In a marriage or relationship, if your partner suddenly disappears for no reason, stops speaking to you, ignores your phone calls, does not reply your messages and avoids any form of contacts with you for weeks, months or even years, it is known as ghosting.
While ‘silent treatment’ may be mistaken for ghosting, silent treatment is a very usual occurrence in every relationship, unlike ghosting which is way darker and on another level.
It is understandable when a potential partner ghosts you, they suddenly stop speaking to you like they use to after the first date or few dates especially when sex has happened. They don’t want to tell you they have moved on. Their lame excuses always center on work pressure, deadlines, and travelling non-stop.
Most times, when a long-term partner starts to ghost you, it is their way of ending the relationship without facing the hard emotional work that comes with confronting and telling you the truth. They become busy 24 hours a day all of a sudden.
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They always have something more important they need to do. Even though it is true that people get unbelievably busy sometimes, but even on those busiest days, they always make out time for their partners through text messages or spare a minute to call their loved one at least.
Being ghosted is an awful side of a person you love and care about. If they eventually pick your call after ignoring it for a while, they promise to call back with no definite time or day and then take like forever to get back to you.
They reschedule your meeting with vague dates like ‘sometime next week’. This leaves you feeling like you did something wrong. Every avenue to reach or see them to get a closure is shut down.
It is possible you will see them on social media cracking jokes with online friends and chatting away, while they read and ignore your messages. Some even take it a notch higher by blocking you on all accessible social avenues.
Through their behaviour, it is obvious they no longer want you to reach them until they feel like it and they don’t in any way feel obligated to answer you.
If they eventually agree to speak with you or mistakenly run into you after days, weeks or even months of leaving you in the dark, they have this air of authority and arrogance without apologies.
They don’t put any efforts into the conversation. They just make it seem you don’t deserve any explanations because they don’t share same interests with you anymore. While their behaviour is noticeably different, they will deny anything is wrong with their strange behaviour.
However, we choose to look at it, it is mean, cowardly, agonizing and rude to ghost your partner even if the feeling is no longer there. This is not a single courtesy of polite rejection but a rude shutdown.
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Getting ghosted is worse than any break-up because you don’t have an idea of what you did wrong. If your partner ghosts you, you cannot change what happened, but you can do something about it.
Take charge of your own reaction to enable you find closure. Do not take their behaviour personal, even if you feel otherwise, choose to believe that their shutting you out has nothing to do with who you are or something you did. The person is just an immature coward.
They made a choice to not communicate with you any longer and that message clear enough. You deserve a better and mature person who knows the worth of communication in a relationship, no matter what. There is no point crying over split milk.
If after ghosting you, your partner resurfaces with apologies and wants you back, if you plan on taking them back, just be prepared for another heart-break because they will ghost you again. It’s what such people do best. They are terrible people with no empathy whatsoever. Learn from their actions and move on to avoid the risk of getting hurt again.
If your stock-in-trade is to ghost your partners rather than tell them it is over, quit acting as you like, learn to do the right thing because another human and their feeling is involved. Throwing caution to the wind when it comes to your bad habit can be injurious to everyone around you.
Your partner, friends and family may not want anything with you any longer, because they are sure they are wasting their time, energy, advice, love and attention on you since you are not acting right to stir their will to invest their love, trust, emotions in you.
Once you earn yourself a reputation for always ghosting your partners, they will never take you seriously again even when you finally claim you have met your soulmate.
As an adult, you must discipline yourself by acting in ways that will elicit trust from people making emotional investments in your life. Your attitude must make it easy for them to invest trust and love in you. Learn to communicate rather than shutting people out even if you no longer want them in your life.