The more confidant a man is, the easier it is for him to hear criticism and...

The more confidant a man is, the easier it is for him to hear criticism and take rejection without it breaking his spirit. Confidence comes from competence. Competence comes from getting lots of feedback and correctly applying it to do better.

My family was culturally German. Fast, fair, honest, and direct feedback was considered polite and expected. Everyone was disagreeable and frank. No one should take feedback personally.

I value courage, and it takes a lot of courage to give and receive blunt feedback. As a man, I find that approach attractive in both male friends and women.

Because of how I was raised, I want to hear rejection as clearly and as early as possible, with reasons if she can articulate them, even if it hurts. But I’m an outlier, and I would not expect all men to respond that way.

The OODA loop explains how we learn from experience and feedback.

Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act

Rejection is just another type of feedback that we can observe. It helps us identify a mismatch quickly, before we have invested a lot of energy into the relationship.

Since most of us didn’t grow up learning about relationships, it takes us several cycles of rejection and improvement to understand them. We cannot skip this part of the process. If the rejection is vague, we might not learn much and then need more cycles to figure it out.

Ideally, one conducts the rejection with love and consideration. There is no need to be cruel or give unnecessary details. There might be hurt feelings; that’s normal and ok. We can’t have comfortable emotions all the time. We are adults and can handle it.

A written rejection is often easier to compose, deliver, and digest once received. This was the norm in the past: a lot of handwritten letters to express deep emotions.

If you didn’t get any feedback from your breakup, try this. Write a letter to your past self, warning you about the relationship and telling you what to do differently. You may find you know more than you think you know about why it ended.

And remember. If a girl’s opinion of you can emasculate you, then you weren’t very masculine to begin with, which is the recurring problem with men today. Take it as a sign that you need to get even stronger.

A while back, I wrote about how to break up with a woman, but this would work for a woman to use when breaking up with a man.