As a child, most of you more than likely experienced not being chosen. The politics of the playground can be cruel. Being chosen anything but first for a team feels deflating, at least it did for me, as I suspect it did for a lot of you. But it is inevitable for most. Even Michael Jordan didn’t make his varsity team on the first try.
Those same dynamics play out in relationships. We will be chosen by some perspective partners, and not chosen by others. I am witnessing my teenagers playing this out regularly. It seems almost like a monthly occurrence of one or the other of my teenage sons bobbing rejecting or being rejected. It’s a bit dizzying.
When I was young I remember a situation where my divorced father invited myself and my siblings out to dinner with his new wife and her son. The son was so excited about a football he had received as a gift from my father. The four of us felt such envy. Despite a weekly scheduled visit, we didn’t see my father very much when we were young, as he regularly didn’t show up for these visits. I remember this like it was yesterday instead of 43 years ago. It felt like we were not being chosen by my father, and this new “son” was.
Very recently in my life, despite being told that I was “chosen” by my partner of 20 years regularly, a day came when I was told by her that I was not her choice anymore and that another had taken my place. To say it was a surprise is selling it way short. It felt like a crack in my world.
Choosing to spend time with someone, to love someone, to team up with someone, or to partner with someone is one of the deeper decisions we all get to make. We trust that the choice will be reciprocated. The journey I have been on recently has forced me to step back to understand what not being chosen means. Initially, there is the shot to the ego, it sucks. Most make it about themselves and not the “rejector.” In my story, with time and therapy, I realized that it had nothing to do with me. And with even more time, I came to find out what a gift it was to not be chosen.
Whether it’s not being chosen for a role, a team, or a relationship, there is a grieving period that comes with that feeling of rejection. Either it’s a quick moment, perhaps just cussing to yourself, or it’s a couple of months of hiding in the bed eating popcorn, and watching your favorite sappy movie. At some point, you get to a place where you realize that as painful as it is, you will survive, and, you will be gifted with knowledge that you can survive not being chosen in the future. You get to work on yourself to be better about choosing the situations and people that you want to be chosen by. You get to rest with the truth that the majority of the time, your not being chosen is about the person doing the choosing, not about you. Either that person wasn’t equipped to ever see you for the brilliant person you are, or something happened within that person along the way to not allow them to see the magic of who you are anymore.
As a father, this has been one of the more difficult lessons to teach to my children. As I watch them navigate relationship dynamics, the main message that I convey is that if you think you need to end a relationship, do it with kindness and honesty. And yes it will be hard. But since you are in a position of not choosing the person anymore, the gift you can give is integrity. Time will take care of the rest. They, like us, will realize, we got this, and we are magnificent.
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