How do YOU reject a date? + 밀당 (ModRom Ch2.3)
The conundrum of “not interested”
My interest was piqued on this topic. Though I haven’t dated a lot, I have been “rejected” plenty ✋. Aziz presented the following to different crowds.
These are your 3 choices:
1. The “I’m busy”
2. Silence/ghosting
3. Honesty
If someone wasn’t interested in you, how would you want them to tell you?
People overwhelming answered “Honesty”, with some going for “I’m busy”. Then, he asked the next question…
If you aren’t interested in someone, how do you tell them?
This time, people overwhelmingly answered the “I’m busy”, with a sizable silence/ghosting contingent.
It’s funny to see the discrepancy, but it’s understandable. If rejection didn’t cost anything, we would all want complete honesty. But there is a cost to rejection: maybe the friendship or just simple shame. Unless you had a bad impression of the other person, in a civil society, it seems unreasonable to bear that cost unnecessarily.
Personally, in post-first-date type of situations, I do a silence → honesty approach. If I’m not interested, I just won’t text. But if she asked about it, then I would just let her know that I wasn’t interested. Sometimes sending signals makes it easier, on both parties, than honest rejection.
As for how I’ve been “dealt with” (rejected 😛), it depends on what my approach was. If I ask in an ambiguous, “let’s hang out” way, I’ll usually get the “I’m busy” response, but if I explicitly ask them out, I’ll usually get the “Honesty” approach 😆. In a sense, you get a return commensurate with the risk that you took.
The Waiting Game aka 밀당
You just finished your first date. Now the infamous question: how much do I wait to text her? A day? A week? Right away?
I haven’t gone on very many dates, so I don’t have a large sample size…but personally, I text pretty quickly if I’m interested. Usually of the “get home safely?” variety.
But I’m a pretty straightforward guy. I don’t like playing games (though I may have inadvertently done so in the past 😟). It’s what scared me reading the last part of this chapter.
Aziz mentions how because of the low cost and expected immediacy of texts, the waiting game is exacerbated in modern dating. When the expectation is immediacy, waiting that extra day for a text, makes it that much more agonizing to wait for.
In Korea, there’s something called 밀당 (mil-ddang). It roughly translates to Push-Pull and is used in the context of dating, where people feign interest, then no interest in an extreme way — rinse & repeat, rinse & repeat. Friends I talked to in Korea mentioned how it was almost a requirement in dating there! 😝
I get tired just thinking about that, hah. But you can see how this waiting game definitely has the potential for a lot of power plays and how it could drive a lot of emotions in those initial throes of dating. How the higher highs and lower lows could artificially contribute to a higher investment in the other (not to say that’s a bad thing).
Of course, there’s always been some form of this. How the waiting can make you think of that person even more…how recovering something that you thought you lost, can be more satisfactory than just receiving it right off the bat.
Knowing what we know about the rapid time space of texting, though, we can see how much more powerful those push-pull moments can be today. Though it’s something I don’t look forward to and hope to not have to deal with too much in my future dating life 😅, you can see what role it can and likely will play in dating today.
Let’s bring this to a close with one more interested tidbit:
If they’re interested in you, expect that they’ve stalked your online presence!
