Rejection hurts.

There is a lot of things that hurt in this world, but perhaps one of the most damaging of them is to be rejected, and by rejected I mean having your university application denied or not being accepted into the chess club, damn those assholes if I had just moved the Queen one space more....

But even worse then being rejected by the Chess club, is to be rejected by someone you like, specifically when you ask them out and they tell you that they can’t, wont or don’t even think about it.

That probably one of the worse feelings in the world, where you put your heart on the line, exposing your interest in someone and in return they give you that warm broken feeling only a blunt rejection can give.

I remember the last time I asked a girl out; She said no so fast you'd have thought I asked her for a kidney instead of a movie.

But getting rejected will happen, to all of us no matter what we do, it’s an inevitable fact of life, of course there are those gifted in life who get everything easy but who cares about those people anyway?

It’s when we are on the other side that rejection becomes an issue, being rejected hurts, but we learn from it, yet when someone asks us out, and we don’t want to go with them, now that’s a tough situation because then we are either in a situation of going with them on a pity date or we have to tell them we can’t, trying to give them some excuse.

Some situations are easy to reject, whenever a guy would ask me out I can just say " sorry dude, I’m straight"

This tactic doesn't work the other way around though, if girls asked me out I cant very well say I am straight can I? well I suppose I could but it doesn't really get me out of saying no to her.

It brings up the issue of when is it okay to lie to spare someone's feelings? what if we lie to them and they ask us again? Does it hurt more if we reject them the second time they ask? or does it sort of lessen the blow?

I myself am horrible at rejecting people, I get all nervous, my palms get sweaty, I try to avoid eye contact and I would end up saying something incredibly stupid.

Girl: so what are you doing after this?

Me: oh I don’t really have anything to do

Girl: so you wanna hang out?

Me: Oh I meant I don’t have anything to do here so I’ll...be going home :D

Girl: Hmm, you know maroon 5 are coming for a concert next week, want to come with me?
Me: sorry, I don’t like concerts
Girl: Well that’s okay, we can just go for dinner then?

Me: I don’t like eating..... either

She stopped calling me after that, I still wonder why :/

If rejection is a hard thing to face, rejecting others must be worse, because you've felt the pain of being told "No" so you know what the person in front of you feels, you also feel how bad it is to say no it just....Sucks.
Then again it's better to tell people no and hurt them for a little bit than say yes and lead them on, why give people hope when you have no interest in them? sure we might end up falling for people who like us and we don't feel the same way towards them initially but overall it's very unlikely and saying no early on just spares them a bigger heart break later.

So how do you guys tell people no? Do you lie? Tell them you're not interested? Make an excuse? Or *gasp* lead them on? I'm interested in learning how you'd deal with this... problem.