Thursday, May 4, 2017

Ghosting

I've been out in the dating pool again... yep, it's been difficult for me to get out there and start trusting people after so long, but I'm doing it.

I'm in it for happiness, for the company of another human being... to connect with somebody else. Is that so bad? Well, I didn't think so.

And so, I connected with somebody, and we met up away from my place at first. We got along really well - had so many things in common. Both of us loved to read, home-cooked meals and enjoyed just talking about everything. We both loved retro things as well... it was great!

After three dates, I thought we were going to head out somewhere once we got into a rhythm of hanging out. But I guess it wasn't meant to happen... after all, this person just vanished into thin air on me.

This person did what is commonly called 'ghosting'. It's the gutless way of getting out of dating somebody you've grown away from. It's disappearing from a person's life completely. What you do - if you're going to be the complete arsehole about this - is unfriend them stop all communications; but do it gradually. Tell the person trying to keep the lines of communications open some useless detail about your life that has nothing to do with what's going on with your dating life - like what I received: 'I'm doing a deep oil treatment'. Exactly what that's got to do with anything I'm not sure. I asked if I had done anything wrong, and I got that as a last message. For a week, I had absolutely zero clue that I was being dumped by some gutless person who was ghosting on me.
Then the next thing you do is unfriend that person you were dating from Facebook... but do it at a time of the day you know they won't be on there for a while, so they won't notice for about week that you're gone from there, not until they don't see your posts and haven't seen your name up on their Friends list for a while. It took me about a week or so to figure out this person had ghosted on me, because one of my friends on Facebook told me about it; then I started Googling and found out it's a real thing.

Exactly how gutless do you have to be to not want to sit down and talk to somebody about where you see - or don't see - the relationship going. No matter how hard it is, you have to actually face reality and do this at some point in your life and not run away from people, disappearing from their lives, when things get too hard or heavy, or when the relationship isn't going where you were thinking it might be.

I was brought up to have the heart-to-heart with people and let them know what I'm thinking - in person - and respect them enough to keep them in the loop of knowing my life isn't going in the same direction as theirs. But when someone is being an arsehole and does this to me, I wonder exactly how much they really respect me... how they were brought up and wonder who they've done this before? I mean, surely I'm not the only person this person has done it to, right?

And if 'ghosting' is the 'in' thing to do to people during dating, what are we showing our next generation of kids? That's it's okay to vanish from a person's life and disrespect them by not telling them there's a problem in the relationship? Is this where the world is going? Are our kids going to just dump people by 'switching off' and 'ghosting' on everyone they don't like because it's convenient and easy? If so, our world isn't going to be an easy one for them. We must teach them how to face up to people, talk and communicate properly and learn that there's consequences to their actions - and ghosting on people isn't the absolute and right solution to social problems in life. Talking it out is - and has always been - the right way of dealing with people... well, that's how I was taught by my parents.

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