How Can an INFJ Handle Rejecting Someone Who Confesses Their Love For Them?
In my post How Should an INFJ Respond to a Confession of Love?, I talk about how it will be necessary for INFJs to reject someone who has a crush on them if they don’t feel the same way. Since INFJs feel everything so deeply, this type of rejection can be especially hard for them. In this post, I offer advice on how to handle the situation.
6 Tips for INFJs Who Have to Reject Someone’s Love
Accept that this will be painful for both of you.
Rejection is hard. There’s no way around that. Whether we’re being rejected by a friend, a family member, or a potential love interest, it hurts to be rejected. That’s because we humans crave acceptance.
But the important thing to remember is, while rejection may hurt a lot initially, in the long-run it allows us to move forward. It’s hard to move forward when a door we wanted to see open hasn’t fully shut. But when we know it’s shut, we can have our mourning period, and then move on.
For INFJs, though, because of our deep empathy, we may feel we’re the one being rejected even when we’re doing the rejecting. In the case of rejecting someone who has made a love confession, this may cause us to do things like pretend we like someone we don’t (see #2) or avoid answering altogether (see #3).
When we do this, it may seem we’re trying to spare another person’s feelings, when really we’re trying to spare ourselves from feeling their pain when we reject them.
Don’t be fooled by the illusion that not being clear with your feelings is more merciful than being honest about them. To avoid thinking too much about how painful it will be to feel this person’s rejection, focus instead on the healing that will happen afterward.
When this person knows how you feel, it will sting temporarily, but this is the only way they will eventually be able to heal and move on. By not coming clean, you’re prolonging their suffering. Be the merciful healer you are and do your part to allow this person to heal.Don’t tell them you like them just to spare their feelings.
Since INFJs tend to be people-pleasers, if an INFJ is single when someone confesses their love for them, they may say they like this person even if they don’t have any romantic feelings for them.
“What’s the harm?,” they may think. It spares them from having to break someone’s heart and allows them to enter a romantic relationship.
While it’s possible that this type of relationship can eventually blossom into genuine romance, it’s never a good idea to start a relationship off with a lie. This is especially true for INFJs who yearn for authenticity.
If you’re not being authentic in a romantic relationship—one of the deepest relationships you will ever have—you’re derailing your efforts to achieve authenticity.
It’s also unfair to this person to pretend to have feelings for them when they have real feelings for you. The better thing to do is be honest. Tell them you don’t have feelings for them right now. But if you think you could someday, tell them that, too. More on that in #4.Don’t leave their confession indefinitely unanswered for the same reason as in #2.
Again, to avoid having to break this person’s heart, an INFJ may simply leave their confession unanswered. This is unwise. You definitely don’t want to answer right away if you’re unsure of your answer, but don’t wait forever to respond. It’s not fair to leave things open like that.
INFJs with low self-confidence or self-esteem may be especially prone to this nonresponse strategy. Being loved by someone may help them feel better about themselves even if they don’t feel anything more than friendship for the other person. This may cause them to avoid responding to their confession in an effort to prolong those loving feelings.
But, INFJs, letting someone love you when you don’t love them back is not the way to build your self-esteem or self-confidence. It may feel good at first, but it’s not sustainable.
If you don’t think you’ll ever reciprocate this person’s feelings, you have to give them a chance to move on. It may seem heartless to you to break another person’s heart, but in reality, the heartless thing is to leave someone without the closure they seek.If you think you could reciprocate someday, tell them that—but also let them know the likelihood of that happening.
As an INFJ, I know it’s not in you to be cruel for no reason. You may not have feelings for this person now, but if you feel in your heart that you could someday, don’t leave this person without that hope. This is one of the positive sides of unrequited love—the hope that your love interest may someday reciprocate.
Maybe you feel you need more time to get to know this person. Or maybe you like someone else or are used to liking people very different from them, so you’ve never tried to see them in this new light.
If you feel there’s potential for you to share a romantic relationship down the road, make sure they know that. And tell them how likely it is.
If you don’t feel the potential is strong, that may be all they need to move on—or hold on, depending on the strength of their emotions. Whether they hold on after you’ve made the potential clear is up to them. Just be honest about it.
But if you don’t like them that way now and don’t think you ever will, then…Avoid spending too much time with them.
Don’t say you don’t like this person and then continue to be a constant presence in their life. Depending on the circumstances of your relationship, it may not always be possible to avoid seeing them altogether. But limit the time you spend with them as much as you can.
And please don’t put them in the position of listening to you talk about your crushes and relationships and all the problems in your life. This person has feelings for you. Hearing you talk about all these things will only make them feel worse.
Every time you mention someone you like, they’ll be wishing that was them. And every time you mention a problem you’re facing, they’ll think how much they want to hold you or kiss you to make you feel better. But all this would be off-limits to them.
So, even if this person has been a good friend, you might have to stop spending so much time with them or talking to them so often if they have feelings for you that aren’t reciprocal. (And this counts time spent talking and interacting on social media.)
This is one reason people are reluctant to tell a friend they have feelings for them. If the feelings aren’t mutual, they don’t want to lose that bond they shared before those feelings were confessed.
Even so, it’s better for this person to get those feelings out there so they know once and for all if their feelings will ever be returned. If this does result in you losing your friendship, that’s still better than sustaining a friendship where one person harbors unreciprocated feelings for the other.
And maybe someday down the road you’ll be able to spend time together again—maybe when you both have a partner.
But if this person claims they can handle this shoulder-to-cry-on, unrequited love friendship, then far be it from me to stop them.Make your feelings clear.
When it comes to feelings, the clearer they come out the better. I know we INFJs have a tendency to overanalyze and overthink things, and feelings are no exception.
If we’re not already sure how we feel about this person who has just confessed, we may overthink and, thus, overcomplicate our feelings. This is something that may lead us to put off our response to their confession. But since we’ve already established that this is cruel, we’re trying to avoid this nonresponse.
What I’ve come to understand is, you can’t sort through feelings in your mind. You sort through feelings in your heart. Your mind can help you think logically and rationally about your relationship with this person. But when it comes to how you feel about them, you’re going to have to put logic and reason aside.
You know you’re comfortable with this person, not through logic, but through how you feel when you’re around them. When your heart pounds in your chest at the thought of them or whenever you see their name flash on your phone, that’s a feeling, that’s not reason. In fact, reason will often tell you to reject someone who doesn’t match your idea of what your potential partner should be like.
So, if you tell this person you need time to think, what you really mean is you need time to process your feelings. While reason and logic can, for example, help keep you from falling in love too deeply with someone you just met, they can get in the way of sorting through true feelings.
Before you tell this person how you feel, put reason and logic aside and feel what you feel for this person without thinking. Ironically enough, that’s when your feelings will come out the clearest.
Final Thoughts
I hope you never find yourself in a position to have to reject someone who has just told you they like you. But if you do find yourself in this awkward place, I hope these suggestions help.
Now I turn it to you. How do you think an INFJ should handle rejecting someone who has just confessed their love for them?
~ Ashley C.
Last updated: August 23, 2023