Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

It sort of kills him, but he knows his rejector was only trying to spare his feelings, since men often react badly to “hard rejection.” So he validates her condolences and communicates them back until she’s convinced he’ll be fine. “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” he says, shaking his fists toward the ceiling, and they laugh together, and hug, and he walks back to his dorm at sunrise.

He stews at the one-sided familiarity of the situation: once again, he’s got to be the one who accepts, forgives, tolerates, pretends not to be wounded, pretends he has stopped hoping—all this sapping emotional labor to preserve his dignity and assuage her guilt, and also because he doesn’t want to spoil his chances of dating her in the future, since it’s her prerogative, after all, to change her mind.

he composes a long postmortem email, reconstructing everything that happened from the beginning, assuring her that he knew nobody was to blame for a lack of attraction, and that if it isn’t clear, yes, he is interested in her, but he’s not one of those fake-feminist guys who snubs any woman he can’t fuck, so, sorry if this is completely graceless and exhausting, by no means is he making his embarrassment her problem, he just wants to get everything out in the open. He hits send. An hour later he sends a second email: Just out of curiosity, could she say a little about why she rejected him? It’d be really helpful for him. Is it because he’s narrow-shouldered? Is that a dealbreaker for her? Because he can’t help that, as she knows. Or is it a specific thing he did or said, because if so, they could discuss that, clear up any miscommunication. Anyway, he’ll be fine, hopes everything’s cool—and if she ever changes her mind, he’ll be around!

Yikes...

Not wanting to seem fragile or impugn their judgment or center the conversation on himself, he says, “Ugh, yeah, we’re total dogshit,” and files this incident away in a thickening dossier of unfairness, a piece of insurance he will be able to use as evidence of their own imperfect principles if they ever try to call him out in the future. Privately, too, he reasons that if they’re going to keep dating assholes, what do they expect.

“See, you’re moving the goalposts, like always,” his QPOC friend replies. “It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won’t admit how strongly you invite it.”

so women either reject you or they don’t act 100% the way you want them to (the term for that is “slavery”). bottom line is nobody’s hurting or stealing anything from you. yall just hitched your psychosexual angst to your self-worth and it’s women’s fault somehow. however unfair you think it is, you’re MAKING IT WORSE.

Weeks later, after some false starts, he is standing in the vestibule of his former favorite restaurant when a woman enters behind him, a short young twentysomething in a yellow smock with little pin-tucked ruffles, her collarbones lightly pied by sunburn. He stands aside to hold the door for her, and she thanks him. In spite of his resolve, he smiles back and nods courteously at this small final vindication, before pulling on his ski mask, shrugging the backpack from his narrow shoulders, and following her in.

By the time Kant types in Cody’s email address, his blood sugar is nil, and the hour late enough that he does not notice the tremble of his ring finger striking the Tab key, which causes his email app to autocomplete the letters co to Coming Out, the mailing list he’d compiled almost two years ago, before he sends it.

It was always this way with the white libs, their anxieties of privilege manifesting as showy accommodation, or useless lipchewing over having caused offense, or aggressive confrontation on behalf of an absent third party, the only balm for which is unconditional admiration and approval.

when a larger verified account, @lemondroppe, an undergrad at UVA best known for long review threads of YA literature (and specifically the opinion that teenagers, not adults, should be in charge of publishing YA) quote-tweeted it: this is disgusting. timothee is a child!! leave him out of your vile fantasies 55358566205535856620 I s2g some of y’all can’t consume any media without sexualizing it and it shows 5535856610 After this hit the mainstream, it was pointed out that Timothée Chalamet was 21 years old during the theatrical release of Call Me by Your Name. @lemondroppe argued that people were responding to the fictional 17-year-old character Elio he played in Guadagnino’s film, not the actor playing him, and that regardless of Chalamet’s legal age, many people expressing attraction for him were in their thirties, which

even if it were the real life timothee, his features are VERY clearly minor-coded and openly expressing your attraction for him is mindblowingly weird and not even subtle?? we see u pedos 5535856784 This take was widely circulated for about a day, and was largely dismissed as a case of Tumblr-addled moral panic, until another user, @PlatoFunFactory, discovered on @lemondroppe’s public Facebook feed—revealing in the process that @lemondroppe was not a college undergrad but a 35-year-old Russian-American woman working for the Forest Service in Tupelo,

It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.