Feeling Rejected by Your Partner? It Might Be All in Your Head.
How often do we perceive rejection that isn't there?
Rejection sucks.
We don’t talk enough about how rejection is one of the most painful things you can endure. Social rejection of any kind, be it romantic, familial, or even business, activates the same brain pathways responsible for sensing physical pain.
fMRI experiments have confirmed this.
Even the degree of perceived social rejection is detectable through neuroimaging. When subjects report feeling more rejected by their peers, their brains light up like the bright lights of Hollywood.
Although we feel pain from every rejection, science has long observed what most of us intuitively know — rejections from those closest to us sting the worst.
There is no repudiation quite like romantic rejection.
Rejection leads to poorer mental health outcomes, feelings of devastation, humiliation, and emotional distress in almost all of us. When you mix all of these things with the uncomfortableness of navigating the minefield of our sex lives, you cook up a recipe for disaster when people don’t know how to communicate effectively.
The Trap of Silence
I know it sounds like a platitude, but learning how to communicate effectively with your partner impacts so much more than meets the eye.
From the time we’re small children, sex is defined by its inhibition. It’s something you have to keep hidden from society. It’s something you can’t talk about openly.
Compounding this problem is that our sexual preferences, orientations, and desires all come together like snowflakes —we’re all unique.
Have you ever been trapped in the prison of silence, where you were intimately involved with someone but felt such tremendous difficulty discussing your wants, needs, and desires?
Believe it or not, this is the norm. Most people are terrible at sexual communication, surely an outgrowth of cultures that insist on using shame as a tool to control sexuality.
Research has shown that people have very different conversation styles regarding sex and non-sexual things. We perceive sexual conversations more as threats, partly because our sex lives are the most intimate aspects of our internal worlds.
We have more anxiety before sexual conversations, undoubtedly stemming from the coupling of vulnerability with the heightened risk of perceived rejection.
We feel especially vulnerable confessing our deepest, darkest desires, needs, and wants — our most intimate selves — and thus, we risk greater rejection, and the potential for a painful experience goes up.
But how accurate are we at gauging rejection?
Perceptions of Romantic Rejection
A 2022 study by Kiersten Dobson et al. wanted to test our perceptions of romantic rejection. They drew upon preexisting research that covered rejection in romantic relationships.
On average, couples in relationships made sexual passes at their partner between three and four times per week. Those advances were accepted one to two times per week, on average.
The study recruited 213 couples and had them engage in two different studies. Ninety-eight couples of various sexual orientations participated in Study 1, which sought to detect how accurate we were at gauging sexual rejection from our partner.
Remember, many sexual advances are non-verbal, which leaves a lot more room for error than verbal communication does.
Participants had to complete a survey every day for 28 days, where they journaled their perceptions of their partner’s romantic interest and their own, jotting down who was more in the mood for sex on a 1–7 scale.
The other 115 couples participated in Study 2, where they had to jot down a binary answer, yes or no, while they tracked their perceptions of being rejected by their partners.
The results were tallied up and branched into four categories:
Correct rejections: both partners agreed that no rejection took place.
Hits: someone made an advance and was rejected.
False alarms: when someone reported being rejected, but their partner did not note that they had rejected them.
Misses: these were the days when someone didn’t feel rejected, but their partner reported feeling like they had rejected them.
You can take a deep breath and let out a sigh of relief. The most frequent type of encounter reported was correct rejections — where no rejection took place (86.2%).
But the most interesting part is that false alarms happened more frequently than both “hits” and “misses,” meaning people more often felt like they were being rejected than was happening.
Considering it’s so difficult for so many people just to come out and say what they want, and it’s nearly impossible for many people out there to come right out and ask for sex, a lot of silent communication occurs. This communication is sometimes misinterpreted.
Since I know you’re dying to ask, there was a disparity between the genders. While both men and women report feeling rejected, women tallied more “correct rejections,” days when no rejection took place, while men tallied more “hits” and perceived having their sexual advances turned down more often.
While most of the time, no rejection took place between couples, there was a systematic overestimation of rejection between the couples.
A lot of people perceived rejection that wasn’t happening.
Perceived Rejection Harms Relationships
Here’s where it gets fascinating. Researchers also had the couples report on their relationship quality and linked relationship satisfaction to perceived rejection.
This isn’t to say that real rejection doesn’t happen. It does, and dead bedrooms are a testament to that unfortunate fact.
But it’s essential to note that we’re inclined to overestimate the amount of rejection our partners are dishing out. This overestimation bias can cause demonstrable harm in our romantic relationships, and it’s no wonder why.
When we constantly feel like our partners are shunning us, rejecting our sexual advances, or ignoring our sexual needs, even when it’s not true, it feels like our attempts at communicating intimacy and love are being rejected.
Most of us use sex to communicate our love and attraction for our partners, and when this process is disrupted, the unbearable feelings of rejection sink in. We feel stressed, sad, and sometimes even worthless if the problem persists long enough.
But sometimes, it’s all in our heads.
The major takeaway is this: it’s incredibly worthwhile to learn the skills necessary to have healthy sexual dialogues with our partners. We were taught from a young age not to discuss sex with people, not to expose our vulnerabilities to others, and to keep our kinks to ourselves; but as adults, this can cause havoc in the relationships we build with those closest to us.