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The Problem With Ghosting

Personal Experience

By Isabelle AnnePublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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A few months ago, I started seeing this guy who I really seemed to click with. It was right at the beginning of my first year of university and I was ready to try some new things. We started hanging out a few times a week and even though it really wasn’t anything serious, I obviously started getting attached at a certain point. Besides meeting up three to four times a week, we would text continuously throughout the day, almost non-stop. I was really trying hard not to get my hopes up or get too attached, but I just thought that we got along extremely well. I’m usually quite a shy person, especially around boys, but with him, I never felt one ounce of shyness, even when we slept together the first time. We could hold up a conversation for hours and it was always really interesting. I like a guy who’s intelligent and with whom I can actually have a real conversation, so he really felt like a perfect match for me. I have kind of a fear of commitment and I’m not usually very good at being in a serious relationship, so what we had was actually quite perfect for me because I didn’t really have to commit to anything. However, after three months of seeing each other, I started liking him a lot more than at the beginning and that’s when I realized that I could maybe see myself being in a more serious relationship with him. At that time, we were nearing the end of the semester and the Christmas break was almost there. I would then be returning to my parents while he would do the same, about 5-6 hours away. I started thinking that maybe I would invite him over during the break, or maybe I could visit him at some point, but that is when the ghosting started. A few days before he was supposed to leave, I could feel that he was a bit more distant than usual, but I didn’t really think much of it. On the day he left, I didn't get any news from him until I asked him how his train ride went and he answered me with barely a sentence. A bit later, I sent him a few messages to see how he was doing and I never got an answer from him. So basically, after three months of texting almost every day, he had ghosted me. I obviously quickly got the message and didn’t send any more texts, but I was quite hurt and pissed. My roommate told me that maybe he had stopped texting me because he was busy with his family, but I was also busy and I would have taken the time to text him! Since our relationship wasn’t really serious, to begin with, I understood his need for maybe a break or something, but I really wished that he would have had the decency to at least tell me. It might have hurt more at that moment, but then at least I would know for sure that he wasn’t going to contact me later. By him not answering my messages, I was kind of left hanging and I wasn’t sure if that was really the end or if he would talk to me again. My whole Christmas break I was always hoping that he would send me a message, but he never did. He would look at my stories on Snapchat and Instagram and like my pictures on Instagram but never any text. I wasn’t extremely sad or anything, but obviously, it sucks to be ignored like that and I know very well that ghosting is something that I would never do. Some people think that it’s fine to just ignore somebody instead of acting like a grown up and talking to that person in real life. Giving someone false hope like that is really not acceptable and if you are not ready to grow up and face your problems, then maybe relationships are not for you just yet.

The problem with ghosting is that you give somebody false hope and that person might expect an answer for quite a long time. It can be very heavy for the heart to be waiting for a text for weeks when the other person has just decided that instead of making their intentions very clear, they would just ignore it and cut all contact. In my case, I am still thinking of him even though the new semester has already started and I’m always very stressed about meeting him on campus because I really don’t know how I should act with him. I just feel like if he had told me very clearly that he didn’t want to see me anymore, I could have moved on to other things a lot quicker and with a lot less pain.

Ghosting is never the solution when ending a relationship, whether it is a serious one or not. It is always better to tell someone if you are not really feeling the relationship or if you need a break because just ignoring someone can really affect them negatively for quite a long time. When you don't really know why somebody just stopped talking to you out of nowhere, you begin to ask yourself 'what did I do wrong?' And in a lot of those cases, you really didn't do anything wrong and the fault lies solely with the person who was too childish to tell you the truth. This can affect your future relationship because you might always wonder if the person you are seeing at the moment will just stop talking to you out of nowhere. It is very hard then to build trust in a relationship if you are always on your guard.

I am now actively trying to forget this boy and concentrating on school and on my friends, but it is a lesson to be learned. Next time, I'll make sure to make my feelings known a bit sooner and speak up if I think somebody is ghosting me so that it never happens again. Don't be scared to let the person know if you think they are starting to ghost you because they should be able to tell you if there is a problem and not take the easy way out, which is ignoring you.

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