Someone I was texting once told me I had “volcel energy” — as in voluntary celibate, as in the stolid aura of a woman who doesn’t bother to fuck. This is a hilarious but horrible thing to hear from a person with whom you’ve been flirting. Shortly after, during one of our regular bedtime conversations, they found it opportune to complain about a previously unmentioned girl they’d been sexting. Well, damn. It’s not that I wanted to escalate from the talking stage, necessarily, but I was slightly miffed to be passed over for consideration.
They were a temporary figure in my life, a minor pen pal aggrandized by pandemic boredom. But their remark has haunted me these last few years as I confront the irrational squeamishness toward dating I’ve exhibited on and off since college. For the bulk of my 20s, I’ve been single, borderline hyperindependent — qualities that intensified when an ill-advised relationship forced me to interrogate whether I had actually loved the people I’d dated or just loved the satisfaction of following an easy romantic script. In a dream world, the perfect person would suddenly materialize, and we’d slowly sink into the warm bath of emotional-intellectual-sexual companionship. Instead, I have to submit myself to the marketplace of desire. I have to be on apps. When I consider facing an abstract mass of strangers calculating my attractiveness, seizing on minuscule quirks that tilt the hot-or-not dial — all for the meager reward of trading biographical info for an hour at a neutral third location — I can’t help but think this is a colossal waste of time. Worse than confronting everyone else’s superficial judgments is remembering I’m no more enlightened than them. “We cannot know each other … A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form,” goes a Janet Malcolm insight that I often text to my friends, who’ve since banned me from texting about Janet Malcolm.
I’m being dramatic. Maybe you relate. Romantic fatalism is the air, and it defines Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte’s blazingly perceptive new short-story collection surveying loneliness’s rock bottom. The book’s protagonists have familiar troubles. Like the millions of Hinge burnouts flocking to running clubs, or the attachment-theory freaks rubbing Reddit’s crystal ball to demystify avoidants, they crave real connection. But they can’t find it. “All she wants is some credible vouchsafing of love and admiration from one non-horrible man who finds her interesting and attractive and good,” Tulathimutte writes of a character named Alison, a lonely 30-something whose modest plea to the universe goes unanswered. She clings so tightly to a one-off hook-up with her best friend that she drives him away, seeking reassurance from her group-chat girlies, whose empty-calorie friendship seems better than nothing. To fill the void, she adopts an aggressive raven named Pootie. He eventually sends her to the E.R., as if the male species hasn’t caused her enough pain already.
Rejection’s characters struggle with the lot they’ve been assigned in a social regime whose rules feel impossible to master. Unable to find their way, they become disillusioned with polite society: “In this pocket universe, the world seemed to molt its civilized plumage, which it wore to hide the blood and shit, to pretend it had an essence beyond carnage,” observes Bee, a gender-nonconforming hermit who numbs themselves watching online gore. Every single person is issued the same reassurances: that they’ll find their people, that the One will swoop in when they least expect it. It’s a nice fiction, this Norman Rockwell vision of a society in which everyone is provided for — all citizens afforded universal basic love and esteem. But the discomfiting reality is that care is distributed unequally, structured by money, location, beauty, and just plain luck.
The book opens with “The Feminist,” which n+1 published in 2019 and which became the magazine’s most-read piece of fiction. It follows an effeminate social-justice short king, later identified as a Stanford grad named Craig, whose strenuous efforts at sensitivity don’t help him overcome his humiliating sexlessness. As a teenager, he’s happy to be the nonthreatening guy best friend to girls. But he’s awakened to some rude realities in college: “Learning in high school about body positivity and gender norms and the cultural construction of beauty had led him to believe that adults aren’t obsessed with looks … that turns out to be untrue.” Having trained himself to listen to women, he questions whether he can trust what they say they want, witnessing friends who say men are trash keep dating the trashest men of all.
You can smell the rancid odor emitting from the Feminist, a sinister logic under his “nice-guy” facade. And he’s deluded. Girls are down horrendously bad for the “medium ugly,” the golden-retriever gamers, rodent men, and rizzless dweebs who’ve never felt a woman’s touch. (As the philosopher Amia Srinivasan points out, men’s-rights activists tend to ignore how patriarchy “makes even supposedly unattractive categories of men attractive … Can we imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating ‘mom bod?’”) But however reprehensible he may be — sure enough, he becomes blackpilled on men’s-rights forums — there’s something real and profound about his anxieties. His frantic search for sexual experience reminds me of late-blooming queers who worry how they’ll ever have gay sex if no queer their age wants to have sex with rookies. It’s a double indignity: the shame not just of undesirability but of thrusting their incompetence onto others. And Craig is not the first people pleaser who has furiously modulated their identity to match what they assume other people want, only to be accused of tediousness and insincerity.
Call it a skill issue. Rejection’s characters flounder so badly it’s hard to witness. But it’s not just the easily-villainizable beta males who’ve become dejected, spinning themselves in circles, baffled by social cues. We live in the midst of a “loneliness epidemic” where kids Zoom-schooled during COVID struggle with basic social etiquette and everyone’s social circles, but men’s especially, are dwindling to the point that news outlets are announcing a “friendship recession.” Women break down on TikTok about their chronic singleness, a problem that’ll only compound for heterosexuals as the ideological divide between genders deepens. Many now abstain from dating and sex completely — one dating-app poll reported that 64 percent of Gen-Z Black women identify as celibate, for example — trying to sort through what they actually desire and what they’re socially trained to want.
For Rejection’s characters, and the intimacy starved in the real world, it’s about finding not just anybody but someone curious and patient enough to try to understand you in all your complexity. Even the allegedly most privileged — to the book’s resentful characters, it’s petite Asian woman like me — question whether the interest they receive is a sham, the product of crude projection. Bee, tired of being perceived based on their race and gender, tries to reject identity and other people entirely. Alison meets a wealthy tech bro who’s “bananas AF” (his words) for her but essentially sees her as a breeding vessel. I’ve experienced the paralysis that Kant, a newly out Asian American gay guy traumatized by childhood bullying, feels on the apps: horror at my own vanity, complicit in a fucked-up system. “It is a cairn of shames,” he thinks, “not only the first-order shame of the straight gaze, under which his self-worth was based on their social norms, but the second-order shame of wanting to cater to these norms despite knowing better,” and so on. Once you start interrogating the politics of your desire, go down the wormhole of “compulsory heterosexuality,” for example, it’s only a few steps toward wondering on what basis you’re attracted to anyone at all.
Like the cast-offs of Rejection, I have preemptively pushed people away under the belief that I was doing them a service and reacted as though the “full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy.” I have experienced bad depressive episodes in which I’ve become addicted to my own misery, rescued only by pharmaceutical intervention (Alison’s “friend” is right: Lexapro, Wellbutrin, and therapy are a life-changing combination). So I see, in Rejection, some really pathetic individual behavior — a raven? really? — but also evidence of societal failure. The characters have almost no emotional safety net. It’s revealed that Kant’s father, presumably one of his only male role models, died by suicide, and Kant supposedly has a few pals to whom he emails his coming-out statement, but they never appear in the text. Craig’s female friends, “who always maintained that romantic love was overrated, who said friendships were what mattered in the end,” withdraw into coupledom and intensify the myth that a person is broken without romance. A similar thing happens to Alison, whose married cousins and colleagues never attend her bar-hang birthdays. Tulathimutte is an acute chronicler of contemporary loneliness. It’s scary how precisely he re-creates a certain type of group chat, bound by gossip and witty displays of onlineness, which are only tenable if you don’t mistake the intensity of communication for proof of genuine commitment.
I’m lucky to have close friends who tell me when I’m being ridiculous and point out the elaborate intellectual justifications I create around what is really a fear of getting hurt. In Rejection, we learn that Kant’s ex-boyfriend Julian was also bullied in high school, but, because he is six years younger, “enjoyed the crucial lifeline of social media.” The education and camaraderie Julian received online is presumably part of the reason why he comes off as so well adjusted, and why embarrassment during sex (“a hemorrhoid thing”) doesn’t crust into shame. Is it naïve of me to wonder what would happen if Kant had grown up in a later generation, with access to gay elders, TV programs like Sex Education, and trusted sites to explore kink? If being Asian didn’t automatically mark someone as a pariah, and if he and Bee, his sibling, weren’t instinctively hardwired to distrust others? That wouldn’t resolve everything, but it might allow them the faith to inch forward. My life is so much different, and better, than what I could have imagined as a teenage normie in suburban Texas, thanks in part to the queer friends I’ve made as an adult who have helped me write a new narrative for myself. “Rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite,” Tulathimutte writes. “For a rejection to be settled, first you—the reject—must hear, and comprehend, and accept.”
