Lauren Howe

We found in one study, we kind of varied the intensity of the relationship related to the rejection, right?

Like we were kind of curious if you're rejected by someone who's like kind of a stranger, you know, maybe someone who you meet on online dating who just ghosts you, stops texting you back versus, you know, being broken up with a long-term relationship.

We thought that one of those was going to maybe have a stronger relationship.

Effect on people who were most at risk of being adversely affected by rejection.

Interestingly, though, we actually didn't find that in the research.

We found that even this like smaller kind of rejection was meaningful for people who tended to kind of carry the pain of rejection with them.

And so I think that, you know, even being rejected in this online context where it's like someone just stops talking to you can still be kind of like symbolic rejection that can be troubling for some people where it's like, well, wait a second, like this person barely knows me and still they thought like I'm just not worth continuing to talk to.

So I kind of question whether online dating actually helps those who are most scared of rejection to avoid it or whether it might actually exacerbate the problem that they're hoping to avoid in some way.

I think there's a lot of interesting strategies therapists will use for helping people to cope with rejection, just to put yourself out there and get used to dealing with circumstances where you might worry about being rejected to realize, like, actually, it's generally not that bad.

A friend in grad school was

going through some of this kind of coaching and one of the sort of assignments that was given for coping with rejection was like hey you know go out to a coffee shop and compliment someone on something that you honestly think is like nice about them like you like you know the watch that they're wearing um or you like the book that they're reading just say that and that's something that might seem very scary when you're thinking about it abstractly to go up to a stranger and compliment them

But, you know, probably that person is going to just answer your question, maybe like thank you and go on to have a nice day.

Even if like the worst case happens and the person was totally weirded out, what happens?

You just leave the coffee shop, you walk away and you go about the rest of your day.

So I think realizing that rejection doesn't have to be scary and can just be, you know, a random thing that happened can help to overcome some of the fear.