Ghosting Sucks But Sometimes, You Have No Choice

I know, I know: ghosting is a really disgusting thing to do to someone. I’ve been ghosted and I know how much it sucks, but I’ve also been on the other side of the fence. A guy I dated really made me feel like ghosting was the only acceptable way of dealing with him. Here’s how it all went down and why I don’t regret it:

  1. Something felt off from the very first date. My gut was telling me that there was just something “off” about this guy, but I couldn’t put my finger on it after the first date, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and dated him some more. By date number three, the guy was getting jealous because the waiter was being very charming to me. Then he was talking about how much he liked me and that we had met for a reason… um, can you say clingy?
  2. I gave him way too many chances. I didn’t just go ahead and ghost the guy. By date four, he was already acting like my boyfriend, texting me to see where I was and asking me about guys who’d “liked” my posts on Facebook. I started to feel like he was way too jealous and possessive for me. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to see this guy again, and I tried to tell him.
  3. I told him I wasn’t looking for anything serious. Okay, I’m not that great with breaking up. I didn’t want to tell the guy that I thought he was creepy AF, so I sugar-coated it and told him that I wasn’t on the hunt for a relationship. I thought that would be enough to give him the hint, but instead. he actually became more intense.
  4. I decided to slow-fade him. He continued messaging me even after I told him I didn’t want a relationship. I couldn’t deal, so I tried to slowly fade out of his life, just to give him a bigger hint that I wasn’t interested and we’d said our goodbyes. I texted him less and less and didn’t reply to his missed calls or social media messages in a hurry.
  5. I was a little unsure about his mental state. Ghosting can make someone go crazy. Since I was worried about how this clingy, desperate guy was going to react to me going AWOL, I decided to test it out a bit by slowly fading from his life.
  6. He couldn’t take a hint from the beginning. Instead of getting the hint from my slow fade attempt, the guy became even clingier! He boosted his efforts to text and call me. It was just too much. Instead of giving me some breathing room, he was becoming suffocating. He said he’d love to see me again and that he would change my mind about relationships. No. Just no.
  7. I wanted to avoid a real confrontation. I know it’s the decent thing to tell someone you don’t want to see them anymore and perhaps even tell them how they’re the problem, but I couldn’t help but think that that would be a bad idea with a guy like this. He hadn’t even cared about my reasons the first time. Plus, when someone is so intense, it makes me scared. I back away.
  8. We’d only been dating for over a month, so what I did wasn’t THAT bad. I know ghosting is wrong, but it’s not like I did it after a year of dating this guy. We’d only been dating for a few weeks, really, so we were still in the casual stage… even though he was acting like we were married (which was one of the reasons I had to GTFO ASAP).
  9. I didn’t want to give him hope, so icing him out was my only option. It might sound crazy to say that being even clearer about how I didn’t want a relationship or him would give him hope, but it was a valid concern for me at the time. I mean, if the guy was becoming clingier the more I pulled back, he might’ve actually seen a confrontation as hope because I was still willing to talk to him. Clearly, this guy didn’t understand the word “no,” so ghosting was my only option.
Giulia Simolo is a writer from Johannesburg, South Africa with a degree in English Language and Literature. She has been working as a journalist for more than a decade, writing for sites including AskMen, Native Interiors, and Live Eco. You can find out more about her on Facebook and LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter @GiuliaSimolo.
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