Why Being Ghosted Feels So Brutal

Hi, I’m Amanda. Welcome to my blog, where I share online dating advice, tips, tricks, and strategies, all based on my professional training and personal experience.

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You’ve gone on four dates with someone, and the dates have gone WELL. The chemistry is there, the conversation flows, and you have quite a bit in common. You’re starting to allow yourself to get excited and hopeful, thinking maybe this time you’ve finally found someone to be in an actual relationship with.

It’s a Wednesday, and you start thinking ahead to the weekend. You text the person, asking them if they want to grab dinner Friday night, eagerly awaiting their response.

You start feeling a bit anxious when you don’t hear anything back by Wednesday night. This person usually doesn’t take longer than a few hours to respond, so this is unusual for them. Maybe they’re just busy, you think.

Thursday comes around, and you still haven’t heard back. Now you have a pit in your stomach, as your brain starts running a million miles per hour. Why haven’t they texted you back yet??

Now it’s Friday morning, and still nothing. You text them again Friday afternoon, checking in to see if they got your previous text. You try to seem casual and nonchalant, even though your insides are churning and you feel like you could throw up at any second.

It’s now Friday night, and it’s crickets.

Saturday, still nothing.

Sunday comes around, and you’re panicking. WTF is going on???

You send another text the next week asking if everything is okay. Asking the person to just let you know what’s going on one way or the other, even if it means they don’t want to go out again. At this point, you just want the misery of not knowing to end, even if it’s bad news.

The end of the week comes around. You feel sick. Defeated. Demoralized.

The reality hits: you’ve been ghosted.

Ghosting is particularly brutal for our human brains because they love certainty, and they hate ambiguity. When an ambiguous or uncertain situation arises, our brains will try to create certainty around the situation, even if there’s none to be found. This sometimes means that we come to false conclusions that we think will make us feel better, even though they ultimately make us feel much worse.

Being ghosted sucks no matter what, but there are ways of dealing with it that can make it easier to process your feelings and move forward.

One of the most helpful strategies is to learn to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty. You have to learn to sit with the fact that you will likely never have the answers that you want.

Never. Ever.

This might sound like a terrible concept, but ultimately it will make it easier to cope in the long run.

When you follow your brain’s desire of wanting certainty, you start going down mental rabbit holes that aren’t helpful. You start pondering every possible reason for why that person ghosted you, trying to figure out what the answer is.

• Did you misread the situation entirely?

• If so, what did you miss?

• How could you miss something that big?

• Did you say something wrong?

• Did you do something wrong?

You start re-reading over all of your texts, analyzing your own texts for anything you might have said or done “wrong”, as well as analyzing the other person’s texts for any potential sign or cue that they were actually interested.

The problem is that because we don’t actually have the data points that we need to determine the truth of what happened, our brains tend to turn on us, making it out to be our fault in some way. We must have said something. We must have done something. There must be something inherently broken or unlovable about us to make a perfectly decent person treat us in that way.

We tend to not think about the possibilities that have nothing to do with us:

• Maybe the person just decided that they didn’t want to date anymore.

• Maybe it just wasn’t a good fit, and the person was a poor communicator who didn’t have the courage to express how they were feeling.

• Maybe life happened and they lost a family member, a job, or a pet.

When we think of those options, they feel less likely, and so we once again berate ourselves for something we may not have even done.

This also keeps us from moving on. We’re stuck in rumination, replaying over and over again a situation that’s done and over. When we do this, we feel as if it is happening over and over again, when in reality, the more time that passes, the further it is behind us. We’re reliving the situation when we don’t actually have to.

We’re also wasting time in our heads that we could be putting into the real, present moment. We could be going on dates, meeting new people, and finding connections with people who aren’t going to ghost us. Instead, we’re reliving the past.

In contrast, sitting with ambiguity prevents you from spending time in the numerous mental rabbit holes. When you say to yourself, “I don’t know what happened, and I likely will never know what happened,” it keeps you in the present moment rather than living in the past.

You stop over-analyzing every text, every conversation, every date. The time and energy that you would have spent in overanalysis is now freed up to go into the areas of your life that are important to you.

You also prevent yourself from going down roads of self-criticism in which you berate yourself for things that you never did. There’s kindness and compassion in acknowledging the ambiguity of a situation.

This also creates more freedom to be able to move forward from the situation. You acknowledge that the situation is in the past, that it’s behind you, and that the only step forward is to look ahead to new matches and connections.

So how do you do this? How do you sit with ambiguity and uncertainty? How do you prevent yourself from going down a gazillion mental rabbit holes of overanalysis?

The simple but not easy answer is to actively state to yourself, “I don’t know what happened, and I likely never will.” We have to gently signal to our brains that the only certainty there is in being ghosted is that the connection is now over. And you say that to yourself as many times as you need to.

Another piece to this is catching it when you are going down mental rabbit holes. It’s not about stopping them completely but recognizing when they’re happening and actively turning your attention away from them. In doing this, you can cut way down on the time and energy spent in unhelpful mental spaces.

Finally, really try to take in the reality that you truly are unlikely to ever know what happened. We try to convince ourselves that we’re all-knowing and can fill in the gaps, but in reality, we can’t. We can guess. We can know the possibilities. But unless you’re one of the lucky few who do actually get closure, you really can’t know what happened.

I did actually get closure once in an ambiguous situation, but not before I had spiraled down rabbit holes of overanalysis and self-criticism, none of which were ultimately reflective of reality.

When I got the closure that I needed, I learned that there was so much that I hadn’t known. That I couldn’t have known. And all of the stuff that I didn’t know was what led to the end of the connection. It wasn’t anything I had done. There wasn’t anything I had missed in the information and experiences I did have. I just didn’t have all of the information.

The information I was missing was that this person was a bit of a thrill seeker. When the initial excitement of a new connection wore off, and a new exciting connection came around, I got left in the dust.

There was no way that I could have known this at the time the connection ended.

I was just lucky in that I got the information that most people don’t.

So, give yourself permission to move on from being ghosted. Acknowledge that ambiguity sucks, that you likely won’t ever know the answer, and move on to finding and forming connections with others who show up for you in the ways that you deserve.

*Don’t forget to grab my free Red Flags Checklist! You’ll learn everything you need to know to scan for red flags in your swiping, conversations, and dates.