I'll Reject You First

Can I tell you about my friend Maya?

Maya is one of the warmest, most generous people I know. She shows up for everyone in her life — with food, with time, with her whole heart. But when it comes to dating? She ghost people first. Before they have a chance to ghost her. She cancels plans before someone can cancel on her. She keeps things light and breezy before they can get deep and real. And if she senses someone pulling back even the tiniest bit, she pulls back harder and faster.

She doesn't do this because she's cold. She does this because she's been hurt. Badly. More than once.

And here's the thing — I get it. I really do. Because I've been Maya. Maybe you have too.

Where the Walls Come From

Nobody wakes up one day and decides to become emotionally unavailable. It happens gradually, brick by brick, after experiences that genuinely hurt us. A relationship that ended without explanation. A person who said "I love you" and then disappeared. A friendship that slowly faded to nothing. A parent who wasn't emotionally present when you needed them most.

Our brains are brilliant at protecting us. After pain, they file away a little memo: "That hurt. Don't do that again." And so we don't. We build walls. We create emotional distance before anyone can get close enough to hurt us. We develop this quiet, almost unconscious strategy of rejecting others before they can reject us.

Psychologists call this a preemptive defense mechanism — and it's more common than you might think. It shows up in so many different ways: pulling away when things start going well, picking fights over small things to create emotional distance, becoming suddenly "too busy," deciding someone is wrong for you before you've really given them a fair chance, or finding flaws in a perfectly good person because finding flaws feels safer than falling for them.

The wall is real. And the pain that built it was real. I want to honor that before we go any further.

The Message You're Broadcasting (Without Saying a Word)

Here's the part that's hard to hear — and I say this with so much love because I've had to hear it myself.

When we put up walls, we think we're protecting ourselves. And in one sense, we are. But we're also broadcasting something very loudly to everyone around us — even when we think we're being subtle.

We're saying: "I don't trust you." "I don't trust this." "I'm ready to leave before you ask me to."

And here's what's so heartbreaking about it — the people who actually would choose us, the ones who have the patience and the heart to stay, often get exhausted trying to get through the wall. Not because they don't care — but because no one can pour love into something that keeps sealing shut.

Dr. John Gottman, who has spent decades studying what makes relationships work (or not), found something really telling in his research: one of the most damaging patterns in relationships is what he calls stonewalling — emotionally withdrawing and shutting down as a form of self-protection. What feels like safety to us can register as abandonment to someone who's trying to connect with us.

Think about that for a second. The very armor we put on to avoid being hurt... can end up hurting the people who wanted to love us.

And more than that — it ends up keeping us lonely.

"I'll Reject You First" Is Still Rejection

I want to gently challenge something.

When we reject someone before they can reject us, we tell ourselves we're in control. We're the ones who walked away. We're the ones who ended it. We didn't get hurt — at least not in the way we feared. And there's a certain comfort in that narrative.

But here's the truth: we did get hurt. We just did it to ourselves, quietly and privately, a little bit at a time. Every time we shut someone out, every time we push away someone who might have been good for us, every time we choose the familiar ache of loneliness over the terrifying risk of being seen — that's a loss. And deep down, we feel it.

Brené Brown, whose research on vulnerability and shame has literally changed how millions of people think about relationships, says something that stopped me in my tracks when I first read it:

"Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy."

— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Running from our story feels safe. But it costs us everything we actually want.

I think about a guy I met a few years ago — let's call him David. He was smart, funny, thoughtful. There was real chemistry there. But every time I started to feel closer to him, he'd go quiet for a few days. He'd make a joke at an emotional moment. He'd mention how much he valued his independence right when things started to feel natural and warm between us. He wasn't a bad person. He was scared. And his fear kept him — and us — from ever finding out what could have been.

I wonder sometimes if he even knows that's what he was doing.

What Staying Closed Actually Costs You

One of the most profound things Brené Brown talks about is the idea that we cannot selectively numb our emotions. When we shut down the fear of being hurt, we also — without even meaning to — shut down the joy of being loved. We can't lock the door against pain without also locking out the good stuff.

She describes something she calls "foreboding joy" — this thing where, when something good is happening, instead of leaning into it and feeling happy, we immediately start bracing for it to go wrong. We've been hurt before, so when joy shows up, we grab it by the shoulders and say: "You will not catch me off guard. I will be ready for when this falls apart."

Does that sound familiar? It does to me.

When we live in that place — closed off, guarded, ready to bolt — we're not actually living. We're surviving. And there's such a difference between the two.

Dr. Sue Johnson, one of the leading researchers in attachment theory, puts it beautifully: "We are bonding mammals. When our loved one is emotionally unreachable, we protest, we panic, and then we shut down. Disconnection is coded by the brain as danger."

Our need for genuine connection isn't a weakness. It's wired into us. When we fight against that — when we keep ourselves closed and emotionally unavailable — we're fighting against our own nature. No wonder it's exhausting.

The Courage to Take the Risk

Okay. So we know the walls aren't really working. We know that closing ourselves off isn't the same as being safe — it's just a different kind of hurt. So what do we actually do about it?

I want to be honest with you: there's no magic trick here. Opening up after you've been hurt is genuinely hard. It takes courage. Real courage — not the fearless kind, but the kind where you're scared and you do it anyway.

Brené Brown says: "Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome."

No control over the outcome. That's the part that gets us every time, isn't it?

But here's what I've come to believe, in my own life and from walking alongside so many people in theirs: the risk of opening up is actually smaller than we think. And the cost of staying closed is actually bigger than we realize.

My friend Maya — the one I told you about at the beginning? She started therapy a while back. And she told me something recently that made me want to cry happy tears. She said: "I realized I was protecting a version of myself that didn't need protecting anymore. I'm not the person I was when I first got hurt. I've grown. I can handle more than I was giving myself credit for."

I think that's it right there. We build walls after we get hurt because the version of us who got hurt needed them. But we keep maintaining those walls long after we've become someone stronger, wiser, more whole. The walls don't know we've grown. Only we can decide to take them down — carefully, at our own pace, but intentionally.

Small Brave Steps (Because That's How This Works)

Opening your heart doesn't mean flinging the doors wide open and hoping for the best. It means making small, intentional choices to let people a little closer. Staying in a conversation that starts to feel real instead of deflecting with a joke. Telling someone you enjoyed spending time with them instead of playing it cool. Sitting with the discomfort of not knowing if someone likes you instead of preemptively deciding they don't.

Courage doesn't start big. It starts with one honest moment.

Here's something worth sitting with this week: Think about a relationship — romantic, friendship, even a new connection — where you've been holding back. Where you've been protecting yourself by keeping things at surface level. Ask yourself honestly: Am I keeping this person out because they've actually given me a reason not to trust them — or because I'm still running from something that happened a long time ago?

That's a brave question. But it's one worth asking.

You Deserve the Love You Keep Pushing Away

I want to close with this, because I think it's the most important thing:

The fact that you've been hurt doesn't mean you're broken. It means you were brave enough to love, even when it didn't work out. That's not a reason to stop being brave — that's evidence that you can do it.

Brené Brown writes: "Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity." Everything we actually want lives on the other side of the wall.

You don't have to tear the whole wall down at once. But maybe today, you let one brick come loose. Maybe you stay in the moment a little longer. Maybe you let someone see you — just a little bit more than you did yesterday.

That's emotional maturity. That's growth. And that, my loves, is how a filled cup gets even fuller.

— ✦ —

Did this resonate with you? I'd love to hear your story in the comments. 💛