Fall is here which means that the inevitable “cuffing season” is right around the corner. With this brings along the horrible habit of ghosting. How do you bounce back from being ghosted and, maybe the harder task, how do you avoid ghosting someone?
The simplest way to avoid ghosting: don’t cut off all communication at once.
Be honest with that person. If you don’t feel a connection, tell them. Its cuffing season for goodness gracious, they need to have time to potentially find someone else.
It’s not like I’m are asking you to pretend that you like them. All you need to do is say “Hey you are cool, but I don’t really feel a connection,” whether it be verbally or over text. You don’t even have to say that you want to be friends with them. You aren’t breaking up with them, you are simply telling an acquaintance the truth.
Ghosting happens when you’re too afraid of a potential conflict. Ghosting is intentionally hurting someone else, but it may be hurtful to you as well. Our brains are wired to feel sympathy for individuals that are hurting, so we can’t avoid it. You can’t just avoid the situation … it’s happening whether you like it or not.
We live in a time where it is ‘cool’ to have poor communication skills, not only in the literal sense (e.g. not responding at all and waiting hours before responding to show the recipient you don’t care too much), but also in terms of expressing our feelings. Most people that are ghosting others are focused more on this than anything else.
It should also be noted that it doesn’t make you an awful person if you ghost someone, just do it gently and with good communication and respect for the other persons feelings.
If you have been ghosted and you are dealing with the pain, recognize that it probably isn’t your fault. Is it going to hurt? Yes. Will you eventually find someone else that actually treats you with respect? Heck yes. Don’t blame yourself for what went down, odds are it wasn’t entirely your fault.
Another tip, talk to your friends about it. This isn’t necessarily a free pass to complain about this person all-day, every day for the next four months, just have a conversation about what happened and be open to the advice that your friends may give you.
Another key factor into getting over the individual is to understand that they didn’t necessarily ghost you to be cruel and mean, but because they were scared of feeling pain themselves. Yes, this is the weak approach to taking care of business, but they rationalized by convincing themselves it would be the best possible solution so that you wouldn’t be hurt.
Let this moment of fragility and pain be a learning experince for you. Understand your own self-worth and figure out who you are as a person. Grow in your own confidence so that if something like this ever happens again you will be able to quickly bounce back. Another thing, you don’t need to be in a relationship. There is no rule anywhere that says in order to be happy you must be in a romantic relationship. Surround yourself with friends that care about you and you will experince so much joy that you won’t even remember that person that ghosted you two months ago on Instagram.
Moral of the story, if you’ve been ghosted, maybe it’s for a reason. If you are doing the ghosting, think about the other person’s feelings before cutting them off all at once.
