
I should begin this by acknowledging that ghosting isn’t a practice exclusive to men, many women are also guilty, including me.
But after I wrote this article about being ghosted after a great date and this article about being ghosted after sex, I was SHOCKED at how many women slid into my DMs with tales of their own ghosting experiences, all equally confused by what had happened.
Hear me out before you call me sexist, but I do think straight men seem to be more prone to the act, so when I pitched the idea of this article, I wanted to reach out to all my guy friends to find out if and why they'd ghosted someone.
Watch: What is ghosting? Post continues below.
I wanted their different reasons in the hope of gaining a clearer understanding, and perhaps a more nuanced perspective on the reasons people do this.
In this instance, I decided to focus on straight men - so men who ghost women.
I spoke to eight men in my friendship circle, and all of them, had indeed, ghosted someone. Some were mortified about doing so and followed up with 'but only once, I'm a gentleman I swear Kel'. Others didn't care as much about my opinion of them with a 'f*cking all the time' response to which they obviously got an eye roll from me.
The funny thing is that they're all great guys, none of them are bad people and despite their actions, they'd be pretty mortified if a girl they'd ghosted was still scratching her head years later, writing articles, still bloody confused... (*cough).
While the person, place, situation, and time differed; what remained consistent was their reason for ghosting.
Generally, these guys were simply too emotionally detached to have a tough conversation with someone that they weren't invested in.
The hard part to swallow is this:
They just don't care about you and therefore, don't consider how YOU feel and how YOU perceived the date in question. They don't want to have that awkward conversation because they don't value you enough to be bothered with it.
We could get cross about this and berate how they've been brought up and that society allows this sort of behaviour, OR we could look at it with the same sort of refreshing clarity we saw the concept of 'he's just not that into you' all those years ago.
He just doesn't care. Hurtful, of course, but how much angst does this save us when thinking about WHY someone completely disappeared out of our lives? They didn't view the situation in the same way we did and didn't feel the connection we did, so they didn't want to continue something they weren't invested in and didn't want to deal with the repercussions.
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