Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Rejection points you to your people
Rejection will happen while making friends, and there is no sugarcoating it. It doesn't mean a person is bad or broken, and the nervous system has to learn that.
Liking someone who seems unique and chasing them is only half of a friendship. If they aren't pursuing in return, that is information. The rejection marks a mismatch: that person isn't aligned with you, and you aren't aligned with them.
Seen that way, rejection frees up attention for people who actually want the relationship. Worrying about being turned down can stop someone from initiating contact or deepening a friendship, and that worry costs more than the rejection itself would.
Why do people overestimate how bad rejection feels?
Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson have studied how people predict their own future feelings, a field called affective forecasting. Across many studies, people overestimated how intense and how long-lasting their emotional reactions to events would be, a pattern called the impact bias. Gilbert and colleagues proposed that people underestimate how quickly their psychological defenses help them make sense of bad events, a process they call immune neglect when it goes unnoticed. The idea was laid out in a 1998 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Why does believing someone likes you matter?
In 1986, Rebecca Curtis and Kim Miller told some people in pairs that their partner liked them and told others that their partner did not. Those who believed they were liked behaved more warmly, and their partners ended up liking them more. The result is a self-fulfilling pattern in which expected liking produces real liking. The study appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Why do people end up friends with similar people?
Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James Cook reviewed the evidence for homophily, the tendency of people to form ties with similar others, in a 2001 paper in the Annual Review of Sociology. The pattern holds across race, age, religion, education, and occupation. Similarity is generally strongest in the closest ties. The paper is titled Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.
More from This Feels Familiar with Minaa B.
