No one likes rejection.

No one likes to open up, to show vulnerability, to shed their protective emotional armor to express themselves or tell someone how they feel…only to find out their feelings are one-sided and unreciprocated.

It’s not even a matter so much of rejection because we all know that not everyone is required to love us. We all know that there are no guarantees in love, that the only guarantee is what we put into it.

The feeling of not being chosen by someone or something you want hurts our hearts, it wounds our egos, it makes us doubt that we are desirable at all, whether it be for a job, a sorority or a boy. But why? Imagine a world where everyone showed interest in everyone. Where is the individuality and the uniqueness of relationships? It would be nonexistent. The concepts of attraction, desire, and love would literally be nothing special.

Not being chosen hurts. Especially when you’re not chosen by someone or something you chose, something you saw a future in, someone with whom you believed to have a really strong connection.

But what’s worse than not being chosen, is not being chosen because they chose someone else. And that opens up a whole new world of hurt and doubt. That is something that no matter how confident I am, or how hard I constantly work towards self-love, someone else being chosen over me makes me doubt so much about myself. It makes me doubt everything I know. It makes me doubt my appearance, my personality, my humor, my intellect and if sometimes I cross the line a little too far. It makes me overanalyze just how we’re being judged. It makes me doubt my judgment, the way I understand situations, and how I pride myself on reading people, on being a good judge of character.

And this is where we struggle. We struggle with the unknown. We struggle with the why. We struggle with the unexplainable. With the fact that no matter how much we think we know, how intuitive we think we are, we struggle because there is always the chance that we can be blindsided.

Because at the end of the day, no matter how wise we believe ourselves to be or how much we think we know about relationships, we will never have any idea when it comes to why people make the choices they make. We will never really know or understand why they don’t choose us even after we’ve given so much of ourselves to them. But maybe we’re not supposed to know these things. Maybe we’re supposed to just take them as learning experiences and life lessons whose purpose is to help us grow, love ourselves, and not base our worth on whether or not people choose us.

So let’s try harder to let go of the burning desire to know why. Let’s try to let go of what is not meant to be.

And let’s really try to learn to give more importance to what really matters here: when it comes to choosing you, it really shouldn’t matter if they don’t. It should only matter that you do.