There’s A Difference Between People Who Reject You And People Who Are Actually Toxic

Not everyone you are incompatible with is toxic.

Not everyone who breaks up with you is a piece of garbage.

Not everyone who does not want a relationship with you is a bad person.

There is a difference between people who reject you and people who are actually toxic to you, and understanding this is will help you heal so much.

A toxic person is someone who is so unaccountable for their actions that their choices, behaviors and words damage your life in a significant way.

To a degree, you must permit a person’s toxicity for it to impact you. In many cases, it’s an issue of codependency more than one person just dumping their barrage of nonsense onto you. Toxic people often become toxic because those they are toxic towards consent to it by allowing their behavior, and coming back for more.

This happens more than you think, and it seems to happen most especially with people who are once very hungry for the approval of someone who they at once have declared a total piece of crap.

Look, there’s a really grown up thing you need to learn to make it in this world, and it is this:

Not everyone who rejects you is a bad person.

This is true even though some of them genuinely may be. This is true even though some of them may actually, truly be toxic to you. This is true even if you have had a sordid history of dating sociopaths, for which I am deeply sorry.

But if every single person you date rejects you and then you declare them garbage, eventually, you have to see the common denominator.

Are you really choosing to be in relationships with exclusively toxic people? Or are you using this as an excuse to make it seem like you didn’t care about your heart being broken anyway?

It is probably just a self-defense mechanism, one that hurts you more in the end than anyone else. When someone you want does not want you, it is easier, albeit more immature, to just assume they are wholly irredeemable.

But this is not how love works.

Romantic relationships are not a competitive sport wherein those who are the most appealing are partnered up first and everyone else has to fend for the scraps. It does not work that way. Look around you, at the people who have found love. It is not a measure of how perfect they are, it is a measure of compatibility. It is a measure of finding your match.

The people who reject you? They are showing you that you are simply mismatched. It does not mean one person is better than another. It does not mean one person is completely bad.

Making people out to be one dimensional like this truly does not serve anyone, least of all you.

When you sum up an entire person by their willingness to be in a relationship with you, you really close yourself off to the type of vulnerability and complexity and thought that real love requires.

Nothing is going to shield you from being rejected, but deciding that anyone who does is wholly bad will ultimately lead you to abstaining from trying altogether.

Rejection is a part of the process. It happens when you’re in love, in tiny, daily ways. It happens in work, in business, with friends.

And yes, it happens when you’re at your most vulnerable — when you’re in love.

But it won’t happen forever.

Everyone gets their heart broken at some point or another, for most its many times throughout their lives. Everyone has their expectations let down, everyone has their hopes dashed. This is an unfortunate part of the process.

If you can learn to see that a good person can not want to be with you as easily as a bad person can, you can start to understand that maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with who they are fundamentally, and maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with who you are fundamentally.

Maybe it was just the wrong person, at the wrong time. Maybe it just wasn’t the best possible relationship you could have found. Maybe you were incompatible in ways that you couldn’t yet see, but you could sense. Maybe you were grasping onto lukewarm love because you are afraid of going through the cycle again.

Maybe the person who rejected you isn’t awful. Maybe they were just simply wrong for you. And maybe, in the end, they were doing you a favor.