Navigating Dating and Rejection (Cultivating Resilience)

Dating is hard. Full stop. And if we want to find ourselves a partner in this wacky world of online dating and modern romance, it means opening ourselves up to rejection (unfortunately). But love is worth it. And navigating dating and rejection with self-compassion and self-care means choosing to lean into hope.

This episode goes out to anyone who is wandering the minefield of modern dating and needs a little pep talk about rejection. It’s a rallying cry to remember that relationships are all about fit, and that when something doesn’t work out, it’s easier to believe that, in the long term, this is for our own good.

So, basically, if you want to hear me remind you that things are ultimately going to be okay and that there’s an opportunity for learning and resilience in this experience – give this a listen.

If you’re in the big feelings and grief of a break up or things not working out, this may not be the time to press play. Call and friend, cry it out, and come back when you’re ready to hear some optimism and hope.

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Resources, References, and Links

Episode #41: “If You’re Freaking Out Right Now… (Press Play)”

Episode #52: “If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes”

Blog Post/Bonus Episode: “Dating Is Supposed to Be FUN”

Episode #46: Cultivating Self-Acceptance through Parts Work with Celine Redfield, LMFT”

Episode #33: “Practical Mysticism and Trusting the Divine with Julie Day”

Transcript

Note: this transcript was generated by AI. Please forgive any malapropisms and misspellings. It’s the robot’s fault!

Cate Blouke (00:00.047)

We have a choice on the other side of every rejection to make it about us, to let our inner critics just run rampant with all of the stories that it likes to tell us to keep us safe, or to look at it as an opportunity to gather more information about what’s actually good for us and what actually might be the right fit.

Cate Blouke (00:23.298)

Welcome to Settling is Bullshit, a sweary podcast about claiming your joy. If you are craving healthier boundaries, a greater sense of purpose, or an increased capacity to feel at ease in your own skin, then you are in the right place, my friend. I’m your host, Cate Blouke, joy activist and life coach to smart and sensitive humans. I’m here to offer you practical tools and playful encouragement to step forward and be your most awesome self. My hope is that each episode will leave you feeling a bit more empowered to make brave choices and claim your joy.

Cate Blouke (00:58.754)

Hello my love. This episode is for anyone who is navigating rejection in dating or might be thinking about dating again and doesn’t want to have to navigate rejection because it’s horrible and terrible and bad and hurts. This episode is for you. It’s not gonna be super great if you have very recently been rejected and are still in the acute grief around that. If you want

an episode to sort of feel like a great big hug when you’re in the big feelings, go listen to episode number 41. If you’re freaking out right now, press play. That one is all about being held in whatever big hard feelings that you’re experiencing right now. This episode is a tool for when you’re on the other side of those big feelings and are ready to get a little bit of a like…

spiritual boost, a little bit of a reminder and pep talk that you’re going to be okay and that ultimately whatever just happened is for your good. And if you’re not in the headspace to hear that, then just press pause and come back to this when you are. But if you are in the space of wanting to have a different relationship with rejection and wanting to have a different relationship with dating, then welcome! Please come along for this ride.

I’m on it too. It’s tough. And it’s especially tough if you are neurodivergent and particularly sensitive to rejection. Like, I just want to hold a whole lot of space for that and around it and tell you that I see you and I know exactly what it’s like. And that we are capable of cultivating our capacity for tolerating hard things, whether it’s rejection,

whether it’s uncomfortable conversations, whether it’s social situations, like all of us have the capacity to grow our ability to tolerate discomfort. And that’s true around rejection as well. Now I’ve read books that have said things like, if you want to build your capacity for rejection tolerance, then just go out and deliberately ask people things that they’re going to say no to. like, if you’re the kind of person that can do that, kudos.

Cate Blouke (03:25.795)

I mostly want to talk about both spirituality, about our connection with our intuition and our inner knowing and with Source and with God if you’re comfortable calling it God, and the ways in which rejection is God’s protection. That was almost the title of this episode, but I really wanted to hone in on dating specifically because otherwise I was just going to go off on a big tangent about it. And I wanted this to be more expansive.

for folks who aren’t necessarily down with thinking about life through the God lens or using that term. I use it really loosely. I think of myself as spiritual, not religious, like God is just a convenient term for whatever it is in the universe that is ultimately working for our good. That this podcast and my orientation towards life is coming from a perspective that there is something

maybe it’s the force, maybe it’s just positive atoms, maybe it’s protons, maybe it’s the protons in our system, are ultimately working for our good. That there is an energy within us and within the universe that wants what’s best for us, and oftentimes we don’t necessarily know what that is while it’s happening.

This is really informed by 12-step recovery and my relationship with a power greater than myself and my sense of meaning in the world that has come through my work in that program. And this idea that rejection is God’s protection is a phrase that I originally heard in the rooms of recovery and that ultimately what it’s saying is that I get to choose to believe that when things don’t work out the way that I want them to, it’s ultimately going to be for my good. And that’s the invitation that I’m inviting you into.

around dating and rejection specifically. But to get into the nitty gritty of it, when rejection happens in a dating context, whether it’s the kind of small early rejections of matching with somebody on a dating app or liking somebody on a dating app and not hearing back, or going on a date and not getting a second date, going on a few dates, having somebody decide they don’t want to keep seeing us, all of those things are opportunities for information.

Cate Blouke (05:46.209)

and opportunities if you’re into it for cultivating greater trust in that force or source or God. Because we have a choice on the other side of every rejection to make it about us, to let our inner critics just run rampant with all of the stories that it likes to tell us to keep us safe, or to look at it as an opportunity to gather more information about what’s actually good for us and what actually might be the right fit.

I know my experience of dating was long coming from this sense of scarcity, this sense of both I am not enough and there aren’t enough people out there. And so any opportunity to connect with someone felt like life or death, felt like last chance, felt like if this doesn’t change now, it’s never going to change. And that was a really painful and insecure place to be approaching dating from.

And it took a long time to really get out of that, I want to be clear. And I dip back, I dip my toes back into it from time to time. I haven’t had a specific post about dating for a long time because I haven’t been in a dating headspace. But as I mentioned on the Nothing Changes Nothing Changes podcast, I’ve been feeling more expansive and been feeling like there was a possibility for dating to be fun. I have another post an episode about that as well, that like, if we’re going to walk into this space.

We need to check in with ourselves about what is my energetic capacity? Am I able to show up as myself? Do I have the emotional resilience to be here right now? And for a long time I was focused on building a business, I was focused on this podcast, I just didn’t have the space for it. And now I do again, and guess what? If you’re gonna try dating, it means you’re gonna get rejected. Period. That’s just what it is. It doesn’t happen where we log into the app and we…

find a profile we like and we say hey and they say hey and then we get married. Like that’s just not how it works because we’re all filtering and we’re all so different and we have to learn about each other and cultivate trust over time. And so it can be so incredibly hard and demoralizing to navigate those like micro rejections, the small rejections of not hearing back. But again,

Cate Blouke (08:08.405)

Ultimately, I believe for me and for you that those rejections are for your good, they’re for our good, they’re for my good, and they’re not about me. Here’s something I just want to offer that hopefully you can absorb into your system. That if you see somebody’s dating profile and you’re like, my God, that person is super cute and we would 100 % be amazing together, I’m going to reach out and I’m going to say, hey, I’m going to say something clever.

and then they don’t reply, I promise it’s not about you. It’s not about you, they don’t know you. They have no idea who you are. But our little brains often wanna make up stories about that. We wanna use it as evidence that, man, this is all pointless and hopeless and I’m never gonna find anybody because this person didn’t reply. Speaking from personal internal experience, for sure. But the work for us is in catching when our brains do that and…

doing the best we can to sort of step away from that mental pattern, get a little distance from it, recognize that that voice isn’t you. That’s one of your inner protectors. That’s one of your parts that doesn’t want to get hurt again and so is trying to keep you safe. I’m referencing all sorts of other episodes this episode, but definitely go listen to the episode on parts work with Celine Redfield if you want to do a deep dive on that. But we have these parts of us that are just trying to keep us safe.

And one of the ways they do that is by saying very mean things to us to try to convince us to not do things that feel unsafe. And anytime we are risking rejection, we are making ourselves vulnerable to rejection, which is what dating is, those parts are going to act up. But when someone that we don’t even know, that does not know us, rejects us, then how could it possibly be about us? How could it possibly be about you when they don’t even know you?

It’s not about getting the perfect picture. It’s not about getting the perfect word in your opening message or your response message, right? It’s just about things, either being in sync or being out of sync, being a good fit or not being a good fit. And for me, cultivating a sense of spirituality, cultivating a sense of meaning and purpose in the world that is beyond my…

Cate Blouke (10:33.251)

control and my direct understanding has been such a huge relief in this arena in particular. Another good episode is to listen to the episode with Julie Day, cause she really gifted me with this deep awareness that if someone is actually a good fit for me, then I’m not gonna fuck it up. Like me saying something awkward in a text message or trying to be flirty or on our first date.

isn’t ultimately gonna fuck it up if this person is really a good fit for me, right? That what is true is that the person who we are best suited to be with is gonna have the capacity for our awkward awkwardness, for our silliness, for our authenticity, for our big feelings. And the more I can really believe that for myself, the easier it is to let go

of the people who I think would be a good fit or who I wanted to be a good fit or who I fell in love with the potential of. If you listen to the Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes episode, I was talking about dating and starting to do dating differently and I had a really lovely few weeks of getting to know someone that ultimately didn’t work out and that’s why we’re here. It’s a relevant topic for me right now and I am on the other side of the feeling sad about it.

And what happens when I don’t skip over the feeling the feelings part is that I’m able to cultivate more resilience and also gain the sort of distance and perspective and choose to look at, okay, that didn’t work out. What did I learn? You know, what were the stories that came up when I was in my big feelings? What were the mean stories that my brain wanted to tell me about why it didn’t work out? What are the stories I wanted to make up about that person and why it didn’t work out?

And what does that tell me? And also, if I fundamentally believe that rejection is God’s protection and that this happened because it was supposed to happen, and that this didn’t work out because it wasn’t a good fit, like if I can believe that, which is such a much more like comforting and nourishing and kind thing to believe, that it didn’t work out because it wasn’t a good fit, not because there’s something wrong with me, not because there’s something wrong with them, but because our two powers combined do not make a good fit.

Cate Blouke (13:02.519)

If I can just really absorb that, then I get to sort of step back and learn, okay, what wasn’t a good fit about that particular dynamic for me? What do I need to know and understand on the other side of this so that moving forward, I have more clarity about deal breakers or things that are really important to me? Moving into dating from a place of self-confidence and empowerment requires that we get clear on

who we are and what we need and we treat those needs as valid. And if we’re coming from a place of scarcity, as we so often are, we start to make accommodations. We start to settle. We look at things and we say like, well, that’s not really it, but I can make it work. I could work with that. How many times in your dating life have you been like, well, I can work with that. I can work around that.

And it’s tricky because it’s so hard to know like where the appropriate space for compromise is versus when are we diminishing ourselves? When are we self abandoning? And the only way that we can find those things out is through practice and through awareness and through paying attention. And when I can treat dating as an opportunity to get better at dating, to get better at knowing and understanding myself and my own needs, rather than

treating dating as a pathway to an objective. I have a much better time dating. When I can go on a first date or start chatting with somebody on an app from a place of curiosity, from a place of like, well, this is interesting. What’s here for me? What can I learn from this? What can I see about myself and what can I learn about my own relationship to other people from this interaction? That gives me

a degree of empowerment and self-agency in a process that is fundamentally outside of my control. Dating is so hard because it’s completely outside of our control. We can show up with what we got and who we are and how we are, and then it’s just a matter of does this other person fit that? Can we meet each other in that space?

Cate Blouke (15:20.278)

And it’s an opportunity to tune into my nervous system, to tune into that sense of intuition and knowing of like, does this feel good? Do I want it to feel good or does it actually feel good? And by good, I mean safe. And I want to just circle back to that because if we’re going to find somebody that’s going to be a good fit for us, we have to feel safe with them. And it’s really hard to get to that place of safety within our system when we’re doing something that’s fundamentally vulnerable.

And scary. Like, I’ve been on a lot of fucking first dates and they don’t really phase me anymore, but like, that doesn’t mean that dating and the possibility of making oneself vulnerable and trying again isn’t scary. It is, because we can get hurt, like that’s the thing. Like, no matter what, if we actually want to open ourselves up to love and connection and intimacy, it means showing somebody our soft underbelly. It means…

giving them the opportunity to hurt us. And that’s hard. It’s hard to do. That’s why pacing becomes really important. That’s why open communication becomes really important. That’s why not getting all caught up in the excitement of a person and taking the time and space to see who they actually are and what they are actually showing us becomes really important. It’s noticing

whether their actions and words are congruent and not letting ourselves ignore red flags. This is very complicated process and it takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of energy. And so if you have been doing it and you’re feeling downtrodden, I see you, I hear you, I’m holding energetic space for you, and I want to offer a deep belief

that you deserve to be treated well, that you deserve love, that you are worthy of love, and that there is someone out there who can offer you those things. The bitch of it is we just have no idea when that’s gonna happen. And we get to choose whether to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and like get back on that horse. But also we get to choose to be like, wow, no, that time I really bruised my tailbone.

Cate Blouke (17:43.016)

And I need to sit on a donut for a couple of weeks before I try to get on another horse. Right? I think that has a lot to do with where we’re at in our own emotional and mental and spiritual wellbeing. And that there’s no set amount of time for grieving a rejection, grieving a loss. It doesn’t matter if we only went out with someone on three dates. It might…

kick up a whole bunch of shit from old relationships, from old hurts, and it might take us a while to get to the other side of that. And that’s okay. It’s all just information. In this particular instance, I was able to bounce back pretty quickly because I was able to recognize that like, I really liked this person, I had a good time with them, it seemed like it could have been a good fit, but when they opted out and I got to like really be with the grief around that, I could

pretty quickly recognized that it was grief around partnership in general rather than this specific person. And once I got a hold of that and let it move through me, I was able to like pick myself up, dust myself off and get back on the apps, you know? And to see some of the things that I’m now a little bit clearer on being deal-breakers for me. Like, I’m a really active person. Being out in nature is really important to me.

And while I want to be like super open-minded and like I love people and maybe it’s not that important, the truth for me is I need a partner who can go on a hike with me and who not just can but like wants to go on a hike with me. And it’s okay for that to be a deal breaker because y’all we’re actually trying to filter. We’re trying to filter quickly so that we don’t end up in heartache situations down the road when we made these concessions about things that are actually really important to us.

And one way to distinguish that is to really get clearer on like, what would really make me sad if it weren’t a part of my relationship? Another example for me is like, I love cooking for people. I love baking, I love making food for people, and I’m an omnivore. And as much as I want to be open-minded about dating a vegan, I’m fundamentally going to be sad if I can’t feed you ice cream in our relationship. Like, if I can’t…

Cate Blouke (20:09.632)

make you ice cream that is my joy of ice cream, which involves heavy cream. I have made lots of vegan ice cream for my vegan friends, and I love making vegan ice cream for my vegan friends, but in my day-to-day living and how I want to show up in partnership and just be able to spontaneously feed something to someone that is yummy and delicious and easy for me to make, and one of the ways that I show love, they have to eat eggs and dairy. It just…

that’s where it’s at for me and that’s okay because then I’m not wasting somebody else’s time by like trying to make them into something that isn’t really the fit that I want or need. And so if you don’t have clarity on those things, that’s another invitation as I wind down this episode of like, what would make you so sad to not be able to share with your partner? Make that list. It really helps to make things easier when you’re trying to figure out who to date and you’re trying to narrow it down.

Because when I’m approaching dating from a place of abundance, like this awareness that there are so many people in the world, there are so many people in Portland, Oregon where I live, and we actually want to narrow down the list because we’re looking for a good fit, not just an okay fit. If we’re all puzzle pieces, we can always shove a piece into the slot that kinda works, and that’s an available option.

But as for me, I want the complete puzzle. I want the piece that actually goes there. And the piece that actually goes there for me, and I genuinely believe for you, is the piece that ticks the boxes, that’s gonna want to show up with you in the things that you really genuinely want to share with a partner.

So I hope that this episode has left you feeling a little bit less alone in the rejection, a little bit inspired, a little bit more grounded with your feet on the ground, knowing that the universe is on your side and whatever didn’t or doesn’t work out is ultimately for your good. And I hope that you can focus on what was the positive about that experience instead of staying really stuck in all of the negatives, because it’s so easy to stay stuck in the negatives.

Cate Blouke (22:27.468)

and it’s so easy to let our inner critic take the wheel. But you are fucking awesome, my love, and you deserve somebody who can see that and reflect it back to you and give you a high five and give you a hug and give you that good, good lovin’ that you deserve because I know you’re gonna do that for them. So rejection is not the end of the world, it’s just shitty, and we can get through shitty things together.

Cate Blouke (22:55.692)

Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please help me grow the podcast by subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with anyone you think would benefit from hearing it too. Your support means the world to me. If you’d like to get updates about new episodes, posts, and offerings, please visit settlingisbullshit.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You can also find information there about working with me one-on-one to build your most amazing life. Until next time, remember that I believe in you and that you are fucking awesome.