This Is What Happens When Someone Ghosts You

You won’t notice at first that you’re getting ghosted, because after years of unsuccessful dating, making excuses for the players on the other side of your text message screen has become second nature. We all have busy lives. Demanding jobs. Competing priorities. There’s no rule in the book that dictates the rate of reply before a first date. 

But when you meet someone new who exceeds your expectations, it’s easy to let your guard down. He’ll be communicative and consistent and thoughtful and warm. And although he’s canceled your first date once already, he’ll promise to make it up to you—this Sunday, same time and place. That’s why, when you haven’t heard from him like you had every day before then, you won’t think too much of it. 

Then, four hours before your date, you’ll start getting antsy. So you’ll ask him if he’s still on for tonight. 

Radio silence. 

Two hours later, you’ll write again, jokingly asking if it’s worth it to start doing your hair and makeup. Last time, you had already applied a full face before he told you he had been pulled into surgery. 

With every 15-minute interval that passes after that, you’ll imagine his alarm going off, waking him up from his midday nap, which is when he’ll surely write back apologetically, telling you that he’ll be on his way over soon. 

Glancing at your notifications will become an instinctive twitch, and your anxious heartbeat will quicken its pace as the minutes tick by. The window of time between your last message and his impending response grows larger. The timeline between now and your date is nearing the end of its rope. 

You’ll decide to call it at the 30-minute mark, telling yourself a story about how he must have slept through all his alarms. Eleven back-to-back hospital shifts will do that to a person. 

But you’re still not convinced, so you’ll scroll through your most recent texts to find any evidence of wrongdoing. Not on his part, of course. No, you’ll look for places you may have scared him off or asked for too much. 

Surprisingly, your records are clean. He’s just as excited to meet you as you are to meet him. He asks the same amount of follow-up questions as you do, and every day for the last five days, he’s been just as eager to stay up late chatting—in fact, he’s been the reason you haven’t kept to your bedtime all week. 

And yet, your activated attachment system starts to kick into overdrive, and you’ll begin alternating between brainstorming theories about what happened to him—“Maybe he died.” “Or maybe he’s been stuck underground with no cell service. Check the news!”—and succumbing to anxiety’s unrelenting grip on your nervous system. 

You’ll feel dizzy from the whiplash of this sudden change in his behavior. Your only tether to reality will be the assurances you tell yourself about how something catastrophic must have happened to him, and he couldn’t possibly shoot you a quick text to cancel. How could there be another, more reasonable explanation? The man you’ve gotten to know is kind and considerate. He’s the first person you’ve met online in a while who seems equally as excited about meeting you. Rationalizing this change in behavior in any other way just wouldn’t make sense. 

Eventually, you’ll fall into a restless sleep. Dreams of apologetic texts and more promises to make it up to you feel so real that your subconscious heart rate slows to a reasonable pace. But every time you wake up to compare dreams with reality, your phone screen comes up blank. 

In the morning, when he still hasn’t read your messages, you’ll genuinely begin to worry about his well being and send a third text laced with curious concern. That feeling is short lived, however, because you’ll find that he has just viewed your Instagram story. 

That’s when mixed feelings of hurt and confusion turn into breathless heaves of bewilderment. You now know he is actively ignoring you. That the man who apologized profusely for wasting your time two nights before has made the conscious decision to stand you up. And somehow, as if being treated like your feelings don’t matter wasn’t bad enough, you will begin to berate yourself for getting so invested in the first place. 

How could you get so emotional over a person you’ve never met? Why would you let yourself get attached to someone you matched with on a dating app only two weeks ago? He’s just a stranger. You don’t know him. He doesn’t owe you anything. 

Dear reader, everything you will feel when you get ghosted risks being belittled by what’s written in the paragraph above, particularly the last sentence, “He doesn’t owe you anything.” That’s the problem with modern dating, says this weary 25-year-old. When you meet someone online, it’s easy for people to write you off. When it all goes wrong, they’ll tell you that what happened between you and that person is null and void because it happened online. So, he saw your Instagram story. So what? 

When they do that, they make it easy for the person who hurt you to walk away without remorse, and for the jury of public opinion to reduce your experience to a few conversations with a stranger. 

We seem to forget that there are two humans on either side of that internet connection. And he’ll conveniently forget it too. He’ll act as though you meant nothing to him. You’ve been reduced to a series of words on a screen that have been blipped away with a swipe and delete. 

Tell me, why are libelous claims and evidence of harassment valid when found on the internet, but not the heartbreak, crushed hopes, and unreciprocated feelings of a hopeless romantic?

The truth is—and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise—whether you met online and spent days and nights texting, or you met in person and spent days and nights talking, your exchanges were intimate. They were real, and you assumed his kindness was too. 

You made real-life connections, spoke about real-life experiences, and planned real-life activities you would do together when the time came. You’d spend real money to enter real movie theaters and buy real food and drinks at real taco trucks and karaoke bars. You had real thoughts and real feelings that, although intangible, now produce real tears when you wonder what you did to make it all go wrong. 

When the hope of an impending relationship suddenly flatlines, I want you to know it’s okay for you to feel like the world has stopped turning on its axis. You’ll be left desperately hanging onto any bit of reality you can, and that will be difficult, because when he unfollows you on Instagram and removes you from his follower’s list, unmatches you on Bumble, and finally leaves your messages on “read,” all you will have is a series of words on screen that apparently meant nothing anyway.

Except it did to you. 

So, don’t be afraid to feel. Mourn the idea of him, even though it feels stupid and pathetic. Grieve what could have been, because you wanted it to. Notice the absence of his notifications lighting up your phone screen. And even though it seems counterintuitive to be angry, to feel the waves of regret crash over you when you’re reminded of him, remember that you deserve better. Even the bare minimum of an explanation would have sufficed. Left without it, your mind—and your emotions—can and will run wild.