My coworker turned me down. How do I get over it without blaming her?

With advice from Lydia Davis (yes she's a modern author, sometimes that's fine)

This collection contains Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’, which we are not talking about today

My coworker, who I had/have nurtured a crush on for a while, began to reach out to me quite a bit at the start of the summer. It turned into frequent texting including very forward flirting on her part, and she often expressed a desire to go drinking together. My policy is usually not to date coworkers, but given some specifics in our work relationship plus the fact that she was initiating things, I figured I'd give it a shot. She turned me down and said she doesn't feel that way about me, but that she wanted to know me more as friends. Since then she's started dating someone else at work and has stopped most contact with me, though she is still polite enough. I'm trying to move on, but finding it very difficult because I'm frustrated about having betrayed my own principles for nothing. How do I get over this without blaming her?

I’m very sorry you’re stuck in this vexing position: in constant contact with someone you’re trying to forget. Not to rub it in or anything, but it really demonstrates the wisdom of your original no-dating-coworkers rule. Of course, we all fall into this trap at one time or another, so don’t be too hard on yourself. I’ve dated people in the theatre industry within which I work, and it’s pretty much always been a mistake. There’s only room for one overdramatic creative within a relationship (calm down, exes, I’m talking about myself) and the fall out is inevitably messy, as you’re unfortunately experiencing.

Right now you are dealing with a double burn: rejection by someone you had fancied for a long time, and the sting to your pride that is the result of having compromised your principles for nothing. That’s tough. As Sabrina Carpenter sings, ‘heartbreak is one thing, my ego’s another’. Then there’s a third factor, too, which is the confusion of it all. She flirted with you, and then turned you down - mind-bending. How do you make sense of that? How do you find closure when the logic doesn’t scan?

I wonder if this last factor is actually the nub of your feelings of bitterness. Something I talk about in Fictional Therapy a lot is the human desire to understand our lives through narrative. When we can’t find a coherent story, it can be very hard to move on.

I am missing a few key pieces of the puzzle, which is making it hard for me to unravel the mystery on your behalf. For example, did you actually go on a date, and then afterwards she decided she wasn’t interested? Or did she just feel you’d misinterpreted her signals all along? What exactly were these messages - is there a chance you could have misread banter as something more flirtatious?

But, even I did know more, the chances are I’d still be guessing, because it’s very difficult to understand what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Often they barely understand it themselves. And while it’s totally human to want to unpick all the details of any form of break up, the attempt is often maddening and fruitless. There is a short story by Lydia Davis called ‘The Letter’ which wrenchingly describes the downward spiral this quest often takes us on. In it, a woman is given a French poem by an ex, and sits in her car trying to make sense of it. She ruminates over the ‘postmark’, the ‘small ink blot in a curve of one letter’, and wonders what it means that he included his return address. Then she analyses every word and its many possible translations, hanging on the letters ‘with such concentration that for a moment she can feel everything in her, everything in the room too, and in her life up to now, gather behind her eyes as though it all depends on a line of ink.’ The poem is about two 'compagnon de silence’, companions of silence - lovers perhaps? - who find each other again after death, in some sort of heaven. She feels hopeful: is her ex suggesting that in the future they will be be together? But -

‘But she worries about the dying part of it: it could mean he does not really expect to see her again, since they are dead, after all; or that the time will be so long it will be a lifetime. Or it could be that this poem was the closest thing he could find to a poem that said something about what he was thinking about companions, silence, crying, and the end of things, and is not exactly what he was thinking; or he happened on the poem as he was reading through a book of French poems, was reminded of her for a moment, was moved to send it, and sent it quickly with no clear intention.’

In the end she smells the letter, hoping for a trace of him - but there is nothing, only the mute scent of ‘ink’, and crooked, copied, incomprehensible words.

Lydia Davis is so good at capturing our interior monologues, the tendency of an anxious or over-analytical brain to sift through every possible outcome and still come up short. Because, while rumination can feel as if it is fixing a problem, it rarely does, and any negative feelings you have toward the subject of your thoughts will only be amplified. How do you escape this spiral? One way is to ask the girl who turned you down for clarity, and see if you can find a story that makes sense to you through conversation. Personally, I doubt this will be fruitful. The fact of your being colleagues means she might not be totally straight with you - and as I said, humans often barely understand themselves. The remaining option is the bravest and most difficult - you can choose to accept that some mysteries are unsolvable, and move on.

Your letter doesn’t tell me this, but I wondered if you were a man. I thought I detected a concern with being the right sort of man; one who doesn’t date his female co-workers, and who doesn’t fall into the misogynistic trap of blaming women for not liking him back. I sincerely respect you for this. You now have the opportunity to be an even more impressive kind of man (or person, if I’m wrong): one who is able to laugh and shrug in the face of inscrutability, and turn your attention to something new. I’m not saying this is easy. God, it’s not easy at all. But if you can achieve it with grace, it will be a way to regain your wounded pride.

What I’m saying is, you sound like someone to whom integrity is a motivating force (again, I find this commendable). So the fact that you abandoned your principles - but more importantly, the uncomfortable feelings of bitterness and blame you are now feeling toward a woman - all this is threatening your idea of yourself as a good and upstanding person. But there is a way to reclaim your identity: skip on over to the moral high ground, my friend. We both know that what your crush did was annoying but not evil. So are you strong enough to rise above it? If you can treat this woman with unflappable respect, cordiality and kindness (even if you need to do it through gritted teeth at first) - if you can date some new people in the background, without at any point trying to rub it in her face - if you can even be polite and friendly to her new date - then you will have proven to yourself that you are capable of being the kind of person you want to be again (this is reading like a 21st century version of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, which I’m not going to quote because it’s hackneyed, but you can read here.) And once you no longer feel as if this woman has robbed you of your identity, you might wake up to find that your feelings of bitterness have disappeared - all on their own.

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