How to get over rejection

Don’t imagine anyone can love on command. The capacity to feel attracted lies outside the will. It isn’t a question of not trying hard enough.

Many of us are predisposed to think especially well of people who don’t want us. It feeds into reserves of self-hatred. This isn’t romanticism, it’s an illness. The true challenge is to stop being so revolted by people who do in fact want us and so admiring of those who don’t.

Don’t connect up the rejection with everything you fear and hate about being you.

Don’t accuse them of cowardice. Don’t exaggerate their qualities, insist on their uniqueness, offer them sex in the hope of changing their mind, imagine that people can fall back in love with someone out of pity or of guilt – or defensively maintain that they had a ‘fear of intimacy.’

For the most part, laugh.