Sometimes Rejection Is Protecting You From the Wrong Man

Rejection can perform a very odd little trick: it can make you passionately interested in getting through a door you had barely inspected while it was open.

A few minutes earlier, there was simply a man you liked. Things seemed promising. You were curious. You had perhaps begun wondering where this might go.

Then he says no, the door closes, and suddenly you are standing outside thinking, Excuse me, what exactly was in there?

Well.

Now you need to know.

The funny thing is that the minute access is denied, whatever was behind the door starts looking better. A man who seemed fairly ordinary begins to come with an imaginary future attached to him. You picture warmth, closeness, good conversations, trips together, perhaps the kind of relationship where nobody disappears for three days and returns as though he merely stepped outside for milk.

You cannot actually see the room, of course. The door is closed. Which is extremely convenient for your imagination, because now nothing inside can contradict the fantasy.

You Begin Negotiating With the Door

At first, you assume there has been some misunderstanding. Maybe the timing was off. Maybe you came on too strong, not strong enough, seemed too interested, or made the terrible romantic mistake of behaving exactly like yourself.

So you try the handle again.

Not literally. We do still have standards.

Maybe you send one more message. You become a little warmer, then wonder whether warmer was wrong and perhaps slightly cooler would have been better. You replay the last conversation and look for the exact moment when this apparently wonderful future slipped quietly out of the room.

And because nothing changes, the relationship you never actually had starts looking better than the one you were beginning to have.

Conveniently, the imaginary version of him has also stopped doing all the wrong things the real version had already begun doing.

He communicates beautifully now. He makes plans without becoming strangely faint at the mention of next month. That habit of disappearing whenever things became uncomfortable would probably have vanished through the healing power of your excellent company.

Anything is possible in a room nobody has entered.

Then the Room Starts Giving Itself Away

But as luck would have it, reality is not nearly as cooperative as your imagination. With time, it begins slipping through the walls.

You hear something about how he treated someone else. A quality you had generously called “complicated” begins looking much simpler. Something you were willing to excuse when you still hoped the story was going somewhere starts to look less charming from a distance.

The communication problem was not sitting quietly in the corner waiting for the right woman to cure it. And the confusing behavior, disappointingly, may simply have been confusing behavior.

No hidden meaning. Just a man doing exactly what he had already started doing.

Ah.

Perhaps we were not being kept out of Versailles after all.

At first, the closed door feels like proof that you lost something wonderful. Later, you may look back and realize that being stopped in the hallway was not the worst place for the story to end.

Another few steps and you might have been inside explaining, once again, why disappearing without a word is not actually a personality type.

This is where people say, “Rejection is God’s protection.”

At the time, this can be an irritating sentence. You are standing outside with your feelings in a handbag, and somebody is cheerfully telling you the locked door is a blessing.

Wonderful.

Could the blessing perhaps have been communicated without making you cry in the parking lot?

And yet, annoyingly, the phrase sometimes begins making sense later.

Eventually, You Stop Caring What Was Inside

The best part is not always that the door eventually opens again. Sometimes it never does.

What changes is that you stop waiting outside it.

Life becomes interesting elsewhere. Other people appear. Eventually, one particular man’s opinion stops being treated like the final ruling from an international court, and the room you imagined in such wonderful detail shrinks back to its proper size.

Then, every so often, you get one last look. Maybe he comes back. Maybe you hear what happened. Maybe enough time simply passes that you can finally see him without rejection making him more interesting than he ever was.

And your first thought is not heartbreak.

It is:

Oh.

That was the room??

Because rejection can make an ordinary man look like the lost wing of Versailles simply because you were not allowed inside.

The door may never have been hiding your great love. It may simply have been standing between you and several exhausting years, a great deal of unnecessary explaining, and far too many conversations beginning with, “I just think communication is important.”

You may never know whether God closed it, life closed it, he closed it, or the hinges simply gave up.

But sometimes you walk far enough away, turn around, and feel unexpectedly grateful that the handle never moved.