“He’s Just Not That Into You” became an international bestseller and inspired a major motion picture. The book was funny, but the movie was a little more dramatic. Unfortunately, despite the success of both the book and the film, few women (and men) seem to have taken the message to heart.
If a guy doesn’t text, call, or email (when it’s actually his turn), he’s just not into you. You are not his top priority. They’re probably not even on his top 10 priorities in life. If he gets annoyed when you text him, call him, or email him (assuming you don’t overdo it), then he’s sending you a message: He doesn’t feel like being around you or spending time with you to spend with you.
This raises an interesting question: How could we evolve to obsess over a person who has no interest in us?
Is there a reason why we like people who don’t like us? Why is this message so difficult for so many people to understand? Why do we overanalyze other people’s behavior and find interest where there is none? How did we evolve to have the ability to repeatedly put ourselves in embarrassing and hurtful positions?
There is a natural answer to this question. But it is only a partial answer. When something becomes scarce, we value it more. We value diamonds in part because they are rare. When contact with a loved one is limited, we also begin to value their company more, and perhaps even value the loved one more.
I said that was a partial answer. The reason this can’t be the complete answer is because we usually don’t get upset and hurt when, for example, Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t seek our company or even rejects us when we try to get together with her. Yet their company is rare for most of us. Most of us have never met her in person, and those of us who have are unlikely to be her best friends in the future.
Scarcity contributes to how much value we place on an activity, event, or person. Still, it doesn’t fully explain why we like people who don’t like us and don’t understand when others reject us.
How could we fall in love with a person who has no interest in us? How could this have been evolutionary beneficial? It seems as if nature should have gotten rid of the individuals who had isolated themselves in their caves when their Stone Age man or woman left them for a new mate. They would certainly have been less likely to become pregnant, and therefore less likely to have passed on their genes to future generations, especially when they found themselves in such a situation quite frequently.
Isn’t our inability to deal with romantic rejection perhaps an evolutionary adaptive trait? Is it perhaps a byproduct of another beneficial trait? Or is it purely cultural, with no anchor in our genetic makeup and no connection to evolutionary history?
I believe our inability to cope is a mix of reactions to cultural expectations and a healthy reaction to social rejection – exaggerated.
Let’s start with the latter. We know that groups and societies were useful to our ancestors (this is important to many of our non-human animal friends too). Social rejection can mean being excluded and left to fend for yourself.
When you are left behind by a romantic partner, which is the case I will focus on here, you are being rejected in some way. Of course, any rejection can hurt and cause us to do strange things, but for example, having your article rejected from a magazine doesn’t hurt as much as being rejected by a person you love.
This is where culture comes into play. There is a societal expectation that we will end up with another person that we will eventually live with, have children with, and perhaps marry. Being in a relationship with another person is (usually) an excuse to evaluate ourselves positively. You are now a “we”. You are invited to joint events, you are treated as a unit, more like an individual than as two separate people.
Finding out that someone is in a relationship with another person is news in your social circles. It is also news when a couple breaks up, regardless of who rejected whom. A label is removed. You are alone again and are no longer invited to the same events as the standard.
Because of these societal expectations, your identity changes profoundly when you are rejected romantically, at least when the rejection comes in the form of a breakup from a long-term romantic relationship or marriage, which is probably the type of rejection that hurts the most.
It’s now news that you’re no longer in a relationship, which isn’t good news for you, but only for the person who broke up with you (if it’s actually good news for either of you). You are left alone with feelings that you have nowhere to direct except outward (stalker-like) or inward, and as we all know, the latter can lead to anxiety depression and other forms of mental illness.
So is there any consolation when you’re rejected romantically? Can you undo the cultural curse placed on you? Probably not easy. Divorce and separation will always carry a stigma. But you can choose not to let it affect you.
This requires you not to let other people define who you are. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. You don’t have to identify with the labels that other people assign to you.
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Let’s say you’re divorced. Unless you take an oath in court and are asked if you have ever been married, you have the right not to call yourself divorced. Heck, you don’t even have to identify as male or female, black or white (or any other ethnicity). You have the right to call yourself single even if you’re divorced (assuming you’re not married, of course, otherwise you’re lying).
You also don’t have to identify with your life with your former partner. You don’t have to define yourself as “the person who used to be married to Brian” or “the guy who used to date Lisa.” Your previous life with Brian or Lisa or whatever your ex’s name is is over.
You have the right not to talk about it. You don’t have to answer any questions about your past life. If asked, it’s enough to say that you and Brian are no longer together (actually, “it’s none of your business” is enough). You are not obligated to respond, “No, we are not together, we used to be, but then we broke up.”
The latter type of answer indicates that you still define yourself by your previous relationship. Thinking about yourself in these terms is not a good way to move forward. In order to move on with your life, you must completely free yourself from this aspect of your previous life.
Berit “Brit” Brogaard, DMSci., Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research at the University of Miami. Her work has been featured on Huffington Post, MSNBC, Chron, TIME, Psychology Today, Psyche Magazine, and ABC News, among others.
This article was originally published on Psychology Today. Reprinted with permission of the author.