No one likes rejection. No one likes to open up, to show vulnerability, to shed their protective emotional armor to express themselves or tell someone how they feel…only to find out their feelings are one-sided and unreciprocated. 

It’s not even a matter so much of rejection because we all know that not everyone is required to love us. We all know that there are no guarantees in love, that the only guarantee is what we put into it.

We cannot force another to want us, to choose us, to love us. Life doesn’t work that way, and honestly, that sucks.

The feeling of not being chosen by someone you want is a shitty feeling, it hurts our hearts, it wounds our egos, it makes us doubt that we are desirable at all. But why? Imagine a world where everyone showed interest in everyone. Where is the individuality of self, where is the uniqueness of relationships? It would be nonexistent. The concepts of attraction, desire, and love would literally be nothing special.

Let’s be honest. Not being chosen hurts. Especially when you’re not chosen by someone you chose, someone you saw a future with, someone with whom you believed to have a really strong connection.

We’ve all experienced not being chosen by someone we wanted. Maybe they didn’t want a relationship. Maybe they were a seriously skilled player who had us believing for a time that they wanted us, only to pull the rug out from under us. Whatever the reason for them not choosing us, we got through it. We licked our wounds, we healed, and we moved on.

But what’s worse than not being chosen for the above reasons, is not being chosen because they chose someone else. And damn… that opens up a whole new world of hurt and doubt. That is something that no matter how confident I am, or how hard I constantly work towards self-love, someone else being chosen over me makes me doubt so much about myself. It makes me doubt everything I know. It makes me doubt my appearance, my personality, my humor and if sometimes I cross the line a little too far. It makes me overanalyze just how we’re being judged by potential partners, which makes me give little credit to what really matters… the strength of the connection. It makes me doubt my judgment, the way I understand situations, and how I pride myself on reading people, on being a good judge of character. If I was such a good judge of character, would this have happened? Wouldn’t I have seen this coming?

And this is where we struggle. We struggle with the unknown. We struggle with the why. We struggle with the unexplainable. With the fact that no matter how much we think we know, how intuitive we think we are, we struggle because there is always the chance that we can be blindsided, especially in love. We have to relinquish control of what it is we think we know, of what it is we think we understand. 

Because at the end of the day, no matter how wise we believe ourselves to be or how much we think we know about relationships, we will never have any fucking idea when it comes to why people make the choices they make. We will never really know or understand why they don’t choose us even after we’ve given so much of ourselves to them, no matter how secure we were thinking they would. But maybe we’re not supposed to know these things. Maybe we’re supposed to just take them as learning experiences and life lessons whose purpose is to help us grow, love ourselves, and not base our worth on whether or not people choose us.

So let’s try harder to let go of the burning desire to know why. Let’s try to let go of what is not meant to be.

Try to emotionally and mentally let go of we cannot control and remember that the only thing we can truly control is ourselves, our actions, and our choices.

And let’s really try to learn to give more importance to what really matters here: when it comes to choosing you, it really shouldn’t matter if they don’t. It should only matter that you do.