The Game Never Ends: Why Rejection Is (Almost) Always Temporary

Imagine the following scenario: you’ve been seeing this girl, and you start to catch feelings.
You invite her to meet your parents, spend every free minute you can with her, and even cook for her even though you don’t have a clue what you’re doing in front of a stove.
You know it’s the wrong move and you’re developing what will soon be a nasty case of oneitis, but you keep doing more and more because you think this girl isn’t like the rest.
You’ve decided that she is your ideal woman and that girls like her are the reason you got into game in the first place.
Then it happens: she asks to meet you one day and tells you she’s no longer into it. She says she isn’t looking for what you’re looking for and that things got too serious too fast.
She offers friendship, but in a way, that feels worse.
In your mind, she can only fill one role, and whether or not she is the girl you believe her to be, it’s hard to place her in any other position in your life other than a romantic one.
At this point, you are devastated. You start writing existential poetry and start listening to The Cure.
It affects your work, your appetite, your motivation in the gym, and while you know that going out and meeting a new girl is the answer, your pick up attempts are try hard, and validation-seeking.
When you go out now, all of your approaches come from a place of wanting to fill the void your old girl left and the new girls you talk to pick up on it, leaving them uninterested.
Eventually, you’ll pull yourself together, but things don’t feel the same.
You feel like you’re starting from zero again, and have to build up to the skill level you were at when you first met her.
It takes time, but eventually you get there, but all the while, the new girls you meet don’t seem to measure up even though they’re fun for the time being.
This is not an article about whether or not there is such a thing as “the one.” There probably isn’t, but that’s not the point.
The point of this piece is to highlight the idea that the game never ends. Being rejected now does not mean that the dance with that particular girl is over.
Chances are she liked you, but something you did turned her off enough to want to end things.
Maybe it was your job, or the fact that you still live with your parents, or the fact that you like to dress up like a Jedi and make Star Wars fan films to put on the internet.
Whatever the case may be, she’s essentially telling you, “Right now, I’m just not feeling it.”
The wrong move is to let yourself be devastated and assume that there is no way to salvage what you and this particular girl had.
Life is long. Very long, and people inevitably change.
You will too, and hopefully, it’s for the better. We as men shouldn’t dwell on a breakup because it will only make us feel worse and bar us from reaching a new level of success in our lives.
What we should do is use the break up as a reason to better ourselves.
We can take it in stride without starting to believe that we aren’t worth a girl’s time.
Just because the one you really like dumped you, doesn’t mean that you’re worthless to other girls. Go out and sharpen your pick up skills as best as you can.
It may be months or even years but it is always possible to re-game a girl who rejected you, as long as you’ve made noticeable changes in your life.
If you try the same stuff that made her kick you to the curb in the first place, you won’t get very far. The point is, the game never ends.
The girl who broke up with you may see you a year later, and think to herself, “Shit, why did I ever dump that guy?”
It can and does happen, and will put you in a position to decide whether or not you want to pick things up where they left off.
The game only really truly ends with a particular girl if you decide to seriously date or marry a different one.
It’s going to be a tough sell to a girl, even if you’ve made a lot of positive changes in your life, to come back if you have a wife and kids.
But if you remain single, and keep becoming the best version of yourself possible, there is always a chance that the process of gaming her will begin again.
Hopefully, you won’t live in the past, and won’t feel compelled to get her back once enough time has passed.
The healthiest thing to do is to go out and sleep with four or five new girls who are as different as possible from the one you just broke up with.
It may seem a little bit like validation-seeking behavior, but it will serve as a reminder that even though things may resume at some point in the future, there are still lots of other awesome girls on the planet.
The feeling you had when you thought the girl you were seeing was the one, is replicable. You can feel it again for a new girl, if you just allow yourself to do so.
Think of it this way; before you met her you were strangers, and right now, every new girl is a stranger just like she was, so there’s no reason you can’t recreate that spark with someone new.
Who knows?
If you really start killing it, and within a year you’re more confident, more realistic about relationships and have made serious changes in your life, you may find that your tastes have changed in both life and with women.
You may still want to re-game that ex, but you may think twice and find someone even better.