Manly Thor's Day Special

Rejection
Men hate rejection. I sure do.

I'll tell you how I got over it. I took a notebook with me to have a coffee. Nowadays you'd probably want to take a laptop. I didn't think I was curing myself of rejection. I was just writing descriptions of people I saw. It was a writing exercise. I was going to write some portraits of people. And they ended up being portraits of women-people because, for some bizarre reason, I find women much more interesting than men.

The thing is I didn't write many because I kept rejecting people. The vast majority of the women who walked into the coffeeshop weren't worth my time to even write a paragraph about. I didn't look at each one and think, 'Well maybe but no'. No, I looked at them and then looked away because, to me at that moment, she wasn't worth the little bit of investment it would have taken to reach a judgment about her. I made those decisions so fast I didn't even notice they were decisions.

That's how women reject us and they have every right in the world to do so.

Now you may say, 'If you'd taken the trouble to try to find something interesting in them, you could have.' Yeah, I could have. But so could you. I mean that is what every pathetic guy with a crush on a woman thinks. He knows she is beautiful and intelligent and wonderful so why should she pay attention to him? Well, the pathetic guy that we all sometimes are thinks, because she should. If she really is as wonderful as she is, then she should be willing to see past all the reasons to reject me and find what is good in me. Why even if I can't see these things for myself she should be able ....

I'll stop there because it should be obvious that is crazy talk.

Women often reject us for trivial reasons and they often reject us for good reasons but here is the point: they don't need to provide reasons. This is how your mother screws you up. She tells you that you can't do something and then she gives a reason. And she is willing to let you argue the point.

You've seen this right? You've sat and been made uncomfortable and everyone else in the room has been made uncomfortable because the child's mother keeps reasoning with him. She keeps explaining and giving more and more reasons. She won't say what needs to be said, 'You can't do it because Mummy said you can't do it.'

That's the thing about rejection. We all do it and we're all allowed to to do it. She doesn't have to give you a reason for why she won't to talk to you, for why she won't let you kiss her, for why she won't let you touch her breasts, for why she won't go out with you, for why she won't keep going out with you. Our mother fell over herself proving that she loved us no matter what happened but (if we are lucky) she is the only woman in our lives who will ever do that and, quite frankly, we'd all be better off if she'd tried less hard than she did.

Other women will reject us for whatever reasons they want and those reasons don't have to have anything to do with us.

'She doesn't care that I exist.'

'That's absolutely right. Do you have a problem with that? Because you shouldn't.'