Unhinged is Slate’s new advice column on the wild world of modern dating. Have a dating question of your own? Send it to Steffi here. It’s anonymous!
Dear Unhinged,
While I was out partying, I met this guy, and we hit it off. We had a great time. He wanted my Instagram, so I gave it to him. We tried coordinating a second meetup, but it fell through. He stopped responding, and after two weeks, he apologized and asked me to text him. (I did not.)
One night, I’m out again, and guess who I run into! He apologized for his lack of response and really wanted a second chance, so I gave it to him. Big mistake! It basically turned into the same deal, but just a little more drawn out. I ended up crashing out about it over on my Close Friends Story (shoutout to them) because of the disconnect between his words and his actions. Why didn’t he just leave me alone? Why get someone’s hopes up? Why do guys swear they want to date you but have zero follow-through or initiative?
—Naive Boy (he/him)
Dear Naive Boy,
Ah, the Close Friends crashout. It’s a rite of passage in modern dating, the Instagram version of sending a long email chain to your friends, or assembling everyone to the town square to theorize about why he forgot to send a carrier pigeon back. What better tool do we have now than the ability to send a live State of the Union address to your invite-only private audience on Instagram—via either the unflattering, blurry selfie with a distressed text passage typed over your face, or the 20-part video series filmed in the style of a TikTok storytime. It’s a beautiful thing. No one wants to repeat the story of getting ghosted over 10 separate dinners. Plus, rejection, which is what this distance between action and words amounts to, feels marginally less painful when we can turn it into fodder.
It seems, though, as if this missed connection is unearthing a larger, existential crashout about the dating pool right now, which is that no one is saying how they’re feeling, and everyone is avoiding the intimacy of getting close to someone (everyone, but especially the men). Instead of telling you that they’re not into you, they’re ghosting. Instead of defining the relationship, you get caught in a situationship. They are telling you, “No, no, text me again, I promise I’ll respond!” then treating you as if you’re a well-meaning volunteer standing on the sidewalk with a clipboard. They’re scrolling through the Settings app on their phone just to avoid eye contact.
It’s hard not to internalize a ghost’s impoliteness as some kind of cosmic curse set above your own head. But rest assured that this particular brand of flakiness is so common that when interviewing sources for this piece, I spoke to six different people who were ghosted after months of seeing someone. Anjana, 33, was ghosted by a guy she was in a situationship with for four months. After the relationship’s unceremonious end, she showed up at one of his indie band gigs in Brooklyn, hoping to pull him aside and get some answers out of him, only to meet his new girlfriend (whom he’d been talking to in tandem with Anjana) at the bar. Kanika, 28, hit it off with her best friend’s brother-in-law at the wedding—he ghosted her after six months of flirtatiously texting, but, so she hears, his mother, who was also at the wedding, still asks him about what happened to that great girl Kanika. Kaitlyn, 28, thought she would move to Scotland for a guy, but he actually Irish exited once he went back across the pond. “I’ve been ghosted so many times! And I really don’t understand why!” said Stela, 27.
We’ve all heard stories like these. And since I can already hear the sound of ghosts everywhere pulling up their Google Calendars to defend themselves, here is what I’d like to say in advance: Everyone is busy. People just make time for you.
So why do ghosters ghost? I spoke to a reformed ghoster, Robert (not his real name, for obvious reasons), 28, who admitted that the reason for his former ghosting was half conflict aversion, half convenience. “It didn’t feel serious enough to have a conversation about it. I know that’s not a great way to think about it, but that’s what it is. It kind of felt like a chore,” he said. “One day, I kind of forgot to continue responding—like, we had an actual gap in our conversation. Then it was a couple days, and then a couple more days, and then it became really easy to ignore.”
That’s really it! Sometimes, Naive, people will merely make promises they don’t intend to keep. After all, it’s way more fun and far less commitment to entertain the idea of dating someone than to actually put in the effort to date them. A relationship is a pleasant thought experiment: I’ll travel with them. I’ll have new banter with them. I’ll finally finish that book that’s been sitting on my shelf for the past five years because we’ll read together and be happy. It’s fun in the same way that catching up with your middle school acquaintance is a nice idea, but the reality is that most people aren’t going to put in the effort to try.
I’m certain that when he asked for your Instagram, he saw something in you that he’d like to be around. (Side note: Instagram? Real lovers ask for phone numbers.) I’m sure when he was texting you about a second meetup, he did actually want to meet. And when he asked you for another chance, there’s no doubt in my mind that he did want one, and believed he’d do better the second time around. But it’s far more comfortable to say you’d like to be a hero than to strip naked, put the white underpants and red cape on, and go flying across the city. It’s like world-famous former professional bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman said: “Everybody wants to be a [real lover], but nobody wants to lift no [real lover] weight.”
Robert acknowledged that much of it has to do with emotional literacy. “Men are less emotionally literate, so whether it’s intentional or not, they are extremely callous about how they’re acting about what they want,” he said.
The real pain of casual ghosting usually has nothing to do with the other person at all, especially if we’ve seen them only in passing at parties. It’s frustrating and disheartening to be put in a situation in which you effectively become the object of someone’s own wishful thinking. And wounded pride makes you search for answers everywhere; it’s often incomprehensible how the answer could be as ridiculous as something like “He said it but didn’t really mean it.” When you’re a person who means what they say, it can be unsettling to learn that not everyone operates that way.
So here’s my prescription, Naive Boy: I’m giving you one Instagram crashout. One storytime to end it all. After that, it’s time to pack it back into the journal and your best friends’ apartments. This man did not care enough about you, so it’s important to do your best to care less about him. It’s no easy diagnosis, I know. But the more you post, the more you dissect and discuss, the more real the issue becomes, and now you’re taking an unserious person with the utmost seriousness. Why bother when they’ve already shown you exactly who they are? The better way to spend your life is to think about all the things that await you in your future—the kind of person you will be, and the kind of person who will be there with you. That person by your side will be someone who takes you and themselves seriously enough to at least mean what they say.
