Friday, February 3, 2017

Ghosting is the New Black

Ghosting: the practice of ending a personal relationship with somebody by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.

I'm going to let you into the shittier side of online dating. The bit when you put all your time and energy into something working, when all you're left with is unanswered texts and many, many quesions.

I've spoken before about needing a thick skin when it comes to online dating - it certainly isn't for the feint hearted and this experience is one of those times. 

This post is for all the single ladies out there who have been ghosted by a guy.

As the description at the beginning suggests, ghosting is when someone cuts all contact without any "it's not you, it's me" bullshit.

My most recent ghosting incident happened on NYE. 

Let me set the scene: I'd been chatting (by this I mean texting) to this FIFO worker for two weeks and we'd tentatively planned to catch up on New Year's Day before he went back to work.

We'd been messaging up until NYE night when, bam, nothing. Two weeks of messages and then radio silence.

He cut contact without an explanation or a simple I'm just not that into you text. I mean we all hide behind text messages as it is - so this wouldn't have been any different.

At first I was pissed off - I'd invested a lot of time and energy in this guy. I mean texting every day for two weeks with someone you barely know. It takes determination and a lot of question asking!

I stupidly thought we were both on the same page and were keen to meet each other in the flesh.

Oh was I wrong.

Somewhere along the line he thought it would be okay to stop all contact with me and that would be okay.

And you know what? I wanted to send him a message and tell him what I thought about him not having any regard for my feelings or at least have the decency to be honest and say he didn't want to meet up.

It took all my self control (and when it comes to this I usually don't have much) not to message because at the end of the day he didn't reply to my other messages about where we were going to meet on New Year's Day so why would this message be different?

I'd just be this psycho girl sending him crazy texts and he'd feel better that he'd made the right decision, or dodged a bullet, blah blah blah.

You might remember the last time I was ghosted back in August 2015 with a guy I'd been seeing for a few weeks.

I remember haggling him for a couple of weeks when he finally did return my texts and all I wanted to know was why? And his response of "I just wasn't feeling it" didn't make me feel any better.

So this time I decided to be the bigger person and let it slide. I didn't message this guy, look at his online profile. Hell, I haven't even facebook-stalked him since.

He doesn't deserve anymore of my time if he thinks he can treat a woman like that. The whole time I kept thinking, what would his mum say if she knew her son treated women like this?

I was talking to a colleague at work and she said to me he's 36, there's no way he's going to change his behaviour now.

How right you are. But I can change the way I act. I will be the better person. Water off a duck's back - repeat after me - water off a duck's back.

So I did the grown up thing and deleted his details from my phone (incuding all 993 text messages) and when I 'unmatched' with him on POF I chose the 'inappropriate offline behaviour' reason.

One small step for me, one giant leap for woman kind.