When You Like Someone but They Like Someone Else

I’m still resentful over the rejection from two months ago. Her last boyfriend had some money but wasn’t rich. He wasn’t good-looking and certainly wasn’t well mannered. So when she turned me down, rather than pointing to her bad taste in men, I assumed that I wasn’t good enough for her, and her ex was better than me in some ways.

“Do your thing and I’ll do mine.” She told me after I apologized by leaving a fruit tea at her door. Getting rejected is God-awful. First, your hopes are destroyed. Then there’s the embarrassment of putting yourself out there. To make matters worse, you feel like you don’t deserve them, especially when they turn around and fall into the arms of someone else.

Now, I’m suspecting that there’s a new man in the picture. She recently posted a rental listing not for her own property(she owns a few houses), but for a guy who seems to be her type. If not a romantic interest already, she at least cares about him a lot.

When someone you like dismisses you but shows intense affection for someone else, it sends a direct message of “they’re better than you.” Just a big bucket of cold water poured all over your soul.

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Growing up with an insecure attachment, I’m terrified of abandonment. My mother was in and out of my life earlier on in infancy.

When I finally lived with her in preschool, she’d always go hang out with her friends while leaving me home alone. So when rejected by a girl, it triggers this deep-seated fear within me, like there’s something inherently wrong with me.

Sometimes we get passed up for someone more attractive. Even though it’s understandable, we feel depleted because it destroys our confidence going into a future encounter.

If we get chosen over for someone less attractive, we become irate. What do they seen in that person that they don’t see in me? We start compulsively dissecting and questioning, inching closer to insanity.

Too often, we blame ourselves for others not wanting us. We think that we’re missing traits they seem to have found in their new acquaintance when in reality, it’s often a matter of compatibility. We have a hard time accepting the fact that not everybody will like us, regardless of how attractive we believe we are. Until we accept this fact, we’ll stay stuck trying to fix ourselves when there was never anything to fix in the first place.

The pain they’ve caused us will take time to heal, but what we can do in the meantime is to move forward. Although I’m an introvert in a pandemic, I started actively pursuing new friendships and romantic relationships after the rejection. I didn’t know where and how, but I knew I couldn’t stay fixated on someone who didn’t want me. And the best way to do that was to replace that void with new hope.

As a result, I’ve met some new friends and a girl who genuinely seems interested. At this moment, I realized she’s the right one for me, not the girl who rejected me.

Someone overlooking us in favor of another person doesn’t diminish our own value. It only means that they weren’t the right fit for us. Instead of fixing ourselves to meet their demands, remember that there’s someone else out there dying to meet this exact person you are right now, who’s just as beautiful, interesting, and kind.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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