introduce a new one into your energy field. Now of course this method doesn't have to apply to everyone. There are people with multiple lovers, and somehow they manage to all know about each other and respectfully make it work. Some people have secret affairs, some people just "look the other way" knowing that their partner is having an affair. The intricacies for the WHYs for anything going on in any given relationship is only intimately known and understood by the two sharing the romantic relationship. The healthiest and happiest relationships have the best forms of communication and compromise, for everyone's highest good, in my opinion.

~Mandelyn Reese 6/13/2016

Additional remarks:
On July 26, 2018, I had an epiphany: It occurred to me, that every single man that I have ever loved, dated, or slept with, has broken my heart. Once I came to that awareness, I realized that I needed to make friends with having my heart broken. It’s part of the learning journey of life experience. People will make mistakes, lie to your face, break your trust, and let you down. But after I had the epiphany, I was like, “Ok! Bring on whoever is next!”