THE LOVE LAB

Name: Sleepless in Brooklyn

I’ve been pretty stupid. Setting romantic expectations up in my head with a girl who has expressed that she just wants to be friends right now. She reads me like a billboard, tho, and doesn’t trust me to respect her feelings. She was right not to, I was always looking for opportunities to change her mind. Now, I’m coming to understand how selfish I’ve been. Probably caused her considerable pain, since I’m done with self-pitying, the guilt of hurting her really sucks.

We are not talking right now. I’m ok with giving her space. But how can I make sure not to fall back into selfish behaviors if/when we do connect again?

LOVELAB SAYS:

Dear Sleepless in Brooklyn,

It is great that you have taken the time to reflect on this situation. Regardless of a relationship outcome, I believe the success of any relationship can be measured by its positive transformational power.

What you can take away from this experience is that you cannot force someone to like you. Both men and women often hang on that glimmer of hope that someone whom they like will reciprocate. If this girl has already expressed to you she doesn’t want anything romantic, you need to accept this and move on. Your job as a man is to figure out whether a woman is interested during the courtship process and invest your time wisely based on the cues you receive. If you want to not fall back into selfish behaviors, you may want to consider moving on from focusing on this girl as the object of your affection and pursuing individuals who are open to your advances.

If you value her as a person, you can continue to engage her as a friend once some time has passed. If she seems resistant at first, you can apologize and make it clear to her that you will not further pursue her romantically. Eventually, if you stay true to your word, she will begin to trust you again. The challenge for you is to get over her so that you are not creating tension and emotional heaviness in this dynamic.

I also noted that you said she “expressed that she just wants to be friends right now”. You have to be prepared that when she used the word “right now” it may actually mean she only wants to be friends period. Women often tell guys they are not interested in romantically that they want to be friends for the time being, leaving that possibility open that something might happen in the future. This can be because they don’t want to completely shut a guy down and hurt this ego; alternatively, it can mean they enjoy having suitors around. In reality, when someone says to you they are not interested right now, you have to accept the possibility that they may never be and not spend your time and emotional energy on something that may never materialize.

Dealing with rejection in a healthy way is a sizable mental feat. It takes years for people to master this and find positivity in rejection. Ultimately, the goal is to see failure as feedback in order to improve your strategies or to understand yourself and others. Rejection can catapult people into depression and make them nonfunctional and self-destructive. So it is important to learn how to buffer yourself against rejection and to have a healthy outlook which will make you resilient in life and love.

NOT ATTACHING YOURSELF TO AN OUTCOME FROM THE BEGINNING

This is a very powerful concept. This does not mean that you are indifferent to the impact a person has on you nor does it mean that you are closed off from love or from the risks associated when allowing yourself to be vulnerable with another. It means that you are open to love in general and not focusing on creating that with someone who is not open to love or is not open to loving YOU. It is a libertarian concept at heart (see post on Libertarian Love) since it means that you are not wishing an outcome for a person that they may not want for themselves. It is about going into relationships, courtship, and dating situations with the knowledge that the person may not feel about you the same way you feel about them and respecting this and not taking it personally. If you have this mindset from the beginning, you will be able to accept and understand that rejection is sometimes a blessing because on some level that person was honest enough with themselves and you to address some sort of incompatibility.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute recently discovered that male chimps who are generous with the meat they acquire tend to mate twice as much with the females that they bestow these gifts upon. Christina Gomez and her colleagues didn’t see this exchange at first because they assumed that the exchange would be immediate, but the fruits of the male chimp’s labor came to be realized at other points of the female’s cycle.

In fact, providing the female with meat when she wasn’t even ovulating increased the male’s chimp of having sex with her when she was, thus increasing his chances of impregnating the female. In other words, while the shisty monkeys were smirking at the ‘baller’ chimps as they squandered away their hard earned meat to the ungrateful females, the strategic baller knew that he’d get the last laugh with his generosity when it was estrus time. The results of this quite intuitive observation were recently published in the PLoS One journal.

Generosity in human males can be used to display resources and thus can be an indication for females of the relative status of the male. In addition, the male’s ability to share these resources with the female is predictive that he will be a good caretaker of her and her offspring.