It’s the first midterm of junior year. I’m trying to understand why I’ve willingly enrolled in a class that requires me to identify mammal skulls and list their names in Latin when I get a text.
“I have something to tell you.”
My stomach drops.
He proceeds to tell me that he’s going on a date with another girl. My first thought is that I need to find a bathroom because I feel like I’m going to throw up. (I did in fact throw up.)
For context, this was a man I had made it abundantly clear I wanted to be in a relationship with. I don’t do situationships. Love me or get out! He initially agreed, then changed his mind, citing commitment issues, only to apparently discover that those issues were no longer particularly pressing when another woman entered the picture. He said something along the lines of having already decided that he didn’t want to be in a relationship with me.
Admittedly, I was stupid for thinking I would be the exception. I was freshly 18, dealing with my very own Mr. Big (with a two-year age gap instead of 10). In my mind, he was simply going through something. Something that would eventually pass, at which point he would come to his senses and realize just how amazing we were together. After all, he already knew we were good together. For whatever reason, making it official was what scared him.
I was obviously deluding myself. And yet, here was another girl. Someone for whom the prospect of commitment apparently wasn’t so terrifying. Someone who was going to receive the very thing I’d spent months asking for.
A particular feeling began bubbling up inside me. Not just the vomit, but curiosity.
What did she have that I didn’t? Was she prettier than me? Smarter? More interesting? Funnier? (Unlikely. No one is funnier than me apart from Larry David.)
I hated that I was even asking these questions. The existence of another woman shouldn’t have made me question my own desirability. I knew I was smart. I knew I was kinda pretty. I knew I had plenty to offer someone romantically. But I was already conducting a comparative analysis of myself and a woman I had never met.
The particularly humiliating part of not being chosen is that you can know, intellectually, that someone else’s romantic preferences are not a reflection of your worth and still find yourself wondering what was so fundamentally wrong with you that they chose someone else.
I think that’s what makes this particular kind of rejection so difficult. He demonstrated a willingness to give someone else exactly what he told me he couldn’t give me. That distinction hurts.
I spent winter break watching rom-com movies and sobbing through them to the point that my roommates were genuinely concerned for my well being.
When someone tells you they’re not ready for a relationship, there’s room for interpretation. Perhaps the timing is wrong. Perhaps they’re emotionally unavailable. Perhaps they’re dealing with something personal that makes commitment difficult. Sometimes those explanations are entirely legitimate, but they can also become remarkably convenient explanations for behavior we don’t particularly want to confront.
I had convinced myself that the problem was his relationship with commitment, not his relationship with me. Because if the issue was commitment, then there was nothing inherently wrong with what we had. I just needed to be patient. But if the issue was that he didn’t want to commit to me, then I had to acknowledge something I’d spent months trying to avoid.
I wanted something with someone who didn’t want the same thing with me. And for some reason, admitting that felt infinitely more humiliating than enduring the situationship itself.
I felt so incredibly guilty about my jealousy. Me. Feminist. Jealous over a MAN. I didn’t know this girl. I knew nothing about her personality, her interests, or what she was looking for romantically. For all I knew, she was lovely.
I think we’re often encouraged to understand romantic rejection as a competition. If someone chooses another woman, we assume she must have possessed something we were lacking. Something that made her more desirable, more lovable, or simply more worthy of commitment.
But relationships aren’t meritocratic. There isn’t some objective ranking of women based on beauty, intelligence, humor, and emotional availability, with men distributing commitment to whoever scores highest. Which, frankly, is fortunate, because I would hate to have to sit another exam. (Also, that’s just not the world I want to live in.)
Someone choosing another person doesn’t automatically mean that person is better than you. It means they wanted something different. And I think that’s an important distinction to make, especially when we’re conditioned to interpret romantic attention as a measure of our desirability.
The woman he chose was not necessarily prettier, smarter, funnier, or more deserving of love than I was. She was simply the woman he wanted to date.
That’s it.
It sounds obvious, almost embarrassingly so, but I liberated myself when I recognized that another woman’s desirability doesn’t come at my expense.
She doesn’t have to be less impressive for you to be worthy of love, and you don’t have to find something wrong with her to explain why he didn’t choose you.
Looking back, I think one of the most uncomfortable things about that experience was realizing how much energy I’d spent trying to convince someone to want me.
Because what was I really fighting for? A man who couldn’t give me a straightforward answer about what we were doing? Someone whose feelings I had to interpret like some cryptic code? I was so preoccupied with the possibility of what we could become that I wasn’t paying attention to what we actually were.
What we were was exhausting. I don’t think there’s anything embarrassing about wanting someone who doesn’t want you back. Rejection is an unavoidable part of dating, and sometimes feelings simply aren’t reciprocated. But I do think there’s something worth examining about how easily romantic rejection can become a personal indictment.
Why was my immediate response to another woman being chosen to question myself rather than question why I’d spent so long in a situation that made me feel unwanted? Why did I assume she had something I lacked, rather than acknowledge that we were simply two different people? And why in God’s name had I given this man’s romantic preferences so much authority over the way I understood myself?
What I know now, and what I wish I’d understood at 18, is that being chosen isn’t inherently an accomplishment. It can feel like one, particularly when you’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince someone to choose you. But someone’s willingness to be in a relationship with you doesn’t automatically make you more valuable than you were before.
Likewise, their unwillingness doesn’t make you any less. The woman he chose was not the villain of my story. She wasn’t my competition, and she certainly wasn’t responsible for the way I felt about myself.
Whatever happened between them had very little to do with me. I think the most important realization was that I didn’t actually need to know what she had that I didn’t. The answer wouldn’t have changed anything. It simply didn’t matter.
He had already demonstrated that he wasn’t going to give me the relationship I wanted. Whether he eventually gave that relationship to someone else was irrelevant to the decision I needed to make for myself. I wanted to be with someone who chose me willingly, enthusiastically, and repeatedly. And perhaps more importantly, someone I could choose without having to abandon myself in the process.
So, he chose her (he actually didn’t even end up dating her either). What does that say about me? Absolutely nothing.