Fear of rejection - how boys mess up love and romance

I had to summon up a little more courage than usual to write this blog because I feel embarrassed to admit that my love and romantic life have been pretty much messed up. In any case, I will still write about how the fear of rejection is real for boys and tends to mess up their love relationships unless they deal with it positively.

Research such as this publication by De Meyer and others, and other studies show that gender norms, that is, how society thinks boys (and girls) should behave, contribute to creating conditions in which boys poorly handle love and romantic relationships. For instance, boys are expected to be the ones to propose love to girls (and not the girl to the boy). Further, boys may associate having a girlfriend or having sex with them, with self-worth.

Boys, therefore, can experience pressure to prove themselves by getting girls to accept their love proposals. But things can go into the dark side when the motive to get that girl or the sex is driven by fear of rejection and poor self-worth or esteem.

Let me ground this in some real stories

A few years back, I ran a small project on sex education with young people at Kapiri in Mchinji (Malawi). In one of the conversations (reported by one of my colleagues, Taonga Nkosi or Alfred Magombo), one of the boys they met raised the issue that boys want to talk to girls and make friends with them but find it difficult. So to deal with the problem, the boys drink alcohol to gain the courage to talk to the girls.

I remember finding that 'truth' disconcerting because it reminded me of my adolescence in the 1990s. Using alcohol to approach girls was precisely my experience when I was about 15 or thereabouts when I was staying in Area 12 in Lilongwe. I remember my friends and I were scared to make friendships with girls. I do not recall exactly how it happened, but we started drinking opaque beer at the tavern in Area 10 (Kauma) to gain the courage to go and propose our interest to girls. That was how we built our relationship skills; on alcohol.

I also remember when I was in Chancellor College (Zomba) that this was the behaviour of some of my colleagues.  When they liked a girl but for some reason feared to approach her while sober, they would go first drink locally distilled spirit in Chikanda, or opaque beer in Zomba town, and on their way back, pass by Umodzi Hostel (which used to house females in 1990) to call out to the girl they liked. Strangely, they rarely shouted nice things to the girl, but obscenities. Or, they would shout a mixed bag of ‘I want you’ kind of stuff and obscenities.

Indeed, the phenomenon was more like the letter I quote below from An investigative study of the abuse of girls in African schools. This is a quote from a primary school boy's letter to a fellow learner, a girl he liked. I cut and paste this image below from page 80 of the report.

This letter also reminds me how boys can be aggressive in pursuing girls so that when a girl rejects them, they would want her to feel bad about it. They would dress her down, and call her names like stupid, ugly or something. I also know boys would try so hard to have sex, not because they love the girl, but just to prove to friends that they were the man like them.

What is this strange phenomenon?

What I see here is that boys want girls, but they fear rejection. So boys have ways of dealing with the prospects of being rejected, including using the cover of alcohol or religion, for instance, going to the girl and telling her that the holy spirit or some divine figure says they must be their girlfriend or using witchdoctors' medicine, and so on.

I suppose psychologists could explain the phenomenon better, but I believe that this also comes from one's sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Adolescents with poor self-esteem may find it more challenging to pursue love and romance, especially if the rejection is interpreted as a blow to one's self-worth. For instance, I believe the aggression in the boy's letter was his way of managing rejection before it materialised.

This behaviour of boys is made worse in a culture that considers it normal for boys to behave in that way to girls. You know how we dismiss it with 'boys will be boys.' We ignore the pain it causes girls.

The problem

Building and maintaining love and intimacy requires skills. When we get through adolescence without acquiring these skills, we may end up getting into love and romantic relationships without enough stature and foundation to authentically live through them. We might still be driven by fear of rejection; to cover that, we use power and money. Our expression of love becomes tied to drugs, power and money in relationships that are otherwise empty and painful.

So what now?

We must help our boys (and girls) deal with these fears and anxieties about relationships. We need to equip them with relationships building skills. We should not take it for granted that we become skilled naturally in relationships. That is not how it works. We need to be mentored to acquire skills for establishing and sustaining friendships with people we like without bullying our way into love and romance.

Unfortunately for some of us, we got it wrong and messed it up. Well, we could start by first acknowledging our mess. Then let us take deliberate steps to learn what we may have missed because there is still a chance we can make things right.