Oh hey everybody. This week on Ask Cristen I'm talking about rejection so in the spirit
of solidarity I wanted to share with you my very first experience of romantic rejection.
It happened in kindergarten. A girl named Jenny and I had a mutual crush on the same
guy. His name was Charlie. He had blond hair and freckles and little gaps in his teeth
and I thought he was so cute. And he picked Jenny.
So this week's Ask Cristen question is a collective effort coming from questions I've gotten from
you all, questions I have myself and things happening on the internet. First one of your
questions. Cutiepie316289 wants to know, 'I have an old friend starting to be interested
in meeting up again. He's a cool guy and I enjoy his company but there are a few personality
and interest conflicts, not to mention I feel no chemistry around him. Should I just tell
him up front that I'm not interested romatically but would still want to hang out? What if
he never had those feelings for me in the first place and I misread signals and I end
up looking like an A-hole?' I get questions like this pretty routinely especially from
girls who want to know the best way to reject guys essentially while still preserving their
feelings. Most of us don't want to be jerks, we don't like knowing that we're going to
hurt somebody's feelings. On the other side of the coin as I've been on as well, it feels
really bad for someone to say hey you know what you're being really vulnerable right
now and showing me these tender parts of yourself but it's not going to happen. One study that
I was looking at found that unrequited love is four times as common for us to individually
experience as mutual love. Another study that I was looking at found that guys are not only
likelier to experience unrequited love versus mutual love or attraction, they're also likelier
to experience unrequited love or attraction compared to women. But I do think a lot of
that has to do with these gender roles of masculine as the pursuer and feminine as the
pursued. To make things even more potentially distressing for guys in addition to that expectation
of men as the pursuers, there is the further step of pursuers and obtainers of sexual access
to women. Not only does that relate to the sexual double standard but also these reductive
and frankly harmful assumptions that guys want to have sex all the time with whomever.
All of this starts to add up to this thing that sociologists refer to as the masculinity
threat. Essentially refers to a sense of being unable to meet up to societal expectations
of what a man should be and so your identity as a male, as being masculine becomes threatened.
Studies have found that in response to a masculinity threat men over-compensate, confirmed with
research of doing things like over-estimating one's height, of over-estimating one's physical
strength, inflating the number of past sexual partners, espousing aggression and even possibly
yes, violence. Now listen, women do similar kinds of things, femininity threats exist,
I'm just focusing on the masculine construct today so please don't start commenting about
how oh, it's not just men who are at fault. Masculinity threat I think is very much triggered
by romantic rejection because it hits at that whole thing of pursuit and sexual access.
Really what we're looking at when we start peeling away these layers are the manifestations
of these gender roles that we have and that I talk about all the time and how they manifest
and also interact today with social media. One thing that I think social media has facilitated
is the ability to unleash whatever vitriol you might have against someone who has said
no thanks I don't want to couple up with you to not just that person, but now to the entire
internet. As with the worst case scenario of this whole thing of rejection gone wrong
that blew up between Buzzfeed writer Grace Spelman and man about the internet and Harry
Potter fandom Benjamin Schoen. Schoen started contacting Spelman first on Twitter and then
on Facebook and he made his attraction to her immediately apparent. She immediately
responded letting him know that she has a boyfriend and isn't interested and he responded
with anger. This whole situation led New York Magazine writer Jessica Roy to comment, 'The
whole exchange is pretty emblematic of the inherent difficulties of rejecting men, both
online and off. Woman are frequently made to toe a line between being polite enough
not to set off a suitor, but not so polite that their manners are interpreted as flirting.'
Exactly the quandry Cutiepie316289 found herself in, wanting to be honest with this guy but
being worried that she was going to end up looking like a jerk and hurting his feelings.
My go-to advice is be honest. That means accepting before you do this that you might be losing
a friend. It requires honestly not only to that other person but more importantly first
to yourself. And this is the part of the video where I say guys and anyone who is being rejected
but statistically guys, you get a lot of it and that probably super duper sucks but please,
please, please, please, please, please, please, learn how to take no for an answer. There
is this messed up trope in so many movies of the guy who doesn't take no for an answer
and gets rewarded for it. He's always the underdog, she always passes him over for the
handsomer rich guy, the popular guy but in the end you show up at her house unannounced,
you hold up that boombox and you know what? She's going to ride off in your Volkswagon
Rabbit. And this Hollywood underdog trope even though yes it did launch the career of
John Cusack who is one of my favorite actors has done a disservice to men and women alike.
Telling men that hey, even if you aren't conventionally attractive or rich or popular, if you pursue
her hard enough and never take no for an answer and really truly believe that you are the
night in shining armor that she needs you will ultimately be rewarded with her. It tells
women you are not people. You are trophies to be won. If trophy woman you put up enough
of a fight that you aren't ultimately won as compensation you owe that other person
an explanation as to why he's not entitled to you. So while the best case scenario when
it comes to rejection is to be forthright, honest and do it sooner rather than later,
the flipside of that, if you're on the receiving end of rejection, don't punish the other person
for making that choice. In rejecting that choice and demanding an explanation and in
not accepting that explanation a lot of times, you're denying that person agency and if the
tables were turned you probably would probably not appreciate that either. Broadly speaking
the less masculine value we can assign to this stuff about sexual prowess and access
and pursuit, probably the better. A lot of times too the conversations about rejection
happen in the aftermath of rejection so let's talk about it now, what do you think about
all of this stuff, is this something that you've experienced on either end? Let me know
in the comments below. And thanks to everybody who watched and commented on last week's Ask
Cristen video 'Is interracial dating taboo?' Unfortunately a lot of you who are in interracial
relationships said yeah. Hcheyne said, 'Yes this is still an issue in the UK. I am black
and have a white wife. I have been stopped while driving twice this year, where the police
have separated us both then asked her if she is safe. Neither of us have any criminal record,
we don't live in a high crime area and both of us are 40 something professionals. For
all the doubters out there I doubt even you could come up with a likely explanation other
than racism.' CK Nail Designs said, 'I'm in North Carolina and my husband is black. We
get stereotyped all the time. The looks and comments we get from both races are ridiculously
ignorant, especially when we have his daughters with us whom are not biracial'. Now it's time
everybody to ask me your questions so I can give you some answers.