Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by a ghoster.
Being ghosted sucks. The process puts you through an entire gamut of emotions that you have to work your way through. (If my experience is any indication, it becomes easier to deal with the more often it happens…which is the most depressing thing I’ve typed in quite some time.)
Here are some of the stages you go through while dealing with being ghosted on.
1. Realization. You go for a while without hearing from the person you’ve been going out with. This, despite the fact you had a good time and you feel like he or she did too. You send a message or two and don’t get a response. They continue to maintain radio silence, and at a certain point you realize that it’s happening—that this person may want to end things and is going to attempt to do so without having any sort of conversation about it or even letting you know. They’re going to ghost.
2. Shock or disbelief. You wonder something like, "Who does this? Who ghosts?" Then you think, "Why me?" Even if you’ve done it to someone before, or if it’s not your first time as the victim, or if you know full-well that it happens to people every day, there’s still a part of you that is shocked its happening, right now it seems, to you.
3. Denial Disbelief leads to denial. You begin to concoct reasons and excuses for a person to have vanished from your inboxes.
Maybe they’re really busy with work and all of that stuff. Maybe they’re playing hard to get (but then you realize you’ve sent the past five messages and garnered zero responses). Maybe they were at a pool party with friends over the weekend and some jerk threw them into the swimming pool even though everybody knows that in the age of cell phones that’s not a cool thing to do at all. So now they don’t have a cell phone and just haven’t gotten around to letting you know via some form of social media, which they should be able to find you on pretty easily because they know your last name and all. Maybe there has been some kind of family crisis and they’re off the grid because of that. Who even knows? Maybe they’re dead. They’d have certainly texted you by now if they weren’t dead or something close to dying, right?
You think you’re overreacting, that they’re bound to reach out very soon.
4. Anger. This stage comes on the heels of denial—when you conclude that, no, they are not going to reach out soon. "Who the hell do they think they are?" you seethe, as you begin dreaming up heinous plans to ruin their life or at least shame them in some way. Because, you know, people shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this stuff! You think about maybe trying to sleep with one of their friends and hope that they never get another date again for as long as they live. You think briefly about texting them and calling them out on their shit, then pretending you never wanted to be with them or cared about them in the slightest, anyway. Maybe you have a few drinks and then you actually do text them all kinds of mean things about their shortcomings, real or imagined.
(One time when I was in this stage, I sent a woman a VENMO request: $50 for "emotional damages incurred due to cowardice." She didn’t respond.)
6. Guilt. You start to wonder if maybe he or she isn’t out of his or her mind for ghosting on you—that maybe you did something that made them not want to be with you. What if you came on too strong? What if you didn’t seem interested enough? What if you picked a terrible place for one of your dates? What if you’re not a great kisser? You feel guilty about your perceived (and likely not even real) shortcomings, and this is compounded by the guilt you feel about wishing ill on them during the anger stage.
7. Depression. This one—in my experience, anyway—can be the toughest to get over because it tends to be the easiest to stay steeped in. Thoughts start to creep in where you wonder why you weren’t good enough for this boy or girl who has broken your heart by literally, actively doing nothing at all. And you wonder if anyone will really love you. In your depressed state, you can’t stand to put a lot of emotional bandwidth toward considering that question (and you’re worried about what the results would be if you did), so you instead crawl onto the couch or into bed and do a little bit of weeping and a lot of binge-watching and binge-eating. (Pro-tip from the serially ghosted: Dumplings tend to help in some small way.)
8. Acceptance. A time will come when you accept that you’ve been ghosted on by some jerk who, let’s be honest, didn’t deserve you anyway. Once you give it a little thought, you’ll conclude that this happens to everyone these days and isn’t that big a deal at all. And, more importantly, you’ll realize that it’s the ghoster’s loss, not yours—that there’s no good in lamenting the fact that it didn’t work out or worrying about why it didn’t because the truth of the matter is that anyone worth his or her salt in the long run would never even think about vanishing without an explanation for having done so. You can do better than someone who can’t even contact you about why they don’t think you should see each other anymore.
This is when you get back out there, knowing you might be ghosted again—but that every time it happens, it’s just another step toward finding something more meaningful.
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