There Is No Such Thing as Rejection
July 9th,After a long hiatus, Naked Loft Party is back and I am glad.
Lex and I have a long, if one-sided, history. I read his blog long before I moved to New York City or had an inkling about the swing scene. He struck a good balance between raunchy and philosophical, and I liked him. As with the best bloggers, I had a relationship with Lex the Writer: if we were to meet, I was sure, he would be the perfect mixture of dorky and dashing, and it would involve either a burlesque show, a dive bar, or an intense whiskey-fueled conversation about Vonnegut.
Some of my favorite posts of his lately: sound advice for men who want open relationships, and a threesome story that touched me.
Also, Leslie and Lex are recently married. How freakin’ cute is that?
Pickup artists came up in conversation last night, and Lex’s latest post (after which mine is titled) seemed an antidote to the lingering sliminess I feel.
Lex has this to say about picking up:
…[T]here really is no such thing as rejection. The concept of sex as a competition to be won or lost was foisted upon us, in biblical times, by the evil corporation that owns Just For Men, aided and abetted by the beer, nightclub and automobile industries, and, in more recent times, by irritatingly nasal guys posing as pickup artists.
Rejection is for loan applications. In seduction you can only lead the way. It does not reflect poorly upon you as a man or a human being if a woman cannot or will not walk the path with you. Seduction is a mutually pleasurable and often unpredictable set of escalations. The question isn’t where is this going next but am I having fun right now?
What does rejection even mean?
Naked Loft Party, “There is no such thing as rejection“
Bless you, Lex. If we ever run into each other, I want to buy you a drink.
July 9th, at 9:45 pm
“It does not reflect poorly upon you as a man or a human being if a woman cannot or will not walk the path with you.”
I should repeat this to myself as though it were my mantra.
It’s easy to say though. It’s easy to define word, write them down and look at them from a logical and emotionally safe place. Trying not to feel hurt is a totally different idea.
If you’re attracted to someone that means you’ve placed some sort of value on them, if they’re not interested then that means they don’t have the same value for you. I have no clue how to get into the right headspace where that doesn’t have a negative feeling.
The trick (seems to be) that many of the pickup artists master is the one where they tell themselves it doesn’t matter if she’s interested or not.
It sounds like a religion where I would need to forget the facts in order to believe it. I’d have to believe that an empty bed feels just as good as a warm bed, that jerking off feels just as good as sex and cuddling feels just as good as..not.. cuddling.
I’ve blabbered enough:)
July 9th, at 11:12 pm
Well… yeah, you have to tell yourself that it doesn’t matter if she’s interested or not. Because it’s true.
Either it’s an acceptance (yay!) or it’s a fortunate miss (phew!).
You may be unhappy because you’re not having sex, or because you’re sleeping in a cold bed. These are normal desires and the advice to be happy with yourself before you enter a partnership doesn’t begin to touch that. But seduction, relationships, everything — it’s mutual. If it’s not mutual it was a misunderstanding, a fiction, a projection. If she isn’t interested in you, she was never “valuable” in that sense, no matter what you thought when you approached her. You were looking for someone who likes you back. Someone with the capacity to love you. If you get turned down, nothing’s wrong with you; you just picked the wrong woman.
And while loneliness and masturbation can both suck, you can’t project your desire for sex and intimacy onto a crush. Therein lies madness. What you want is sex and intimacy from a reciprocating partner, and unless you’ve established that she is, there’s no use mourning not getting it. It was never there.
I find pickup artists disturbing because they venture out with a goal and try to figure out who, anyone really, they can trick into sleeping with them. The hotter the better. I find that absolutely reprehensible. Not only is the sort of manipulation they do morally wobbly, in terms of consent, but they’re not establishing that mutual relationship. All they care about is their goal, what the woman wants or doesn’t want or thinks about them be damned.
Thinking of it as necessary reciprocity makes it much easier to me. If they don’t want you, you didn’t want them. That attitude is not sour grapes; it’s a recognition of the woman’s agency and desires as equally valid.
Maybe it’s all cold and logical, but damn if I don’t think it stands up for me.
July 10th, at 5:59 am
I don’t know, I think both you and Lex missed the point of my original piece which is that rejection is something to be sought, not feared. That shooting for the sun often nets you the moon, and the moon’s a pretty good thing to reach.
July 10th, at 10:07 am
L & L have been at the last few teas. I’ll remind them to make sure to attend in August.
July 10th, at 7:02 pm
Thank you, Calico, for the kind words. Don’t know quite what to say in response, but after reading what you wrote I need that drink. Even after five years of writing my doodads it’s pleasantly shocking to be reminded that someone out there is paying attention.
Axe, this isn’t about denying your feelings and desires — go ahead and feel. Perhaps the reason I’m more philosophical about rejection is that I have lost several women I’ve been quite fond of… to monogamy. Some of them come back into my life. Others never do. As obsessed as our society is with exclusive pair-bonding, my sexual and romantic relationships with women are necessarily fleeting. If I hadn’t made peace with loss by now I would find it impossible to get out of bed in the morning. (And, as any poly person can tell you, having a wife doesn’t make it any easier to lose a girlfriend).
So, since I’m forced to look upon every relationship in an existentialist fashion, I don’t sweat the relatively minor question of whether a particular person wants to go out with me at this very moment.
BM, I understood your point, I just don’t accept the narrow way you framed the issue as one of gaining acceptance by conquering rejection. It still sounds to me like it’s coming from a place of “outcome anxiety,” which is, like, the root of every problem I’ve ever had. Ever. Why not solve the real problem? To quote Morpheus: “Do you think that’s air your breathing now?”
August 26th, at 4:23 am
Most cultural systems phrase their gender interactions in terms of propositions and rejections. What do you mean that there is no such thing as a rejection?
I go up to a girl who I think is attractive, I say hi, she turns away. In what sense has she not “rejected” me? There is only one interpretation of this chain of events: I was not “attractive enough,” by her standards, to even be considered for sex. She doesn’t even want to start the “chain of escalations” because she knows that it can -never- lead somewhere where she is interested. She may be flawed in this understanding, but there it is.
I think that the term “rejection” really becomes salient/meaningful when the above interactions happen over and over again in a patterned way. For instance, let’s say you were a really ugly, boring person and you were trying to break into some scene or something - meet people, make friends, find sex partners, etc. It’s conceivable to me that you would be “rejected” (in the above sense) over and over and over again. This would lead to feelings of “rejection” with respect to the community. They don’t want you there. No one has any interest in you. In what sense then are you not being “rejected?”
Don’t get me wrong here - I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. What I disagree with is the pedagogy, if I can call it that. This is not sound reasoning. Rejection really -does- apply to some people. There are some people who will be rejected from the vast majority of human communities. To say that “there is no such thing as rejection” might be harmful to these people because it leaves them at a loss to explain their situation. If there’s no such thing as rejection, why can’t they join any of the communities that they want to?
Like, let’s say you’re a freaking burn victim. This may sound callous, but seriously, no one wants to look at a burn victim. It would take a real saint to want to have sex with a burn victim. I’m not censuring this behavior or sentiment, but it’s my conviction that it’s the case. There are lots of communities that a burn victim could not join/be sexually successful in. How does this person, then, construct their experience? Should they keep trying? What’s the point?
I say that sometimes you should accept your rejection and move on to greener pastures.
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As for the more philosophical interpretation of all this, the logical conclusion of this reasoning seems to be that no one should ever frame an action in terms of its objective. Maybe this is even sound. I am undecided. Leary said “never try.” I’m not sure if we can transcend this, in practice.