Being turned away after approaching someone you like

How long does the sadness from rejection usually last?

Among the people here it ran from a single night to years, and the length had less to do with how harsh the refusal was than with what the person concluded from it. The ones who came out of it fastest treated the encounter as a thing that had happened rather than a verdict, replayed it hard for about a week, and then let it close by accepting that the possibility had not been theirs to have.

The ones still inside it years later had turned the refusal into a standing fact about themselves, that something in them is what repels people, and from inside that reading no amount of time passing does anything, because every new attempt is read as further proof.

Where it did finally shift for someone in the long version, it shifted by their revisiting the old attempts and seeing that some of them had run into walls that were never about their worth at all.

Ember’s view. The sadness is not really the thing that lasts; what lasts is the sentence you wrote about yourself the night it happened. The people here who were still hurting years on were not grieving a particular person, they were defending a conclusion, and the ones who stopped hurting had stopped believing the conclusion rather than waiting out the feeling.

Go back over the attempts you already count as failures and ask of each one what actually blocked it, since some of them will turn out to have hit something outside you entirely. That rereading cost the people here the comfort of a single explanation, and it left them holding both the wish and the fear at once rather than resolving either.

Do people ever get an explanation for being turned away?

Mostly not, and the people here who did get one found it did not do the work they expected. Some got nothing at all: no look, no word, just someone walking away, and years later they still had no idea what it meant.

Others did get a reason stated plainly, either a prior involvement or a condition they could not change, and the reason did not close anything; in one case the regret got worse after hearing it, and in another it hardened into a vow to stop trying altogether. What actually settled things for the ones who settled was not information but a decision to stop treating the moment as a verdict on themselves, arrived at over weeks and sometimes years.

Ember’s view. The explanation you want is standing in for something else: the assurance that it was not about who you are. The people here who got explanations learned that a reason can be true and still tell you nothing about whether you are worth wanting, and the people who got silence eventually had to decide that question themselves anyway. So the fork is not whether you ever find out why, it is whether you let the absence of a reason become a verdict, and the ones who moved on were the ones who refused to read it as one.

If you are still turning it over, try naming out loud what you would believe if you did get the reason you want, and then notice you can simply decide that now, as the people here did, over weeks rather than in a night.

How do people decide whether to try approaching someone again?

Among the people here, the decision came less from weighing odds and more from what they concluded the turning-away meant about them. The ones who could read it as circumstance rather than verdict found their way back to trying, sometimes within a week, sometimes after saying out loud that the no had been about something other than their worth.

The ones who read it as confirmation of something permanent about themselves either declared they were done while still quietly wanting the same life as before, or kept going through the motions without any sense that it could change. What stayed unresolved for several of them was not whether to try again but why they had or hadn't moved when they did, and that question outlasted the encounter itself by years.

Ember’s view. The question of whether to try again is usually standing in for a different question: what you have decided the last refusal proved. The people here who kept moving were not braver, they had simply landed on an explanation that left room for a next time, and the people who stalled had landed on one that didn't.

Before deciding whether to approach anyone again, try putting into words the sentence you have been carrying about why the last one walked away, and notice whether it is a sentence about that moment or about your whole life. For the people here who did something like this, it cost them the comfort of a settled verdict and left them unsure again.