When You’re Better Than The Guy Who Dumped You.

“Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac.” I’d like to pretend that I’m wildly smart and that I learned this from having studied one of the world’s greatest philosophers. But I’d be lying. I know this because it’s a line from a Madonna song. I have not studied Socrates, but I know my Madge.

I don’t know why human beings are so drawn to things that reject them. Animals don’t even bother obsessing over stuff that they can’t have. It’s basic human instinct to want things you aren’t supposed to want. And the guaranteed way to make someone want something is to deny them that. If you’ve ever experienced a preacher’s kid’s Freshman year away at college, exposed freely and suddenly to things like booze and sex, then you know exactly what I mean.

Rejection is a vicious thing that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I often think that the reason I never got into politics wasn’t my seedy past or lack of ambition, but my overwhelming disdain of rejection. I avoid it all costs and always have. A guy in a bar has to practically be reciting a poem about me and giving me access to his credit cards before I’ll safely assume that he’s looking at me. I don’t like rejection, and if I even slightly detect its possibility, I turn and walk away.

But rejection, like most horrible things in life, is unavoidable, no matter how masterfully you try to avoid it. Stand-alone rejection is bad, but a drop of lemon juice on the paper cut that is rejection is being rejected by someone that you would never in a million years expect to be rejected by. Once, when I was about 23, I asked a less than attractive guy in a bar if I could borrow his lighter. His response? “Not interested.” I was dumbfounded as he walked away, having been sucker-punched by rejection. This happened to me again very recently when I was dumped by someone that, by all definition, wasn’t playing at my level.

How I got myself into a situation where I was dating someone considerably a league or two beneath me is similar to a conversation I recently had with my friend Annemarie about pink eye.

“Maybe you have pink eye,” she said when I told her about my right eye being red and swollen for a few days.

“How do you get pink eye?” I asked?

“Fecal matter.”

“Yours or someone else’s?”

“Does it matter?!?!”

It doesn’t matter how I wound up there, but I was. I was totally into a guy who, in my normal universe, I would’ve been the one handing out the walking papers. Granted, I’m no prize goose. But I know enough about myself, my life, and the things that I can offer someone to know what’s marketable and what’s not. I’ve been rejected before, but normally when that happens the issue is more of an understanding than a sadness. “Yea. You’re right, you probably can do better.”

I spent a longer amount of time trying to bounce back from this having had happened than my normal pace, and I couldn’t seem to figure out why. I had dumped (and been dumped by) cuter, funnier, richer, and smarter men and was always fully recovered in time for the next big party. I’d convinced myself that I’d fallen in love. But my friends convinced me otherwise.

“You got rejected by someone you’re better than,” was their consensus. But just because something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen, like George Bush being president, it didn’t make it any easier. Along with it came the normal self-doubt, self-hate, and pure grain misery that comes with being dumped by someone that by all definition is entitled to do so. I guess it boils down to another basic human reaction. Simply put, no one likes being told “no.”

You can’t dodge rejection. You can’t bob and weave through life hoping to miss that punch. So I took one on the nose this time? I’ll survive. I’ll live to date someone else. And even though it’s impossible to know whether I’ll get dumped again or if he’ll dump me, you can guarantee that either way, he’ll be a higher quality ex-boyfriend than this last one.