The Unofficial Official Break up – Ghosting by Tia Peake
Every morning like clock work you wake up to a “Good Morning Beautiful” text message and it immediately puts a smile on your face. Throughout the day small exchanges in communication brighten your day, and of course at night that “ sleep well and dream of me” text puts you to sleep with a grin ear to ear. Till one day, the calls slow down to a stop, then the text messages are short one word answers. Before you know it, you haven’t heard from your “special friend” in days. You text – no response, you call – straight to voicemail and now all of a sudden, their social media pages are non-existent. You have officially been Ghosted.
According to Urban Dictionary, Ghosting is defined as when a person cuts off all communication with their friends or the person they’re dating, with zero warning or notice beforehand. You’ll mostly see them avoiding friend’s phone calls, social media, and avoiding them in public.
Your first instinct is to find out what you did wrong and why has this happened to you? There are several reasons why people “Ghost”
- the person has been ghosted before. Unfortunately when you have been ghosted you lack empathy about the act. They see it as no big deal. It has happened to them and they got over it and so shall you.
- To save your feelings – maybe they really don’t want to say anything hurtful to you but don’t see the need to continue a relationship with you.
- People “ghost” to avoid confrontation. They feel no words will ever help them avoid this sticky situation of breaking ties with someone, so they silently slip away.
- They want to leave options open and if the words were never officially said they can always come back at a later date and claim they were “busy” sorry for the lack of communication and pick up where they left off.
- Depression, sometimes in life people are dealing with their own ups and downs and don’t know how to communicate especially if the relationship is new.
Ghosting can leave a person without closure and consistently guessing about what happened. It can also damage a person’s self esteem – blaming themselves for the person’s departure.
So what do we do at this point? We handle this break up like we would handle any other.
- Give yourself time to mourn the death of this relationship. If you are angry, you are well entitled and if you are sad, it’s your right. There is no help in suppressing your immediate emotions, all of them – good, bad and the ugly are justified.
- Time to let go! Make sure all reminders of said person are gone. Block that number, remove pictures and delete those posts that give you a bad vibe.
- Understand that you just dodged a bullet – obviously this person lacks the communication skills needed to even have a healthy relationship. Now you have more time to spend with people of quality.
Conversations are hard and communication is a lost art. Since we are well aware of the hurt and heartache Ghosting can bring someone, I hope we can begin to do better by each other.