As a Brit living in a foreign city I often get potential dates telling me “ooh you are English, you must be quite the gentleman.”
I’ve never actually considered myself to be especially gentlemanly when it comes to dating.
In fact one of my favorite lines is to tell them that in fact I am only partially a gentleman.
But then I discovered first hand the other day how ugly some guys’ reaction to being rejected can be.
And I realized that perhaps I am indeed a gentleman by comparison.
An ungentlemanly attitude to rejection
I was having a drink with an acquaintance who occasionally and not particularly successfully peruses the dating apps.
He was telling me that a woman who he had been on one date with had been stringing him along.
I could hear the anger and hurt in his voice as he described it to me over a beer.
Apparently he had held out high hopes that they would meet again.
She had reportedly agreed.
But she had several times cancelled the plans.
The last time it had happened my acquaintance had even offered to meet her at 11pm.
There’s not a lot you can do at 11 pm apart from the obvious so perhaps he had in mind the “quick shag” option.
When she rejected that charming proposal he finally lost patience.
My acquaintance’s ugly proposal
“I’ll tell you what you can do at 11pm,” he messaged her. “Suck my dick!”
The conversation was interrupted by a momentary clang. It was my jaw hitting the pavement.
In terms of gentlemanliness, by comparison I am the love child of David Nevin and Clark Gable, wearing a tuxedo and cummerbund and carrying a gold cigarette case.
“You didn’t say that. You really didn’t?” I said.
Normally when I’m meeting up with friends or acquaintances and they’re telling me about something bad that happened to them I try to be empathetic and see it from their point of view.
But this was wrong on so many levels.
Trying to justify the unjustifiable
His posture went defensive as he sensed my disapproval.
“So? If she’d treated me with a bit of respect there wouldn’t have been any need to talk that way to her. Would there?”
I don’t agree. There is never a justification for being rude or harsh when someone rejects us – unless they are being very rude or aggressive themselves. And even then it is better to remain polite.
Messing us around a little bit while someone makes up their mind is inconvenient to us but does not count as rudeness or aggression.
I could tell he felt uncomfortable about what he’d said even though he was defending it.
And a bit of background here. This guy has a good side – I’ve seen him perform selfless actions to help others.
Why it is that romance and especially rejection sometimes brings out the worst in otherwise good people?
Is it because there’s so much at stake?
Ugly parting comments wound the commenter rather than recipient
In the end I think the person that snaps at someone who has rejected them is only hurting themselves.
Any of us who have been on the receiving end of such treatment instinctively know that the person trying to insult us has failed to hide how much we have hurt them.
And we also have the sensation of having dodged a bullet.
There’s a popular phrase in self-help manuals at the moment which is fake it until you make it.
It’s the idea that if we act in a certain way eventually our feelings will follow suit and we will start to genuinely live up to the new image we have created for ourselves.
Even if you feel hurt, if you act in a generous conciliatory fashion I believe there’s a payoff in it for you.
Perhaps you even end up becoming a more generous and conciliatory person.
And then you really will start to attract the partner that you are looking for.
By Max
