A compassionate theory of ghosting: How to preserve your faith in love, men, and yourself when a good man ghosts you (or when any man does)

The background story

I was recently ghosted by a man of whom I'd been saying, for months, that that's the most grown-up man I have ever met (apart from kind, interesting, thinking with his own head, sublimely patient and a lot more, but it was the emotional maturity I was finding extra rare).

I wasn’t dating him. We had a joint project and were meeting roughly twice a month, in some periods weekly, to do the work. We would always go to a café after, chew over-buttered brie sandwiches and have some of the most honest conversations I’ve had with anyone outside of my most intimate circle for years.

Loneliness is not one of my life dramas. I easily turn precursors of it into ‘blissful solitude’. Yet perhaps because of pandemic socialising complications, I’ve had noticeable bouts of loneliness hitting me in the not-so-new new area I was living in, two and a half years after I’d moved in. That loneliness too had now gone, knowing that this week or next week he and I will sit down to do the work that needed to be done and then talk of things that didn’t need talking about but felt so good to.

I had no meaningful relationship expectations of him, other than in the way in which no expectations in your realistic mind turn into some expectations in your fantasy mind when you like a person. I’d say he is one of those men who have a deep appreciation and need for the feminine which few men have with the same intensity and discernment. He’s good with women. He has the rare knack of treating women both most respectfully, as humans, and as women, with a touch of a manly man’s appreciation and chivalry.

When I first met him, I preferred to keep a distance precisely because I found that skill suspicious.

I happen to have met one of his previous girlfriends (whom I genuinely liked; when they broke up, my first thought was of losing the chance to have her as a friend). I also happen to have witnessed a conversation in which he was asked about her and his answer made me think that, “Hmmm, true love answers differently”. But then again, I only know how my true love answers. I've also long thought that “this man would never see me”. He seems to prioritise something in a romantic partner I’m not and I am comfortably me without it.

Yet I was beginning to feel his signals towards me grow conflicting – very respectful but with the occasional, in later times not so occasional, sense of “that’s the behaviour of more than a friend”.

I will spare you the details of a period of trying to work out if he likes me or not, as that’s a most stupid question to waste time on. The only (related) question you need an answer to is, “do I like him?”. One day it hit me, with amazement at the clarity, that I really do! I’ve just spent the whole day, other than when I was deeply immersed in work, joyfully thinking of him. Last time when we met, I’d completely forgotten to be self-conscious when I was in his personal space to see something on his phone. And on and on and on. I caught myself what I was doing while trying to feel into what I was feeling.

In my book of how a grown-up behaves, I had to tell him. For me, you always tell somebody you like them. You tell it not so much because “something might happen” but because that’s the truth, and it is a beautiful one: “Your being has moved me in ways very few do”. Of course “something might happen” too, but that’s optional. Telling beautiful things is not.

By that point, I felt such a sense of openness and connection to him that I would have also experienced hiding this truth as lying to his face. I also trusted that what was turning into a friendship (I have high standards of what I call ‘a friendship’) would withstand the emotional commotion. If anything, it would deepen the friendship (with the honesty, not with benefits attached). By that point, our joint project was also coming to an end. We were soon to be free of the professional relationship. To add a last-minute twist of lowered expectations though, on inviting him to celebrate the project’s end (and to tell the truth that was bursting to be told), I found out he had just started a new relationship.

The truth that needed to be told was delivered at the end of an otherwise pleasant and chilled-out evening by the river. The passive voice of this sentence is not accidental. I felt some of my life force leave me the minute I saw him that evening. Whether the new relationship, something incidental from the day, or my signals earlier in the week – that I intended to say something of the overly personal range - had caused his energy to retreat. I did not feel the connection I had got used to in the past months.

I told him I was saying what I was saying with full respect for his new relationship and out of a need to be honest with him. He thanked me for the honesty. He told me he had always been “super” looking forward to our project time together. We ended up talking about previous relationships and shortly after he left.

The day after the following, I sent him a generous (and long) email to thank him for coming over; to say that I definitely count him as one of my friends even if my good-bye may have felt distant; and to wish him the best in his new relationship (believe it or not, I can even feel such a wish in my heart of hearts). I also wrote that while I would try not to see him intentionally until the “I want more” feeling has dissipated, I’d definitely see him around the friends we had in common. When this happens, I’d do my very best to find a way out of any awkward interaction we may create.

I wrote some further things which were kind, appreciative and generous. What followed made me doubt if they had come across in the way I intended them to, but I wrote the email I would have been profoundly moved to receive in a similar situation. I sent him a social media message to say the same briefly and that the “long form” was in his inbox.

I got no response. About three weeks later, I had to accept that I’ve been ghosted. In realising that, I also realised that if this were a poker game, I would have put down, without blinking an eyelid, £100,000 that “of course he would write back”. Something made me place more trust in this man’s integrity than worry about him not being good at handling emotionally intense conversations (something he’d told me). I realised I would have gone into the millions if I was focusing on my trust in him, but while £100,000 I can one day return, a million or a few may be difficult. I ended up wondering if there were still debtors’ prisons in Britain.

The emotional consequences

On this occasion (and rather uncharacteristically), I wasn’t interested in dissecting my own emotions. I sought to understand the ghosters, not their “victims” and myself as one. I sketch my emotions below partly because I realised they placed me in a good place to seek a compassionate understanding. In other stages of my life, I would have needed the self-exploration, self-compassion and self-expression first. You might be in such a stage.

At this stage, I stood strongly in my self-love and self-worth. It’s taken me decades to arrive there, but it was good to feel I had. I didn’t pick myself up from the dusty ground. I hadn’t fallen on it.

This is not to say that some quite unpleasant and intense emotions weren’t there, real and biting. I did not simply fly out to a disembodied, grown-up, spiritual cloud of compassion. I needed my theory largely because my emotions, thoughts and inner stories were unpleasant.

My overwhelming state, once I knew I’d never get a response from this man, was of sadness and confusion. I was sad that I had blown up the potential for a friendship. It felt so deflating that the honesty my soul needs and would not back down and away from, and an honesty which was kind, generous, courageous and vulnerable, fared so badly. I had risked a budding friendship because of the importance I place on truth, yet friendship and truth should never be in conflict! I was sad not to have this man in my weeks any longer, my best antidote to loneliness in the new county where I lived.

More than anything though, I was sublimely confused by his lack of reaction. I’ve misjudged the man. Radically. How was that possible, up to that degree, relative to all the inner checks I make whether somebody is to be trusted?

Unlike what might have happened in the past and would happen to many, I did not feel intensely worthless, diminished, or small other than on a single occasion. In that moment, I saw myself as a teenage girl who’d plucked up the courage to tell a teenage boy that she liked him. She had made herself speak, even if she was a shy girl; she had given him the greatest gift of appreciation without putting any pressure that it be reciprocated. He stood there quiet, eyes on the ground, and “gone” even if he hadn’t moved. She felt she had dared to like the prince without seeing how lowly she was.

The grown-up who took over from the girl was angry. She was angry for having been made to regret telling the truth. For having been made to regret acting out of courage. Because it was not about achieving anything. It was about being truthful to somebody she’s been so truthful to. She was angry for having to wonder if it was not better to do what she did, 30 or so year ago, when in a game of “spin the bottle and tell the truth” she kept quiet about liking a boy. She despised her own cowardice then so much that she committed to unlearn it, and she had. She (I) now wondered if unlearning it brought her (me) any good.

I saw those images and ended up crying, tucked in my soft pink armchair and under a not-so-soft bed throw, but even that experience of feeling first small, then angry, was a matter of minutes. It took the form of an emotional release, not of thickening of the inner tension.

I might have, perhaps, felt more hurt and angrier if I was less confused. But I was very confused. I was incredulous. I couldn’t solve this problem of personality and connection misjudgement. I didn’t feel that the 0s the equation demanded could be real. I felt I was missing a parameter.

The parameter of “something’s wrong with me” wasn't a candidate for long, unlike in younger years. I wondered only briefly if I was ugly, boring, if I come across as too emotionally unstable or, in partial contrast, as too cerebral or as a few other “too muches” and “too littles” that can be dealbreakers to a good man. I’ve long believed that if somebody sees something about you as a problem and you agree, well, they are right! If somebody sees something about you as a problem and you don’t, well, that’s their problem!

I hesitated for longer if I was not feminine enough for him, as I carve my path in life strongly, which may be a bit too “yang” for him. I put that aside too. I am treated as a womanly woman so consistently by men in daily life that even if he doesn’t see that in me, it is because of the particular kind of femininity he seeks. The varieties are endless.

I then circled around, for longer than with any of the above, the worry of how he had now redacted my image in his head. I could imagine him drawing an inner picture of all that is wrong with me and throwing me into the bag of “people who are not worth it”, whatever the “it” was.

I feared he would soon dilute me beyond recognition. I still have the hangover of worrying about how I live in people’s heads. I want to be “seen”. We all do, of course. It is only that some of us are irrational enough to care about correcting the misperceptions more than is our business to do and I was back there. Yet I ultimately knew he won’t be able to sustain the extremes of this redacted image. Something in me trusted he thought well of me. Even if his conscious, self-protective thoughts had started to pack and box me away as sub-standard, I trusted that his deeper knowledge and sense of connection would not allow them to run amok.

Finally, the fear I was avoiding to name the longest was that we didn’t create our connection together. It was that we connected so well because he can connect with anyone so well. That we had those super interesting and deep conversations because he created them. It didn’t matter I was on the other side. There was nothing interesting or different about me. Anyone would do. He just had time on his hands and I happened to be the most convenient human way to spend it.

I carefully avoided that conclusion. But the moment I articulated it, it acquired the sound of an empty tin. If there are five things I can do well in life, one is to create a connection with people. Another one is having conversations the person opposite enjoys, which we both enjoy, and which are “different” to most conversations. It was a dance for two and we had both danced with grace and presence.

No other choice but a compassionate theory

If I continued to believe in us both and in the reality of the connection we shared, I needed to be able to think about ghosting in a way that is different to what you get after a quick, or not so quick, search on the Internet. I needed a theory which didn’t make him immature, cruel and even vicious. I needed a theory which would not place me, primarily, in the position of somebody who has been hurt or weakened or “felt vulnerable”. I needed a theory which does not invalidate what I felt was true about the depth of our human connection.

The compassionate theory of good men ghosting you

Here it starts. Since it is a compassionate theory, there is, of course, softness and kindness to it. It doesn’t make the other person bad. It reveals what is hurt and vulnerable in them. Thinking of their behaviour as damaging and, thus, of them as a perpetrator (be it a passively aggressive perpetrator) obscures the pain they too are acting out. Hurt people hurt people. If seeing the weakness of the one who made you feel weak helps you regain your own strength, so be it. It is not the lit-up motivation a compassionate theory seeks, but if it gives you strength, that’s a good outcome. Just don’t corrupt the strength with a reflex to hurt them in turn. It is not a real strength then.

Some of the foundations of the compassionate theory are anchored in realities from this man’s past I know about. Most come, however, from what I’ve learnt having spoken to other important men in my life who had not faced me on breaking up with me (I’ve never been ghosted before, “just” broken up with over text or email rather than a phone call or a meeting). I happen to have always been able to restore the connection after a break-up. I am friends with all my ex-boyfriends. This has allowed me to learn about the inner experience at avoidant break-ups. And while there’s always more to learn and my sample of men is small and biased, there is solidity to the hypotheses below.

The past that continues to determine him

A man who ghosts you (or a woman, but I will keep to men for simplicity; I also believe that there are gender-specific tendencies I wouldn’t want to go into) is less likely to be cruel and insensitive but to have a personality structure and previous life experience of the following kind:

• This is a man who continues to fear spillages of intense emotion. He has either experienced too many of these or the ones he’s experienced had emotional daggers, maybe even physical sharp-edged objects, flying around at a time he had no skills to catch or neutralise them. He shuts down when his psyche detects rising emotional intensity in a woman. It is instinctive.

Most likely, he has also never had an intense emotional conversation with a woman who expressed her intense emotions truthfully yet without flying off the handle; who kept the connection between the two and her gaze on there being “two”, not her own needs and pain and vulnerability only; who could assert and support his right to his own life and preferences and boundaries and not only her (hurt) feelings, dreams and desires.

You may be a woman who has learnt to flow with and harness your emotions better than 98% of people. You may have learnt the skills to stay present and communicate from your heart in situations of heightened emotions and potentially hurt feelings. You may have the capacity to feel and express them, but also keep them about you, not within you but about you, demand nothing even though asking for the space to speak your truth and for it be witnessed.

If you can, well done, but you know how rare you are. Most men have never experienced that in their most intimate relationships.

If you can’t do the above, or if it comes in fits and starts, you cannot throw stones at him for choosing to protect his peace, preferences and boundaries, even if in an extreme way. He has a right to refuse to manage your emotions for you if you can’t manage them yourself. He has no responsibility (apart from, obviously, not enough skills) to do it, single-handedly, for the two of you.

• This is also a man who, most likely, has been made to feel guilty for following his path, desires and heart, for major life pursuits and for trivial daily decisions, when these come into conflict with the ones of the important women in his life.

• As an extension of that, he has not integrated into his being the knowledge – even if, as words, he may be asserting it – that he has a divine right to feel good and to choose what is best for him, and that anyone who claims to love him, or feel the stirrings of a love for him, will want nothing less than that for him, will in fact insist that he does precisely that. And yes, that other person (me, you) will insist he does precisely that, even if initially it may break my, your heart to lose him.

• This is almost certainly a man who has bled hard, at least once, after being rejected in love. While this is lazy thinking – nobody can reject you in love unless you reject yourself and unless you disconnect from love – this is how most of us think before we do some proper thinking. The more hurt he has been when he’s lost a love, been rejected, made a pass on, the guiltier he will feel for being a cause for you to be in that place. He may not even believe that it is optional to feel rejected.

• This is also a man who, most likely, does not live amongst people who take the ultimate responsibility for their recovery from shocks, minor or major. He runs away from the decent human thing of acknowledging your feelings while still leaving them to you, because he has hardly ever experienced anyone take extreme responsibility for how they feel. It has always been “this is what you did and that’s how I feel” rather than “this is how I feel and that’s ultimately my business, and I am good at sorting it out. I trust that you didn’t purposefully, intentionally hurt me”.

• This is a man who, most likely, has not seen consistent generosity from a woman he has been in a relationship with. Every kindness given, every omission forgiven was added to a tab brought out to be paid one day, sometimes multiple times. No free-flowing love here.

The conversation about another love he cannot have with you

It is not only a man’s past and his dark experiences with hurt and disappointed women that come into play in ghosting though. Often, there is also the hope of a new love. Somebody else has appeared that fills in the inner image this man has of his woman better than you do.

If you like who you are and who you show yourself as, that’s just a fact of life, nothing hurtful, even if it will shake you hard for a start. If you can remember how the hope of a new love feels, and if your heart was truly open to this man to begin with, you will even be touched by the experience beckoning at him.

The imaginary monologue below is a composite of comments – more articulate and better glued together than anyone of us will ever hear. Psychological logic demands that a man who can say or write something similar is a man who won’t ghost you, won’t refuse to see you when he is breaking up with you or won’t create any of the other scenarios from the same register. But a man who has the inner experiences I am speaking of without the courage and articulateness to tell you of them is a man who will ghost you with a far greater likelihood that a man who does not feel as deep. And at least I can’t help wanting to hug such a man (even if I also want to kick him in the shins, or further up, and tell him he’s better than this).

I wish I could find a way to tell you “I’m sorry, I’ve been a dick”. You are the last person I wanted to hurt and yet I did. I did it because of my desire, a need in fact, to always have a good woman around, to enjoy a woman’s presence, her movements, her laughter, her energy, the touch of her fingers, the softness in her eyes. This made me behave with you, more often than I should have, like a man to a woman.

I should have kept it “more neutral” knowing my intentions, or lack of them, rather. By this age, I know how to keep the boundaries of a friendship neat and clear, how to be the generic person rather than the man. I knew what I needed to do yet I didn’t. It is so deflating to choose “neutral”. It loses the colours of life.

I’m sorry I didn’t have the decency to close the door on leaving. I didn’t want to close the door, that’s why I vanished into thin air. I don’t know door to what. Maybe to one of those male-female friendships with an edge. It may be more.

I don’t have a clue. I just know that I couldn’t help you with your closure as I am not as certain as I want to be of my desire for a closure with you. I want to have my pie and eat it, even if I don’t want to either have it or eat it right now.

I believe I need a relationship that is different to what I can create with you, a life that is different to the one I can create with you. I struggle to say the words, as I know they hurt, but I need somebody different to you. I need somebody else.

I don’t know if I’m right. I believe I’ve found all that with the lady I told you of. I will follow the promise, the hope. Only time will tell if I was right to choose it. Only time will tell if I’ll look back and think of you without a flicker of a “what if” thought.

There comes the time to choose. I did. And, believe me, it was not without regret.

It was not without regret as there is something you have which nobody else has had in my life. I mean it. There is something I get from being around you which I’ve felt with nobody else. I wasn’t even searching for it because I cannot quite tell you what it is. But once you touch it, you can’t easily let go of it.

You are not like the woman I’ve ever imagined I would be with. Yet there is something about being with you that feels of the worlds above this world I’ve always been searching for, occasionally danced in, and which is a world only love can take you to, even if I did not feel love for you.

But it is awful to continue to be feeling what I can feel around you in that selfish way of being neither in, neither out. Of taking most of your weekends but not wanting to be a part of your week.

By now, I can’t give it the energy it had those months. The promise of what I see in the relationship I started is growing. It makes me happy. At times ecstatic. It makes me believe in the possibility of being happy again. Of being in love again. Of having the life I'm seeking to create. I want to give it my all. I also must stop egging you on.

But, believe me, it is not as if I am saying good-bye without regret (and yes, I know, without having the decency to say it, only “performing it”).

You are the last person I would have wanted to hurt and yet I did.

You are the first person I would have wanted to talk to about my budding relationship because of how I can talk to you, and yet I can’t.

I’m sorry I am not the grown-up man you saw in me. I so wanted to be it for you, apart from for me and everybody else. But it is hard, as hard as it gets to face you and to know that I need to say things that will hurt you for no fault of your own, even worse, when you’ve been unfailingly kind and generous and truthful to me, and when you held your palm out and said that it had your heart on it. In your rather characteristic way of “it’s said with no expectation and with deep respect for your new relationship, but truth demanded that I tell you that my heart is beating differently for you”.

I’m a coward, I know. I wish I weren’t. I’ll try to talk to you one day. I promise I’ll talk to you one day. When you have your beautiful life back again and the hurt I’ve caused won’t matter.

It is hard to say what this man needs to say, isn’t it.

Let alone that you will fall madly in love with anyone who can do that.

A non-compassionate aside

I do believe in the reality of the psychological mechanisms I am describing, even if not all will apply to everyone and anyone who ghosts you. I can’t even say if they apply to the men I based them on. For anyone who has ghosted you, some of those psychological workings will have traces in their consciousness, whether within or outside of the context of ghosting. In no case they will have a well-defined presence. Otherwise the person wouldn’t have ghosted you.

More importantly, with all my belief in those explanations and with all their necessity for a compassionate theory, there is a brutal pragmatism to ghosting.

Ghosting avoids complexity in a masterstroke. It is a head-in-the-sand technique we all apply to some area in life – debt, weight gain, deteriorating health, difficult family relationships, mess in the house … I will persistently ignore the problem and it will somehow resolve itself. Some such problems do, indeed, magically or naturally resolve themselves with time and circumstance. Others are resolved for you. Still others turn into an ever-present background. One way or another, it often works. You can avoid so many problems by, well, avoiding them!  

Ghosting gives its initiator (the appearance of) total control. Yes, it is achieved in a manipulative way, even if in some heads this may be masked as a rational choice, even as an enlightened “detachment” and making it easy for you! It is an enviable level of control for the minimal involvement of resisting involvement.

In most cases, the ghosting will also drive the person on the receiving end to behaviours which will fully justify the avoidance. It thus has a remarkable capacity for self-justification too.

And, gosh, doesn’t it work in severing the cord ... Sooner or later, with some people immediately, the one being ghosted will stop reaching out. As a rule, they will end up so hurt and disappointed that the closure will have happened. Both parties will be free of that un-started, long-meandering or unfinished love story.

The other side of this non-compassionate aside is that, as effective as it is, ghosting is bloody lame. You are right to be angry. A grown-up man is and wants to be truthful. A grown-up man looks you in the eyes when speaking his truth and making space for yours. It is a 6-year-old who hides so that Mum doesn’t shout at him! It is a 16-year-old who feels uncontrollably guilty when a girl starts crying. Let alone that some of us weren’t going to shout or cry (until by ourselves) anyway.

Now back to the compassionate theory. Some of us still prefer an understanding based on compassion and connection. Some of us also know that pragmatism-based explanations and justified anger in human relationships work while dripping slow-acting poison. It is a poison which accumulates and crystallises in human souls. It accumulates and crystallises until one day faith in love dies in you. Some of us cannot live if we stop believing in love.

What follows is about what you can say or do once you’ve understood better.

What to say if you decide to reach out one final time. Or what to do or say if you accidentally (or predictably) meet him

One of the hardest things about ghosting is that if you’ve got to the stage when it is clearly “it”, every new attempt at contact may make you feel that you are the messed up, the psychologically unstable, the freak, the immature one, etc. Beyond a certain point, you may, objectively, become it. You’ve justified the ghosting post-factum. You’ve strengthened its presence in the world.

Your final reaching out needs to come from a decisively different emotional place. It is the place of your own insight and closure where his response doesn’t matter any longer. In fact, his response matters so little by this point that you may prefer to float yours into space – talk about it with a friend, write it down in a diary, write it in a blog (as it happens).

Paradoxically or entirely logically though, if you reach this point, you are more likely to get a response from him than at any time before. There is nothing more effective in getting a reaction than stable and light emotions and a radical departure from expectations in one.

My version of closure after a rupture requires three things.

First, I have restored my trust in the goodness and luminosity of the person who’s disconnected from me, even if with a new appreciation of their limitations relative to my dealbreakers.

Second, I have re-rooted myself in self-worth and self-love, without compensatory over-blowing.

Third, I trust that when we cross paths again (I am always certain this would happen one day), I will be truly happy to see them. This is compatible with first needing to mask some emotional complexity. “No awkwardness” is a tall order to achieve for a first meeting unless years have passed.

Below are some of my don’ts that follow on from this version of closure. Your most valued outcome (or primary need, or primary insight) may be different, for instance affirming your value; owning your anger in a way you’ve never owned it before; allowing yourself to be vulnerable, to express emotions you would habitually suppress …  Then some of my don’ts will be your dos. And do them you should!

Just keep it in mind that if a part of your most valued outcome is him understanding the impact his behaviour had on you and, who knows, being different to other women in the future, most of those formats won’t work. They will most likely activate the part of him which needed to ghost you.

In some cases, if you’ve touched something very true and raw in your experience and have managed to translate it into words, those sniper words may wake him up.

Typically though, they will make him run even further away. They will increase his certainty that he chose the better way, even if both ways sucked.

Those don’ts are also litmus tests for how far you are down the path of compassion and self-love. If you thought you’d found your closure but realise that some of those response types may take over your “final communication”, hold your reins back. Keep trying to understand him. Keep trying to anchor yourself in the strength and beauty of you. You are in a better place, but not there yet.

(My) don’ts

• The vulnerability line. Most of the time, it won’t work if you communicate from the position of the girl who opens up and shares her vulnerability. Making it about how his ghosting hurt you and how small it made you feel will make him feel guilty or trigger his well-rehearsed responses against feeling guilty. This is also a response type he’s seen multiple times, especially if it is a man who’s well liked and has needed to let many women down.

Our society encourages being vulnerable like never before. Overall, it is a good thing! There is immense strength in vulnerability. A truthful description of your ghosting experience most likely revolves around vulnerability. But if what you say/write or compose internally still comes primarily from the place of vulnerability, you are still bleeding more than closure demands. Keep writing about it, keep turning the words around in your head, keep drawing it, dancing it out, blowing your nose out on it, whatever. Don’t communicate yet.

(Note that I am not saying not to communicate from a space of vulnerability as a rule. I am only talking about most post-ghosting situations.)

• The anger line. Almost certainly, it won’t work to communicate from your anger, no matter how justified. That anger which would speak about basic respect. About being made to regret one’s honesty and courage, one’s behaving as a grown-up. Unlike him!

In movies, both vulnerability and justified angry outbursts make a character get his act together. In real life, most of the time, it puts them on the defensive.

• The outpouring of love and gratitude line, with expectations of something in return smuggled in. Most of the time, it won’t work if your message is about how much your time together meant for you and what a difference he’s made to your life, how he’s been the bright spark in your dark days of recent times when something in the way you say this demands more of it, suggests that him removing himself from your life will create a big void for you and impoverish your life.

I am a firm believer that one must say the lovely things one thinks of another. I say them generously and specifically myself. But they are to be said when you can do it with gratitude yet letting go, with no tinge of nostalgia or loss. He has shown you what rare thing you want to find. He has no duty of being it for you. Don’t defile the gratitude with manipulation, then lie to yourself you were simply grateful.

• The joker line. Most of the time, it won’t work well enough or in the long run if you communicate from the space of joking. The unexpectedness and lightness of it may get you an initial response with greater likelihood than the anger and vulnerability. But if you turn your experiences into a joke, the latter will most likely have a biting edge that carries the anger, or, alternatively, a suppressive character that diminishes the impact his actions had on you.

You may carry on in the same vein for some time, but the surface will crack. Or if it lasts, the nature of the connection between you two will change. The connection may be preserved but it will lose the depth and sincerity it must have once had (if it didn't have some of that, you wouldn’t give a damn about being ghosted).

• The psychotherapy line. I’d say this to myself first, as I have both the education and the tendency: don’t become the other person’s psychotherapist, even when you see a pattern lucidly and are able to share it simply. It can be cold and patronising and too intellectual, while you are in the space of the heart.

• The silent treatment line. This is in the context of communicating about something else because you need to, yet you say nothing of the ghosting experience.  

My dos (or, rather, my ‘dids’)

I hugged him as tight and close as I’ve always done and said it was so good to see him. At the end of the night, I thanked him for accepting my invite. I shone my eyes from a world above this world, without intending to, and said I was really happy we were talking.

In a message a few days later, after he reached out trying to smooth out one of the unsmooth (though nothing dramatic) interactions of that evening out with friends, I wrote I was making my best but still flawed human decisions on how to negotiate the boundaries between us. I wrote that I was confused by his ghosting and that this rather unwelcoming thing he was talking about came out of my best intentions to show a thoroughgoing respect for his space.

I said more things. He did, of course, too. But, overall, we spoke strangely little of the situation while, later, getting immersed in another deep and interesting conversation.

It is not only that “all is good”. Dare I say that “all is better”, that we have even more trust in one another and are able to share even more than before the ghosting experience.

Some of you may be irritated with me for the lack of detail in what seems the most important part of this blog – what to do! What invite? What evening out? What exactly did you say?

They are not important. What was important came before. It was in the understanding and in checking with myself that the fragments of anger, vulnerability, emotion-suppressing joking, rationalisation, etc. have been cleared.

What to do will come out of you and out of your context once this work has been done – and yes, if it is ever done.

I sent my invite, to him as well as to others, when I was certain my work was done. I reached out when the ghosting was no longer relevant, not even interesting. 

I had no expectation he would accept. This is not to say I wasn’t anxiously looking at my phone at times or that my heart didn’t consider jumping out when his response arrived. All that was human to experience, I did experience.

When I found out he was coming, I had no plan what to say. I knew I’d either say the right thing or when I mess it up, I’ll be able to repair it.

I knew it because, by that point, I was looking through the eyes of compassion.

Those eyes never see ghosts and their scared victims.

They see living breathing bleeding scared flawed lovable humans.

Thank you for reading!

Written 2023, minor edits 29 Mar 2025

Image by Cristina Zamanillo Delgado, 2020, iStock, Getty Images