The Oxford Male
Rejection can bring out the worst in people. The friend whose emotional fortitude has impressed you for the past two years, may turn into an emotionally incontinent, sobbing, mascara-destroying monster. Then again, your friend who cried when you told her that mildly upsetting story about your gran, may show incredible emotional fortitude in the face of desertion. The overriding aim of the reaction must be to feel comfortable enough to move on and trust humanity again.
Whatever your particular tactic, your key allies when facing rejection are denial, misery and anger. Denial is probably the easiest to master, but is really only a passing solution to your woes. A few possible excuses you could use on their behalf include: “their phone is a bit dodgy and probably has lost my text messages and/or missed calls” or “that essay crisis is just a temporary setback” or “they’ve lost my number, and haven’t got my name in order to facebook me.
These will provide some relief and soothe sore wounds for a while. Eventually, you will ring his phone from somebody else’s and find out it is only selectively broken, that his essay crisis is going to last until the end of his degree and that, although your name is published in The Oxford Student weekly, he has deleted you from his facebook friends and cannot be bothered to look you up to send an apologetic message.
It is now time to blame someone for the mess you are about to find yourself in, and who better to blame than yourself? What did you do wrong? Were you too forward, or perhaps too shy? Was that joke you told just too offensive? Perhaps your face is not the image of beauty and your body the temple of perfection you had previously thought, and in fact you resemble the love child of Margaret Thatcher and a dog. That second creme egg was a mistake. It was. You are a tubby piece of crap.
Now you have realised the new truth, it is time to cry. Find a pillow, bury your head in it and blub until your face looks like wrinkly like a prune. There are two ways to recover from this new state of fragility. Sitcoms and television dramas tell us we need to reinvent ourselves: a whole new wardrobe can be more useful than years of therapy. Annoyingly, this is all bollocks — we need a healthier way of dealing with this situation.
Firstly, you are going to need the help of friends, they are going to provide the putty to fill the gaping holes in your ego, namely by reassuring you of how brilliant/ sexy/funny you are at every possible occasion. Once you have decided to believe that your double chins only make you sexier and that your voice is not nasal. it is sexy, only then is it time to complete the transformation.
Learn to dislike your rejecter, stop ignoring all their imperfections and realise that they, too, are simply human, just exactly like you and I. Well, not exactly like you and I, because they lack basic manners and communication skills. They were never that good looking, or that charming they were simply fleetingly friendly and available.
It is not really something to be angry about, is it? Just chalk it up to experience, take the compliment for what it was and realise it is now worth the stress. Now is the time to value your lucky escape: it could have been years before you noticed their emotional backwardness, but now you have the opportunity to go on and explore more dating options. You are now a fully fledged survivor. Congratulations.
8th Jun 2006