Yasmina: Dear Valentina,
I, generally speaking, try not to talk about this, because I think I try to live with this whole narrative of being “the cool girl who’s not affected”. I also don’t talk about this because I don’t want to bore my friends. I know I’ve bored them to death already when I talked about this…
My answer: I could talk about hours about the pain of being ghosted, and I think we don’t talk enough about it. We talk about endings in general, about breakups, but ghosting as a concept? I think it’s one of the roughest pains in the world. It has happened to me multiple times, it’s happening to me right now, um - where someone I think I was to some extent in love with, just, on a random Saturday morning, decided to ghost the hell out of me and disappear from my life. It hurts like crazy. And it hurts because, you know, there’s not much you can do about it, right? You can’t really bounce back: you can block, but the action is done, from their side. They have decided. There’s this Florence and The Machine lyric from this song called Buckle that kills me and it says “I blocked your number, but you didn’t notice”. This is how ghosting lowkey makes me feel.
You can get (yourself) into some form of excruciating pain because of ghosting. I would rather a thousand, a million, a trizillion times have someone tell me bluntly “hi I don’t want to see you anymore” or “hi I don’t want to be with you anymore”. But I’m so bad at interpreting signs and I don’t know how to interpret ghosting. One problem is I always leave the door open. So unfortunately even if I get ghosted I don’t necessarily see it as a door being closed but as a temporary pause … which is so bad! Because you’re left there lingering!!! You’re kept in the loop!! In the cycle!!!!
I could write a whole book about this, about the pain and about how it leaves me hollow. I can’t even cry about it - I just feel so empty inside, and so puzzled, and distraught. I think we should be talking more about ghosting and stop pretending like, yeah, we’re cool and unaffected, fuck them. You know what? In our current society where dating has this disposable nature, we’re often being told that ghosting is normal, it happens, but for me, even when it’s done by a friend, I just hate it.
Even when it’s done after I try to email someone for Palomita Office, and they don’t, ever, reply back, I hate it. Because I’m the kind of person who will always reply. Even if it’s a bit late. Even if it’s just with a reaction. I will always fucking reply. Not because I’m God, but because I think replying is an act of respect. And for me respect is the biggest value to have in life. At least one of the biggest! And when someone I love will stop replying to me I will feel pain. We should talk about this pain.
So yes, I could talk about hours about ghosting…. and not just because I’m going through it right now and I feel lost, and confused, and distraught, and bad! It sucks!!!!
Valentina: What you told me is genuienly one of the most twisted things you can do to someone emotionally. Jail time.
Something I try to remember when someone has that sort of behavior is this: people treat you according to their own values, capabilities, and limits, not necessarily according to how much they care or don’t care about you. For example, if a guy holds the door for me, I don’t think “wow he must really like me”. I appreciate it of course, but fundamentally he does it because he was raised a certain way and/or has certain values on how to treat people. I view communication and attentiveness the same way and it helps a lot.
Of course its normal to change your mind about someone or need space, but having the selfishness of ghosting is just so lazy and uncool.
