12 Signs a Romantic Partner May Reject You

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can talk about the signs that somebody will reject you right I've heard this question word a few different ways like what are the signs I'm about to get dumped other things like this I know this can be a bit of a morbid topic but in romantic relationships rejection happens quite a bit and it's painful for people so it's an important question I'll answer this question by looking at the 12 signs that someone may reject you now in this video I'm not talking about somebody being turned down for a date but rather somebody who's in a relationship where there's some level of investment so maybe dating for a month or more or of course if the couple agrees they're in a long-term relationship like a marriage in relationships rejection is painful and it's a common situation ultimately of course necessary because if nobody rejected anybody else then whatever relationship somebody was involved in first they would just stay in for their whole life so rejection really has to happen it's thought of as unilateral so one person does the rejecting another person is rejected but sometimes people will want to be rejected right so I'll talk about this in a moment how that works now we look at the research literature around rejection we see this term initiator status right so when one person is going to reject another the person who's doing the rejecting is the initiator and the person who's being rejected is the non initiator so what I'm going to do here for this video is going to use kind of a person a person B situation just to be clear about who I'm talking about so person a will be the non initiator so they're the person who's concerned that person be the initiator may be thinking about rejecting them so person a not initiator person B initiator now I mentioned that rejection is more or less necessary at some level if people are going to have romantic relationships but it does come with a cost we know there are negative outcomes associated with being rejected those outcomes include mental illness automobile accidents homicide major depressive disorder substance use a loss of self-esteem sadness anxiety anger loneliness and shame now the problems are not exclusive to person a the non initiator the problems can also occur for person be the one doing the rejecting now there are also some positives associated with rejection we see that it can lead to perceptions of personal growth and positive life change so rejections aren't always a bad thing we see that when somebody's rejected in a romantic situation this may be something that prompts them to seek mental health care like they may go see a counselor and of course as a counselor I've seen this many times and one of the things that really stands out to me about the pain of rejection the way people experience it is that it can last for many years and it can hurt just as much many years later right so time doesn't necessarily heal wounds I've been in a number of situations clinically where I've been listening to somebody kind of talk about the pain of a romantic rejection and I was thinking to myself because the way the person was describing the pain that it must have occurred maybe a week ago or perhaps a month ago but it had to be in that time range and then later on the conversation I find out that the rejection occurred 30 or 40 years ago so again it can really be persistent that pain can really hang on because of the pain associated with rejection a lot of people try to avoid it and it is a hundred percent avoidable right you can avoid the rejection and romantic relationships by not getting involved in romantic relationships but that's not a solution for most people so then we see some kind of other things that people do right like they might leave first so they sense they're going to be rejected so they leave first because that may not be as painful although of course it b we also see people will try to improve the relationship so they sense the rejections coming and they'll try to do more be more engaging communicate more and this can help certainly this can prevent some relationships from failing but sometimes people just aren't compatible right so rejection at least in some cases is inevitable so why does someone reject someone else in the context of romantic relationships why is there a person B out there many of them in fact well we see that the relationship may not be working for them they decide not to invest the effort could be compatibility issues could be that they found somebody better or they believe that there's somebody better out there so they want to disengage from that relationship so they can be kind of available again to engage in other relationships it could be that person B was treated in a way that made them feel unwanted so they struck first I touched on this before not wanting to wait around to find out what happens next a good analogy to this is the idea in an employment situation of a constructive discharge so if there's an employee working for an employer that employer may want that employee to quit so that employer may want the employee to leave but the employer doesn't want to fire them or they're worried about legal liability or something so they make the employee's life difficult right they give them fewer hours to work or an unpleasant work assignment and eventually the employee is the one that rejects the employer the employee quits but of course the employer caused that right so when we see a rejection occur in a romantic relationship we can't really assign blame even though of course we don't necessarily need to assign blame at all because it's a natural part of many relationships but if we were going to assign blame it's not as clear as putting it on the initiator sometimes the non initiator actually does initiate the rejection in a manipulative way sometimes rejections happen because of a mistake so person B is impulsive and they have an error in judgment and they reject person a they might regret it it might be too late to fix it but that could be one of the reasons why the rejection took place and of course I mentioned the manipulation sometimes it's just manipulation and the manipulation is complete person be obtained whatever they wanted to obtain from that relationship so they reject person a so now looking at the 12 signs that somebody may reject you again here I'm looking at some signs emanating from the non initiator and some that of course emanate from the initiator I'm gonna have more signs here toward the initiator but I'll specify which person I'm talking about so it's sign number one I am talking here about the non initiator and this would be low self-esteem in person a so what happens here with person a kind of encouraging a rejection from person B would be that with low self-esteem person a tends to see problems that don't exist they tend to see signs of rejection that don't exist and they start to back away from that relationship they create distance and they weaken the level of attachment right it affects the attachment quality so low self-esteem really can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy now sign number two has to do with the personality of both person a and person B I'll start here with the non initiator so in terms of the characteristics we might see here in person I only use the five factor model of personality theory so this would be openness to experience conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism I remember these through the acronym ocean so the profile again we would typically see or be more likely to see in a non initiator who eventually is rejected would be low openness to experience especially like rigid thinking we see low conscientiousness so impulsive Ness and being disorganized extraversion is not as clear sometimes high extraversion can cause difficulties and sometimes low x-direction cans so I really don't have a clear direction with this one either one can lead to some difficulties being in the middle is probably the most ideal to avoid rejection in terms of agreeableness we see low agreeableness so being antagonistic and having low trust and in terms of neuroticism high neuroticism so again this kind of ties it with the self esteem piece I talked about before if some of these looking at signs and interpreting those signs as dangerous when they're not which is associated with neuroticism that could be a problem so what about person B what would be the personality characteristics we see in the initiator the person who rejects well typically high openness to experience and the facets of the most interest to me would be adventurousness and fantasy so if somebody's really looking for an adventure a lot of times that would happen outside the current relationship and fantasy that's the same thing right so they're fantasizing about somebody else now if they can invest that energy of adventure that drive for adventure and the fantasies into the current partner then that would decrease the chance that they would be the one to reject now in terms of conscientiousness of course low conscientiousness impulsivity would be more associated with rejection here with the initiator extraversion would clearly be more tied to being the one who rejects because people who are extroverted tend to cheat more they tend to be more talkative and they tend to flirt more all these things tied to rejection low agreeableness just like for the non initiator would be a problem being antagonistic now in terms of neuroticism this can get a bit tricky so with high neuroticism somebody would be impulsive emotionally reactive but with the impulsive behavior we would see it's the type of behavior where somebody can't resist temptation that's the type of impulsivity we see with high neuroticism it's different than the disorganized impulsivity we see with low conscientiousness so certainly high neuroticism in that way would be problematic but also low neuroticism could be problematic because with low neuroticism somebody really isn't afraid they're not afraid to lose the relationship they may be cold distant and have a lack of empathy so that could make it easier for somebody to reject somebody else without that empathy component kind of keeping them in check again rejecting becomes fairly easy so moving on the sign number three this one has to do with more complex personality structures so combinations of traits the first one that comes to mind here on their side number three would be narcissism so this would be for the initiator right so narcissism the dark triad in general so we see not just narcissism but also psychopathy and Machiavellianism and the subclinical sadism we see associated with the dark tetrad right that would also lead to somebody being more likely to reject in terms of personality disorders like the official mental disorders and the DSM we see dependent person is order tied to the initiator rejecting and the sounds counterintuitive like if somebody was dependent why would they initiate the dissolution of a relationship but what happens a lot of time is somebody's dependent on somebody else and they're always looking for a better source of support so they find somebody who can support them better and they break off that relationship so that need to have support really outweighs feelings of affection right now of course what some people would dependent personality they latch on to another person and never let go right so it really depends on the manifestation of the disorder other personality sorters paranoid person is Witter if somebody's distrusting and they're accusing people falsely that makes them more likely to reject we see borderline personality now this one is interesting because technically speaking yes somebody with BPD would be prone to reject a lot but because of the idealization devaluation cycle the love-hate cycle they're also going to invite person a back into that relationship so it's rejection acceptance rejection acceptance back and forth so who knows where that relationship is going to end whether it's going to end on a rejection or on an acceptance but technically summative PPD again would tend to reject a lot now I mentioned narcissism before this of course includes narcissistic person is order well you also see the other two person is orders from cluster be associated with rejecting behavior antisocial personality disorder probably due to that lack of empathy and histrionic Personality because that disorder is associated with having a lot of affairs so again if somebody is in a relationship person beats in a relationship and they want to have an affair it makes sense that they would reject person I at some point signed number four is if person B is highly attracted to a characteristic that person a does not have especially if person B develops an obsession around a particular characteristic I've seen a number of characteristics in my clinical experience people obsessed with money so if person a does not have money if person a does not have a body weight that person B wants usually person B is looking for a lower body weight if person a does not have the status like the level of career success sometimes person B wants a different personality in their partner sometimes they want a partner that does not use substances or who does use substances sometimes a criminal record can be problematic they want somebody who doesn't have criminal records especially because that can interfere with employment and a lot of the time what I hear in these situations is that person B is looking for somebody more stable than person a right so stability is a characteristic that people can really take seriously and sometimes become obsessed with sign number five has to do with the opportunity to find alternatives so if person B is exposed to a number of alternative mates especially if it's something that happens on a regular basis that increases the risk of their gonna wander off and of course that results in a rejection eventually now when person be is exposed to alternatives while intoxicated so person B is intoxicated and the alternatives are intoxicated and my experience I found that dramatically increases the risk now there are certain situations where this would be expected like a person B spends a lot of time at a bar but I've also seen this in work settings right and we shouldn't see this in work settings like this is a little disturbing but I have seen a number of work settings where substance use is fairly common and person B so to speak is exposed to a number of other potential mates this I think is one of the really significant risk factors right like combining exposure to alternatives with intoxication this is not a good sign this is something that often would lead to a rejection or at least some sort of problem in that primary relationship if you throw extraversion this same mix which kind of makes sense based on that behavior it's like dumping gasoline on a fire it's really gonna increase that risk even more dramatically side number six has to do with deception so lying prevarication this one's kind of interesting because if somebody has the tendency to lie just by itself that doesn't necessarily mean they're more likely to reject somebody else it's really the link over to the dark triad traits I talked about before narcissism psychopathy and Machiavellianism lying is associated with the dark triad now lying may not be desirable and can cause other problems in relationship and certainly if somebody's lying about contact with alternatives that could be problematic but just looking at lying itself it's not always really clear again that association with the dark triad would probably point more toward risk sign number seven is when person B tries to separate resources and kind of other similar items so if person B has a concern over something that's shared in that relationship like if person a and person B both have their phones on the same phone plan and now all of a sudden person B wants to get their own phone plan or they have their cars in the same insurance policy and purse he wants to get their own policy anything that kind of creates separation or distance could be indicating a rejection is coming out sign number eight is if we see dissatisfaction in terms of sex and this can work a lot of different ways what we see quite a bit in clinical work is that more so with men they tend to be upset about the quantity of sex being low and more so with women it's the quality now again there of course exceptions to that but again if we see the satisfaction in terms of intimacy that's going to be something that points toward rejection sign number nine applies to both person a and person B and this is really also kind of a characteristic of the couple and this is when the couple has a poor mechanism for resolving problems so what can happen sometimes in relationships is both people can kind of see there's a problem and they can talk through it and they can work it out or they can come to a conclusion that doesn't make sense for them to be together so again there really isn't a rejection but rather they agree the relationship should end when there are poor mechanisms for resolving problems we don't see that kind of migration over toward some sort of solution and person B ends up rejecting right so we just end up in a situation where other mediation options aren't really available and kind of goes to a more drastic option sign number 10 is when person B slowly decreases contact so person a sends a text message and person B usually responds in an hour to and now they're taking a couple days or if they're slow to return phone calls and just really spending less time with person a in general that could be a way of them trying to signal that they want the relationship to end but again they just don't want to take that difficult step of rejecting that's a fairly good sign right so slowly decreasing contact and especially if it's a really dramatic change if you look at it like weeks later or a month later right so a couple of spending time together everyday and now they're seeing each other once a week that pointing toward the relationship not working out and of course toward rejection sign number eleven is a prior history of being the one to initiate the end of relationship right the one to reject this is a reliable predictor if person B has been in say ten or fifteen relationships over the course of three or four years and they have been known to reject the other person in every instance or in almost every instance that's indicative of them rejecting now person a right so I would say that's as good an indicator as having exposure to alternatives while being intoxicated and extroverted right so one of the higher risk categories sign number 12 which is the last sign I'll cover here is dating more than one percent of time and again I'm talking about some amount of investment in each of these relationships now this is somewhat common but it's still a sign right and really it just comes down to mathematics specifically probability if somebody has five romantic relationships and they consider themselves invested than all five at least four will have to end eventually well theoretically right I guess they could maintain them indefinitely but realistically speaking for those relationships are gonna have to end at least maybe all five will be over at some point so that leaves person B rejecting for other people right so it's just a probability situation if somebody is just with one other person at person a and person B are together and there's no other people involved all the things being equal that decreases the risk of the relationship failing so those are the twelve signs that someone may reject you I know whenever I talk about topics like romantic relationships and rejection there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate really interesting dialogue as always hope you found this description of rejection behavior to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 143,659

Keywords: Rejection, dumped, pathological lying, narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, dark triad, dark tetrad, subclinical psychopathy, dark core, narcissistic personality disorder, grandiose, vulnerable, sociopathy, Machiavellian, cynical, cold, callous, lack of empathy, arrogant, jealous, deceptive, superficial charm, poor behavioral control, lies of omission, blatant lying

Id: QF5vJfMEd7U

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019