Ok, so virtually everyone knows about my fear of rejection. I think I just stumbled upon the reason for it...

Back in 2001, I was asked to accompany the daughter of the pastor of the church I was going to, to prom. Seeing no problem in it, and given the fact that I kinda liked her anyhow, I decided to go. The days between when she asked me and when the prom actually was, we spent lots of time together, just sitting and talking. I had never talked with someone like that before: As we talked, the hours seemed to disappear. One evening, we even talked until way past midnight. Our parents both went looking for us, and we were just sitting on the back of our vehicles at the church, talking.

After we went to prom, there seemed to be a question that needed to be asked... "I have a question for you", I said, "I think we can be more than friends and I'd really like to take it up a notch. Would you like to change our status to something more than friends?"... She sat there in my truck, so silent that as I was driving, I wondered if she was still even in the truck. She agreed with my suggestion for the future, and we ended up being known as "boyfriend and girlfriend".

After about 2 months had passed, we spent lots of time together. I was there to help her move out when she decided she didn't want to live with her parents anymore. That was a very rough time for her and her parents, and her leaving home was not on good terms at all. Needless to say, she didn't even spend a night in the apartment I had helped her move all of her stuff to. My mom talked with her and asked her to stay at our house on the spare mattress on the floor in my sister's room. The next morning, she wanted to call her dad at work to talk to him. I didn't do anything more than hand her the telephone, and within minutes, her dad was there to take her home.

I spoke with her dad at a church gathering one day after that, and he said she asked him if he was mad at me for helping her move out. He told me his response was, "No. I would be furious with him if he hadn't helped you move out."

Shortly thereafter, things just all of a sudden turned sour. I had no idea what the reason was, and I just went with it. She used the excuse that she was leaving for college and that she couldn't handle a long distance relationship.

After a couple months had passed and I had moved on to a new job, I went back to the place I had worked when I was dating her, and one of the guys confronted me. He asked me if I was mad at her for anything, and if I had some agression that I needed to take out. He reassured me that he was not making any judgement, and that he was just looking out for me. He then informed me that my ex-girlfriend's dad, who also worked at this place, had been talking to the guy there in the shop about something that she had said. Somehow, someway, she said something that lead her parents to believe that I had hit her, or physically hurt her in some way.

I confronted her about this after trying to get some more info about it from other people, friends of her's and friends of my own. Nearly everyone I went to before going to her had shut me out and told me that they would not believe me, only her. When I confronted her about it, she said that a night that I had grabbed her arm when she was playfully hitting me that I scared her and she knew of no other way to react. She then went on to say that what she had told her parents was misunderstood and that she did not say that I had hit her at any time.

During the time I was trying to resolve this little conflict, I received the "cold-shoulder" treatment from nearly everyone in the community, including the cashiers at the local grocery store. This continued even after I had confronted her and found out what had happened.

To this day, certain people will not talk to me, and certain employees at local businesses will pass me over as if I am not there, all because of this situation. Yes, we have resolved it, forgave each other, and we've both moved on.

You may be thinking as you read this, "Moved on? HA! You're going on and on about it!". News flash, it is a realization that I am as shy and introverted about a relationship because I've been scared by this past experience. I am afraid that if I am accepted into a relationship that something similar will happen. Everyone who knows me knows that I am far from a violent person. I don't even playfully hit people, because I don't know if that person that I'm "hitting" or if a bystander will take it as a full fledged hit and label me as a physically violent person.

So in conclusion(I stole that from a video we watched in speech class today), my fear of rejection is a result of a semi-traumatic experience from a previous relationship.