Micro-rejections can often hurt the most
…and reconfirm the most brutal stories that we tell ourselves
Dating in my mid-thirties has meant putting myself out there in ways that I have never had to before. As someone who was perpetually in relationships from my teen years, there was so much I never had to do. I had never asked someone out before. I had never planned a date. I had never had to make my attraction or my feelings about someone so explicit before…so much of that I was so used to just being assumed.
Even now, I’m so averse to putting myself out there in obvious ways, I’ve never actually asked a man out in person. I’ve never asked for a man’s number. I’ve never even paid a man (who is a total stranger) a compliment.
I’ve now become a woman dating in her mid-thirties (does 37 still count as mid?), having to put aside the fear of getting rejected and put myself out there on dating apps. Even then, the micro-rejections have started to eat away at me, from I can feel the walls building up high around me with each one.
I’ve done the big, milestone breakups. I’ve had the first love heartbreak. I’ve done the divorce. I’ve done the first relationship and breakup post-divorce. All of that comes with its own special and particular type of pain. Each one unique to the love and the loss of the person and the relationship. The life you’d shared. The future you thought you’d have alongside.
The one thing I can say about dating now is that it comes with the knowledge that you can’t change people, you can only change yourself and your own attitude towards the relationship. Or rather, you have the very simple option of just walking away from what isn’t serving you.
But so does everyone else. And they do, with ease.
My very first date post breakup was a few years ago, but I remember it so clearly. As much as the worst, most traumatic dating experiences have become the best stories for my Dating Wrapped, it’s the really lovely dates that are so charming and full of hopeful optimism that stick with me. I started to wonder if they ever actually happened, and if it’s possible it could ever happen again after the stream of nothing-to-write-home-about ones.
Those kinds of dates are so often few and far between. It had been so long since I felt a romantic feeling at all that I clung to it fiercely as a reminder that there is warmth still out there in the world, moving between people.
I’d met a poet. Now if you know me at all, you’d know that this was simultaneously the best and worst thing that could’ve happened to me. All of the romantic possibilities I could’ve built up in my mind immediately began putting up scaffolding for his pedestal as soon as he opened his mouth.
He was cute, funny, and smart, and interested in me! So often on dates I feel like I’m an HR representative running a pre-screening for an interview, questions for the candidate becoming increasingly more boring as the minutes tick by.
But he was excited to learn all about me, ask me thoughtful questions, not probing, but curious about my inner world, the people who featured it. My life experiences, my thought processes. He played the part of poet and good date very well! We were comfortable around each other, we suddenly had inside jokes, I immediately thought to myself, “wow, dating isn’t as hard as everyone seems to make it out to be…”
In the middle of it, he asked to kiss me, which simultaneously thrilled me but also spoke to everything I was looking for. Consent, humility, thoughtfulness, sweetness. I was drunk off of the possibility of my new poet boyfriend.
We held hands on the way back to the station, and he asked to see me again. I was surprised he didn’t ask to come home with me. On the pedestal he went.
What followed is something I’m now used to happening after one of these one-of-a-kind encounters. Ones with expansive promise laid out right in front of you. Nothing.
A week went by without a word of our second date. Then two. I reached out again to check in.
Then a text arrived, which in summary, told me how wonderful our date was and how he really enjoyed meeting me, but he wasn’t looking for a relationship.
The confusion aside (which I spent weeks upon weeks trying to make sense of and in hindsight, is honestly not my business), it was the first sting of many that I was going to experience over the years to come.
I had another one of those seemingly perfect dates earlier in the year, which ended in me being stood up for the first time ever on what would’ve been our second date. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so many emotions in such a short space of time. Anxiety, fear, rejection, sadness, anger all in a two-hour window.
I couldn’t shake the feeling of devastation over how something so good could’ve ended so badly. And with such a cruel cast aside. The beginning is meant to be the easy part and I can’t seem to get through it.
It’s the micro-rejections that hurt the most. You end up collecting them over time and pour over them in the quiet moments of loneliness. They become small souvenirs, the reminders of how you weren’t chosen. And when you’re face-to-face with another rejection, all of the ones from the past come flooding in.
Seeping into your lungs and the corners of your heart, it feels heavy. You start to drag yourself through the process over again and you wonder why you even bother. Every future you’d ever envisaged with them and everyone else, reduced to none at all. And the past feels like it's ever-present.
I remember angrily voice-noting my friend on my way home after being stood up, tears spilling over. I told her, I’m pissed off that I’m crying because it’s not even about him, it’s about everyone else who came before him.
But despite it all. Despite what feels like death by a thousand cuts, what surrounds it is life. A rich and full life that is peppered with beautiful romantic encounters, even the ones that are fleeting. Even the ones that are long out of my life. Even though they didn’t turn into something lasting, they’re a reminder that I haven’t missed out on anything that wasn’t for me.
It’s those warm moments of hope, those small intimacies when I finally meet someone I like after what feels like forever, and the possibility of something on the horizon that is a feeling worth experiencing every time.
About me: I'm Nicole, the writer of A Crumb of Romance. I’m the co-author of The Half of It: Exploring the Mixed-Race Experience, a content creator and the co-host of the award-winning Mixed Up podcast. Having been chronically online since the age of 13, you can also find me on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Pinterest.