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We’ve all been there: caught up trying to solve why potential friends or partners won’t give you the time of day. It’s especially mind-boggling when you can’t seem to figure out why they aren’t responding. After all, you’re nice and fun to be around, right?
As it turns out, this puzzling behavior doesn’t only emerge in romantic relationships — it also pops up in many social situations.
For instance, you might insist on becoming friends with a coworker who says yes to your afternoon coffee invites but bails at the last minute. Or maybe a friend of a friend never makes an effort to say hello in group settings.
But instead of writing the person off, you try to win them over. In psychology, we call this chronic need for chasing unavailable relationships “rejection sensitivity.“
Chances are your situation isn’t a chronic occurrence, but if you find yourself mulling over the moment more than you’d like, here are some questions to ask yourself:
Great question! First, we’ve got to tackle some behaviors: Think of a scenario where someone likes you. What’s your response?
Are you eager to start texting and make a coffee date or do you wait a few days before responding? Do you feel unworthy of positive attention?
If insecurity plays a role in your response, it might mean that you have a scar from your childhood. We call this an early attachment wound, such as growing up with an emotionally walled-off and critical parent, or seeing your parent’s marriage splinter in half.
This often starts patterns of trying to befriend people who dislike closeness. Why? Because you had more problematic frames of reference for relationships than nurturing ones.
If this sounds like you, focus on the facts the next time you find yourself spiraling into anxiety. Ask yourself: Is there any evidence that your newfound friend will reject you?
Keep in mind that even if an early attachment wound caused “rejection sensitivity,” not everyone you meet will ignore your emotions and push you away like you may have experienced in the past.
If you’re looking to sort through these complicated emotions, don’t put your hope in the friendship basket. A therapist who can help you untangle your attachment patterns may prove a better fit.
Let me explain, if you find yourself gravitating toward partners or friends with larger-than-life personalities, is it the person you’re actually interested in? Translation: If you’re trying hardcore to be friends with the popular coworker, is it because you like them — or are you envious of their pull?
Now, this doesn’t mean you aspire to be like the Kardashians, but it could mean you’re dissatisfied with some aspect of your life. Perhaps it’s a constant a battle to see yourself in a positive light, and because of this, you place all of your energy running after unattainable friendships.
If this is the case, self-acceptance exercises may illuminate a meaningful life lesson.
For starters, keep track of the positive comments that come your way. Did your coworker compliment your outfit, or did a friend thank you for giving them sound relationship advice? Whatever it is, take note, because chances are you’re valued by others more than you realize.
Another great idea is to start a gratitude journal and write down one or two things that you appreciate each day. These may seem like simple exercises, but they can truly shift our perspective by cultivating positive feelings, which can help lift our self-esteem.
I don’t mean to get psychoanalytical on you, but sometimes it does come back to mom. Moms get a bad rap because society often makes it seem as if the “perfect” mom is always warm, loving, and joyful. But what if your mom wasn’t always bursting with sunshine? Or what if your mom took a “tough love” approach to parenting?
Most likely, no one’s mother fits the stereotypical cultural portrayal — and that’s okay. What’s important is understanding how your relationship with your mom influences your relationship experiences.
For example, if you grew up with a mom who seemed emotionally distant or constantly criticized you for not perfecting your SATs, and being the star of the soccer team, you might try to win over closed off people.
Psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud called this a “reenactment.” While some may say his theories are outdated, he was absolutely correct when he said we tend to play out old family scenarios in the present moment.
The other aspect of human behavior Freud nailed is this: We all engage in behaviors unconsciously. Reenactments are rarely conscious, which is why the behavior can be hard to break. In our minds, we’re merely repeating a familiar pattern that used to be a normal way to interact with others.
Because we’re not aware of this behavior, it often takes someone like a friend, coworker, family member, or therapist to bring it to our attention.
Many years ago, I went out on a limb and told my friend that she always seemed to befriend cruel people. While she was taken aback at that moment, she came to realize that she was replaying an old painful dynamic. Not only was she drawn to emotionally closed off people, but she mistakenly believed that charming them over would repair her childhood baggage.
If you see rejection as a sign of failure, not being liked can be a big pill to swallow. When this happens, the unrealistic need to be perfect can drive us to invest too much of ourselves in the wrong situations — and with the wrong types of people.
You might ask yourself why you hold yourself to such high standards? If a friend with a similar problem asked you for advice, what would you say?
Often, the pursuit of perfectionism is fueled by our need to avoid icky emotions like vulnerability, embarrassment, and shame — the very sentiments that feeling imperfect can activate.
If this sounds like you, you might ask yourself: “Where did the message come from that you aren’t ‘good enough,’ and that being disliked is a personal failure, instead of a sign of being human?”
Whatever the scenario, chances are your behaviors reflect an old childhood or adolescent wound that never fully healed. If these tips triggered something for you, you may want to read about fawning. If it’s hard for you to break the cycle of “rejection sensitivity,” speaking to an expert about your behavior can help.
And a gentle reminder: If these tips don’t fit your case, it doesn’t give license to push for a relationship to happen. After all, in an era when personal information is plastered on the internet, people have a higher need for boundaries. And we need to respect those boundaries, no matter how cool we think the person is.
After all, you don’t want them to think of you when that Mariah Carey song comes on.
Juli Fraga is a licensed psychologist based in San Francisco, California. See what she’s up to on Twitter.
For simplicity's sake, I refer to heterosexual women in this post, but what I discuss here definitely applies to heterosexual men and non-heterosexual individuals as well.
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Many of us are familiar with this scenario: Mr. Nice Guy is cute, sweet, interesting, smart, and available. Even better, he is interested in a relationship with you. The only problem is that you just aren't that into him. Mr. Bad Guy, on the other hand, is on your mind 24/7.
Like Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Bad Guy has a lot of good qualities, but he is either unavailable for a relationship in general, or unavailable for a relationship with you, because he just isn't that into you. Despite his continual rejection, however, you cannot seem to get him off your mind. The more he rejects you and the more forcefully he indicates that he doesn't want to be with you, the more interested you seem to become.
Why do we develop this bad habit of wanting what we cannot have? Why don't we always want what we can have? In other areas of life, it seems that we can adjust our preferences to fit the situation. You may have once flirted with the idea of becoming a Hollywood star. But when you discovered you couldn't act, you let go of that dream (I hope). So why can't we let go of people who continually reject us?
According to Helen Fisher and her colleagues, the reason romantic rejection gets us hooked is that this sort of rejection stimulates parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward, addiction, and cravings. Using functional MRI, her team looked at the brains of 15 college-aged men and women who had recently been rejected by their partners but claimed to still be intensely "in love." During the scan, the research subjects looked at a photo of the person who had rejected them. They then completed a math exercise, such as counting backward from 4,529 by 7. The exercise was an attempt to distract participants from their romantic thoughts. Finally, they were shown a picture of a familiar person they were not interested in romantically.
The team found that participants' brains were more active in areas associated with motivation, reward, craving, addiction, physical pain, and distress when they looked at the photo of the person who had rejected them than when they looked at the photo of the neutral person.
The study, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 2010, shows that people in this situation are really suffering from a drug addiction, and the drug is the person rejecting us, leaving our love unreciprocated. But the results do not give us insight into why we respond to romantic rejection in this way, and it doesn't answer the question of how we have developed this troubling tendency of wanting people we can't have.
You might think it is a matter of heartbreak and grief. But that cannot be the full answer either, because in some cases we haven't lost anything that we can grieve the loss of. We can be madly in love with someone who doesn't want us, and never wanted us but the situation can sometimes be as painful as someone breaking up with us.
In a previous post, I argued that part of the rejection pain we feel when love is unreciprocated may be caused by an evolutionarily-grounded repulsion to social rejection combined with a social stigma associated with breakups and divorce. But that, too, does not explain why we often want only those individuals we cannot have.
Another aspect of this anguish may have to do with the perceived value of the other person. If the other person doesn't want us or is not available for a relationship, their perceived value goes up. They become so "expensive" that we cannot "afford" them. Evolutionarily speaking, it would have been an advantage to mate with the most valuable mate. So it makes sense that we become more romantically interested when a person's perceived value increases.
Another answer may have to do with our relatively addictive personalities. Fisher's study showed that anguish and pain after romantic rejection is a kind of addiction. The question remains, however, what is it we are addicted to in this scenario?
In the case of a relationship that has ended, we may be addicted to the time we spent with the other person, their text messages, their company, or the sex. But if our brains work similarly when our love is unreciprocated, and there never was a relationship, what is the source of the addictive feelings? Presumably, we're addicted to thoughts of what could have been but never will be. Once we get stuck on those thoughts, being rejected by the other person can intensify them, leaving us to deal with obsession, which is a kind of addiction—or an addiction to thoughts of a certain kind. Elsewhere, I have argued that standard methods for dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder can also help you get over romantic obsession.
Your attachment style can also influence how much you get stuck on people who don't want you. People with a dependent attachment style (also known as a co-dependent or anxious attachment style) are brought up to seek out people who will cause them pain. In a classic scenario, they grew up in a household with a mother or father who emotionally rejected them. For these individuals, being romantically rejected is a familiar feeling. Since we are always more likely to act in ways that are familiar to us, if we have a history of rejection, we are likely to seek situations where we should expect more rejection. Our brains interpret these scenarios as normal, even though we know that it is not normal to seek out scenarios that lead to pain and anguish.
Finally, there is the "different ending" explanation: If we have a history of being rejected—by a parent, for example—we sometimes subconsciously seek out similar scenarios, hoping that the story will have a different ending next time. Only it does not. It is worth remembering Einstein's definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.