Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront: they won’t. There the story stalls; but, strangely, continues. Even with no hope of requital, desire can persist, even intensify, with no guarantee of ending. The lack of happening is the tragedy.
Rejection isn’t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance. A rejection implies that you don’t even warrant a try. From the reject’s perspective, the reciprocity of heartbreak looks pretty appealing. And if you’re going to suffer, it may as well be exciting. Who would choose the flat desolation of rejection over rough-and-tumble drama, especially if they end the same way? The cliché—tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all — is comforting to the heartbroken, but damning to the rejected. No matter how unpleasant or unequal, a breakup is at least something you share with someone else. Rejection makes only one reject. “Unrequited love does not die,” writes Elle Newmark in The Book of Unholy Mischief , “it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.” A story that begins with closure can never end.
The basic plot of rejection is simple. First comes the yearning, where “by the successive inventions of his desires, his regrets, his disappointments, and his projects, the lover constructs an entire novel around a woman he does not know,” as Proust writes. Eventually you make a proposition and are declined. You may try again, but only the same happens—nothing.
What science has to say about rejection is mostly what everyone already knows: it’s real and it hurts. In an fMRI study researcher Naomi Eisenberger demonstrated that being rejected lights up the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that deals with physical pain, with a corresponding release of dopamine and cortisol. The social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dawn Dhavale’s study “Two Sides of Romantic Rejection,” typical of much writing in their field, spells out common sense to a point of absurd rigor (they note that “it is better to be intelligent and beautiful than stupid and ugly”). They define romantic rejection as a situation in which “a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores / avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship.” The measure of rejection is the “discrepancy between desired and perceived relational evaluation,” which is “the degree to which a person regards his or her relationship with another individual as valuable, important, or close”—in other words, you want your relationship to matter to the other person more than it does. Certain categories of people are more likely to be rejected: those considered “dangerous, having little to offer, as exploitative, or rejecting of us.” And the leading cause of rejection, they argue, is hypergamy: desiring people more desirable than oneself.
Most notably, they observe that “the culture has not provided them with good, effective scripts for rejecting love,” causing them to experience “a pervasive sense of scriptlessness.” Rejectors have their prefab lines (“It’s not you, it’s me,” “I’m not dating right now,” “We’re not a good match”), but rejects don’t. What is there to say, after all?
To whatever extent the mind is a part of nature, it too abhors a vacuum. Just as infatuation drives you to project intimate fantasies onto strangers, the blank slate of rejection, the lack of a script ,invites you to devise an elaborate narrative about why you were rejected, and what that says about you. But even stronger than the temptation to dwell in the past (what might have happened) or dread the future (what won’t be) is the urge to wallow in an eternal present. Your life can’t move forward, so it moves sideways, to a parallel reality. At parties you imagine the date you didn’t bring, then go home to share your bed with a ghost. Absence becomes the realest thing in your world. So the true rejection plot is the one the reject devises in the absence of a plot.
***
Narrative is a way of giving not only shape and coherence to chaos, but progress and closure; its absence creates a feeling of endless languishing. For this reason one often sees rejection described as halting time, as Miss Havisham orders every clock stopped at the precise minute she was left at the altar, wallows in her moldering wedding clothes, and makes Estella and Pip reenact the romance that ended with her stood up at the altar. (“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she tells Pip, “and I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play.”) In Cut Loose, Helen Fisher quotes an anonymous eighth-century Japanese poet who writes, “My longing has no time when it ceases”; the men of Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River province who’ve had their marriage offers rejected compose songs describing the marriages that could have been.
In this way, the true object of your fixation may not be your rejector, but rather the fantasy devised in the process of yearning. The perfection of this fantasy makes it hard to give up. (Proust: “What is necessary is the risk—which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person—of an impossibility.”) Your secret hope is to become Pygmalion, convinced that your desire can somehow be made real through sheer agonizing persistence. Pygmalion, it’s worth remembering, is disgusted by real women (“dismayed by the numerous defects / of character Nature had given the feminine spirit, / stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion”) and only loves the one he creates by his own hand.
Devotion—putting someone in an exalted position, as Pygmalion places Galatea, on a literal pedestal—feels like empathy, in their shared sense of understanding someone deeply, but is actually the opposite. When wishful thinking becomes confused with reality, the real person vanishes, as does the entire world around that person. The thing you’ve been denied is always perfect. In “To a Magazine,” Mary Ruefle writes, “the rejected know another knowledge—that if they were not rejected, heaven would descend upon the earth in earthly dreams […] The rejected know if they were nonrejected a clear cerulean blue would be the result, an endless love ever dissolving in more endless love.” For all their power over the nature of your imagined reality, it can feel as if the rejector is a divinity of sorts—Borges writes, “To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god,” noting also that Beatrice had rejected Dante in life (“Infinitely Beatrice existed for Dante; Dante existed very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. Our piety, our veneration cause us to forget that pitiful inharmony, which was unforgettable for Dante”). And so in his own poem he makes Beatrice the immortal docent of Heaven, a place he doesn’t belong. One is only rejected from Heaven, never Hell.
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The rejection plot usually peters out, as over time the wound becomes less interesting and meaningful. But this isn’t always the case; what if they change their mind? What if you can help them change their mind? Such hope is often toxic, but not always unwarranted. Everyone has heard of a case where someone’s ill-advised, ethically dubious persistence paid off— He just wore me down! —which means you can never fully convince yourself that any rejection is truly final. (“In a surprising minority of cases,” write Baumeister and Dhavale in their study on rejection, “stalkers eventually become the romantic partners of the people they have stalked.”)
And so another way of answering rejection is to be willfully oblivious: to reject rejection, through sheer gumption or delusion. Pride and Prejudice is full of rejections issued and ignored, preemptive and rescinded. When the arrogant Mr. Collins receives Elizabeth’s firm refusal of his marriage proposal, he tells her:
“I am not now to learn,” replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.”
He later adds, “As I must, therefore, conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”
Not taking the hint is a strategy of attrition; keeping the proposition on the table indefinitely, you hope, will increase your odds. Since you can’t just switch off your feelings for someone, you hold out for the unlikely reversal, even at the expense of your well-being. The fact that this is possible (which is not to say wise, ethical, or appropriate) permits the reject to believe against all evidence that a mistake has been made, that everything could work out if enough of an effort is made. The reject haggles, disputes, demands to know why, tries to poke holes in something that isn’t an argument, until eventually he turns into something uglier: the creep. For its ability to repulse and coerce, creepiness can be a strange form of power, one perhaps even unsought by the one who wields it, since it can feel more like powerlessness. But no one said power always feels good.
***
One of the oddest stories of rejection in the internet age was authored spontaneously by dozens of people. Known informally as “The Saga of Denko,” it began in 2011 with a post on the anonymous Japanese message board 2channel (#OP is the original poster, and #2ch are his responders):
[Help!] The Girl I Like Won’t Respond to My Emails (´·ω·`)
#OP
There’s this girl I’ve had feelings for since high school, and now we’re in college together. We’ll call her Denko.
Once we hit second year, we went out drinking, and I worked up the courage to exchange numbers.
We started out talking often, but she hasn’t answered me in three days now.
I’m getting depressed just thinking that Denko might be sick, or that something happened to her… (´･ω･`)
Please, somebody give me some advice.
At first the reactions #OP gets range from earnest to mocking, until he reveals that he has been emailing her six hundred times a day with no response, at which point the board begins heckling him; #OP keeps asking for advice anyway. Across five threads totaling over 18,000 words in the English translation, #OP reveals himself by turns to be a guilelessly deluded, obsessive stalker. Convinced that Denko secretly likes him but won’t admit it, he interprets everything as encouragement, never questioning his own motives or Denko’s interest. By his own account, he begins calling her at home, then visiting her house to look for her. When she emails him to tell him to stop emailing her, and threatens to call the police, he wonders if she’s testing him, or if her mother put her up to it.
From this point on, the community’s tone shifts from jeering to morbid fascination: several try to egg him on further, suggesting he keep trying, or stuff thirty hamsters in a box and send them to her. Some try in good faith to shout above the noise and get him to see his own delusion, or convince him of Denko’s obvious lack of interest; in others, it’s less clear whether he’s being mocked, or defended by someone equally deluded:
#2ch
Screw you guys. OP’s persistence should be COMMENDED.
Sending massive amounts of emails out of worry!
Buying clothes to improve his appearance!
And I say try even harder!
Send 1000 emails a day!
Girls love men who worry about them!
#2ch
I know I’D hate you.
#2ch
Serious post here.
If you don’t get a reply after three times, stop.
If she’s making excuses about work and busyness, she really doesn’t like you.
She’s only not saying it because she thinks it would hurt you.
Denko getting 600 emails from a guy who isn’t even her boyfriend is no doubt going to scare her.
But she’s probably a nice girl if she isn’t admitting it.
There are people out there who just can’t be blunt.
So stop it, please.
#2ch
Even from a boyfriend, 600 emails in three days is scary.
#OP maintains his obliviousness, acknowledging the bullying replies with polite befuddlement, and he eventually shares an email that he sends to Denko:
#OP
Subject: This Is How I Feel
Contents:
I’m sorry for making you worry.
I would never consider killing or raping you, Denko, so don’t worry. Is that what you thought I would do?
Now, I want you to take what I’m saying seriously.
I really, truly love you, Denko.
I think I would be willing to die for you, Denko.
I’ve always been trying to ensure your happiness first.
And I don’t think my feelings for you will ever change.
It’s very unfortunate things got like this right after we started dating, but we can start over.
That would be great, wouldn’t it?
Remember what I said when I confessed to you?
I still feel the way I did back then…
After nearly a month of these posts, OP signs off, the end of his saga inconclusive. As it often goes with internet folklore, the story’s provenance has become disputed. It’s not clear whether #OP was as guileless as he acted—the story’s coherence, and his willingness to ignore and carry on against overwhelming opprobrium, is highly suspect, and the post’s translator also unearthed a post from three weeks earlier by someone who used the same “(´･ω･`)” kaomoji, claiming that he’d sent six hundred emails to see if his crush was safe after an earthquake. It’s also possible #OP posed as some of his own hecklers.
Suppose this is the case—that it was a social experiment, a fictional story designed to elucidate something about rejection communally. Ordinarily the goal of trolling is to either make people angry, expose their gullibility, or draw out their ugly qualities. But mixed in with the trolls are attempts to communicate or commiserate with the hapless #OP; rather than ragebait, he managed to make empathybait, curiositybait. Here we are, contemplating him now. Can attention be a form of acceptance?
***
There may be no good way to accept rejection, but there are many terrible ways, and frustration often makes a turn toward anger. A 2015 article in The Cut , “ Is There Any Right Way to Reject a Guy? ,” describes an incident with Ben Schoen, the former host of a popular Harry Potter podcast. It began with Schoen sending flirtatious Twitter DMs to the BuzzFeed writer Grace Spelman; when Spelman didn’t reply, he took to Facebook (where seven years earlier, as a fourteen-year-old Harry Potter fan, Spelman had added him as a friend) and sent her a series of DMs:
Grace you do a remarkable job of making your personality shine through online
It’s hyperactively beautiful
And you seem really introspective
So what I’m saying here is you wanna get married at one of those drive thru places
If you can’t handle such spontaneity I understand how I might be getting ahead of myself
I’m starting a new podcast I would love for you to listen and if you like it I would love having you on an episode
You had me when you posted that Kendrick Lamar vid
That’s when I realized you are probably definitely a special soul (aka “the one”)
