One Customer Left. Please Do Not Close the Restaurant

A man loses interest in you, and suddenly you are renovating the restaurant.

The menu is under review, the dessert trolley has been called into question, someone is staring anxiously at the curtains, and the chef has tasted the sauce twelve times and can no longer remember what sauce is supposed to taste like.

All because one customer came in, looked around, had a perfectly pleasant evening and, for reasons known mostly to himself, did not come back.

This is an astonishing amount of authority to give one diner.

Before him, the restaurant was doing rather well. You liked your own menu, people had enjoyed themselves here, the champagne was cold, the pasta had confidence, and nobody was standing in the kitchen at midnight whispering, “Do you think I’m too much?”

Then Mr. Table Seven declines another reservation, and suddenly we are considering whether the entire establishment has been a terrible mistake.

Nobody Knows Why He Didn’t Come Back

This is the maddening part of rejection: we experience somebody else’s decision from inside our own feelings, so naturally we assume the explanation must also be about us.

Maybe he did not feel enough chemistry. Fair enough.

But why he did not feel it can be almost impossible to know, and our imagination is rarely gracious about uncertainty. It does not say, “He may simply prefer something different.”

Oh no.

It begins inspecting the kitchen.

Perhaps you were too enthusiastic, too available, too quiet, too opinionated. Maybe you should have ordered something different on the second date, or laughed less loudly at that story, or somehow prevented your hair from doing whatever suspicious thing it apparently did around 8:40 p.m.

Soon you are rebuilding yourself around information you do not actually possess.

Meanwhile, Table Seven may not like French food. He may have walked in hoping for sushi, or he may adore French food but still be emotionally wandering around the little café he visited three years ago and insists he is completely over.

He may even have enjoyed dinner very much and still not want another one.

We do this ourselves all the time without considering it a referendum on the restaurant. You can sit across from a perfectly lovely man, recognize that he is attractive, kind, interesting and presumably capable of operating household appliances, and still feel absolutely no desire to see him again.

Nothing terrible happened. The soup was fine.

You simply do not want another bowl.

Yet Rejection Makes Us Inspect the Soufflé

When you are the one being rejected, ordinary preference suddenly feels far too simple. We want a cause, preferably something identifiable, correctable and available for immediate repair.

If we can locate the faulty item, perhaps we can prevent this from ever happening again.

So we start editing ourselves after every departure. One man thought you were too reserved, so now you must be warmer. Another liked you but said something vague about not feeling a spark, so perhaps warmth was the problem after all. A third was wildly interested for two weeks and then vanished, which naturally requires a full inquiry into the cheesecake.

At some point, the restaurant no longer knows what it serves.

This is what makes rejection so sneaky. The disappointment itself is real, but then we quietly add a second injury by treating somebody else’s preference as useful information about our value.

And preferences are wonderfully unreliable things.

One person will travel across town for the chocolate cake another person leaves untouched. One man thinks your independence is irresistible; another finds it slightly intimidating. One loves that you talk to strangers, laugh easily and have opinions about everything, while another dreams of someone quieter.

Neither man has discovered the truth about you.

They have discovered what suits them, which is a considerably smaller discovery.

The Restaurant Does Not Close

Of course rejection can tell you something useful sometimes. If five people leave because the waiter keeps insulting them, we may want to speak to the waiter.

Self-awareness has its place.

But romantic rejection is not automatically feedback. Sometimes it is simply a no — a disappointing no, an inconvenient no, occasionally a no delivered by someone you had already, for no sensible reason, mentally included in next Christmas — but still only a no.

It does not require you to become less funny, less affectionate, less expressive, more mysterious, easier to impress or whatever renovation project has begun in the back room.

One customer did not return.

The chef does not resign, the sign does not come down, and nobody throws the profiteroles into the sea.

You clear the table, feel disappointed because you wanted him there, and then life continues.

Eventually, someone else walks in and cannot believe this place has an empty seat.

He likes the menu.

He orders dessert.

Possibly two.