Dear Chelsea,
I met this guy in one of my classes this semester, and the first time we locked eyes my heart skipped a beat. I’ve never experienced such a crush before. He started talking to me here and there until we finally had a conversation and that night he added me on Facebook. It's weird to say this but I felt a huge chemistry between us, as if I was being drawn to him. I cannot describe the feeling.
We started texting and I asked him if he wanted to grab a coffee sometime. So we set up this day and time, and unfortunately he couldn't make it but said he really wanted to see me and he rescheduled another day.
We went for coffee, and it was the first time in my life where I felt comfortable and at ease with a guy. (I’m 20 years old and have never been in a relationship before.) Our conversation just seemed to flow easily and just staring at him, I was just in lust.
It was also the first time a guy genuinely showed interest in me. The other guys who’ve come into my life were f—kboys and complete a—holes. This time around, it just felt different. There was a connection.
We were supposed to see each other last week. We had made plans and so I texted him asking what he was down to do that evening. He never answered me. All day I was waiting for a response.
I then checked his Twitter that evening (he doesn't know that I know he has Twitter) and I saw this tweet of his saying, “here’s to ignoring someone you have class with the next day.”
My head started spinning. I just couldn't believe what I had read. And then he had the audacity to Facebook me and tell me his phone has been broken since Sunday and that he had completely forgotten we had a date.
I didn't answer him.
The next day when we had class, he told me how sorry he was and how he broke his phone.
We haven't texted since and I just don't know why the sudden change in his behavior. I'm so confused, hurt, sad and annoyed. It's not the first time a guy literally stops showing interest after a month or so of talking and hanging out. I'm starting to think it's me and that love is just not something for me.
I used to be a cold b*tch and closed-minded when it came to guys because I was afraid of getting hurt. But the past two years and a half now I've opened up more and pulled down the walls around my heart. I got burned in the process and now I just want to go back to how I was before.
I genuinely feel like relationships in today's society are a myth. I'm scared because I feel like I waited too long to be in a relationship with someone great and that now, because of my age and how society functions, the dating pool is nothing but playing around and no commitment.
My question is this, how I'm feeling, is it normal? What could have happened for the guy to literally ghost me out when we had plans?
Thank you,
The Girl Who Got Ghosted
Dear The Girl Who Got Ghosted,
You’re 20 years old, how in the world are you going to give up on love now? How are you going to give up on the meaning of life already?
Tell me honestly.
You want to go back to how you were before, to who you were when your walls were up and your heart beat on uselessly? Then, tell me this too: What’s there for you?
And don’t say freedom from heartbreak. Heartbreak is what isn’t there for you. Tell me what is. Behind those walls what kind of life are you living? If you have no interest in loving, what interests you? If you’re back to being a cold b*tch, tell me, what draws people closer?
I want to understand how you see yourself managing a great life. A proud life. A life that you can look back on and say, yes, I pushed myself to the edge. I took off. I went all the way. Or, at least, I did everything I could, I braved the race, I woke up in the morning and wanted to live.
I want to understand how you shut out the brightness and still see yourself creating a life others will have wanted to share in.
I ask because I wonder how we could even do this. Even if others are the ones who’ve built the walls up around our heart, it’s we who keep ourselves behind them.
My question is, why would we even want to?
I really want to know what’s there for you.
I want to know what you know that I don’t know. I want to hear you convince me to walk over to the other side. The side where I’m close-minded and cold, where I’m afraid for myself. Where I won’t get close to anything that could hurt me and, because I won’t get close, have committed myself to staying so far removed.
The truth is I want to be a woman who is affected.
Affected means I’m living what I’ve been gifted, I’m engaging in my life, I’m not letting fear strike me down and rob me of my horizons, my peaks, my wonder and potential.
This alternative of yours sounds devastating to me.
Of course I don’t believe for a second that you could actually prefer it.
And yes, I get that this isn't what your letter is explicitly about. I guess I’m just warning you that when you rule love out, you give up your capacity to dream. You sink down and the stars turn off for you.
It happens this easily. And it’s such a lonely way to live. It’s such an angry way.
Don’t do it to yourself.
Especially not at twenty when your stars have more light in them than you could imagine.
Don’t let a tweet yank you back down into a place that you spent two and a half years pulling your way out of. You are more than this tweet. You are stronger than his vain rejection.
This is where we get it wrong. Just because we make it out of the hole, we forget that life will continue to test us.
But that is exactly what happens when we assume we’ve arrived anywhere. The world tests to see whether we belong yet, tests to see whether we have a few more inches and steps and leaps and lessons to go. You see, even people who are in our life for a week come racing through to remind us of what we are uniquely after.
At 27, I made a promise to myself that I would move toward love even if I felt like it was against me. Two days after I blew those candles out, I was ghosted. I shook from the scandal in tears. I kept the plans I had for a party. I wept for half an hour in a bed that only two people could find me in. And in those early moments of disappointment and impossible confusion, I didn’t know whether I wanted to come up for air, whether I could keep giving and trusting, whether I had the want to even breathe.
When someone disappears, it’s not that nothing comes in their place. You know this. When we’re ghosted what shows up is a shit ton of silence. That silence is begging us to speak into it though, to speak into it with a softness we haven't known ourselves for, to speak with new thoughts, to think in finer, more freeing ways.
The silence that heartache provides is there to teach us how to support ourselves on our own. It’s a platform, it’s a space for learning. You must take to it in this way.
What I discovered in that silence was that being fooled wasn’t a blow to my ego as much as it was a dare to my soul. Two days after my birthday, after I made that promise, I was ghosted and that was so much more than rejection or humiliation or even pain itself, that was the world daring me to keep my promise.
Could I do it? I had to know.
Could I trust in the timing of my life, would I actually move toward love even if I felt like it was against me?
Like you, I had just spent two and a half years crawling out of a sinkhole as well as demolishing a decade of walls—a decade, really, of fear. Did I expect to be punched in the gut so soon after I was up and standing on my own again, after I was at long last back to opening myself to love? Of course not. But life wouldn’t have it any other way. Life needed me to know whether I had grown and blasted through those walls like I believed I had.
And here’s the thing, how good is belief if our faith is never being tested?
Even today, when I’m disappointed by a man, a friend, or even myself, I see it as life giving me a choice—will I be crushed or courageous? Will I fall backward or forge on? After my 27th birthday, and my own ghosted episode, I learned to trust in my life, that it was on my side and watching out for me, that it was hurting my feelings because it wanted me to grow up. And the thing is, so did I.
You have choices here, and you have choices because you are stronger than you were at 18. You are aware of your value more than you ever were in the days of your f—boys. Though, believe it or not, they had some importance to them too.
You have choices because you have made yourself stronger.
Revel in that.
Honor the determination it takes to dig yourself out of the hole you were kept in when you were ruined. Honor your ability now to choose. God knows when we are tangled up in sadness, we don’t see very many options. We don’t even really look for ways out and certainly not for ways to get ahead.
I think the dare here is that you get out from under your own pity. You stop slandering yourself with fear based thoughts. You choose to not let what someone else doesn’t want threaten all that you do. That boy is not your answer. He’s a reminder. He’s a reminder of how far you’ve come, a reminder that you have it in you to connect and, most importantly, that you have the want to.
Don’t live without love, live at least with the want to. That is my advice.
As for what could have happened that would cause this guy to ghost you out of your plans? I think the real issue lies in you thinking something—you, especially—caused this. More often than not, nothing is caused. There are just issues with character and conditions.
Maybe he’s pulling a you circa years ago. Maybe he’s in that stretch of his life where he is the cold b*tch, the closed-minded one when it comes to women because, just as you said you used to be, he’s afraid of getting hurt.
You’ve got to realize that just because we show interest doesn’t mean we can’t become afraid of our interest too.
To bypass self-criticism that’s what you’ll need to understand about others. You will need to because you will meet these people, people who show interest but lose it, people who cling to fear instead, and these people will confuse your sense of self if you don’t come to grips with growth’s natural progression, with the reality that life is about the give and take of resistance and allowance, and it is for all of us. Growing up is about learning to not sabotage love, to not gain a preference for catering to fear, to not sabotage connection just because we have been burned when we let ourselves get close.
Life burns because we’ve got fire inside of us. Every last one of us. And that’s okay.
I promise you, you will meet more people than not who are afraid of feeling what they so badly wish to feel, who are afraid of having the person who never could have been their’s before. It won't always make sense. And it will mess with your heart. But, we’re all in this together. Quietly, silently, privately, we are all up against ourselves and more than even wanting love, we are fighting, we are hoping, that one day we will just allow ourselves to give it, show it, that one day we will dare to try our love on and see if we can handle the way it melts into our skin, the way it becomes us.
Why did this guy ghost you? Why does his interest appear to have waned? Maybe he just isn’t there yet. Maybe he doesn’t want to dare himself to become more, to become a bit of what he’s never been. Maybe he just isn’t ready to connect over more than one coffee, to connect coffee after coffee after coffee.
Love itself isn’t a myth, it’s all the expectations we have informing it that are. The expectation we have that everyone we lean into will be just where we are. That’s a delirious myth. Our emotional bravery is a journey that doesn’t just fall into sync so freely like that. This doesn’t mean the journey isn’t worth it though. It’s more than worth it.
Like I said in the beginning, the journey toward love—toward the person who is exceptional for us—is the meaning of life. If you want that meaningfulness, you don’t just give up on love, you choose to give into it.
One more thing. In this world of social media, there’s this feverish, sleazy desire for coolness. I think we need to talk about this, too.
Maybe he prioritized writing that tweet rather than keeping plans or appropriately breaking yours because he knew that tweet would get some likes, satisfy his demand for short-term attention, and make him sound indifferent and pathetically cruel. I mean, cool.
Lots of people are doing it. They’re bragging about their ghosting. Maybe it’s because they don’t have a red Ferrari to ride past 1000 followers in. But get this, their silly little pissing contest will, low and behold, never take them far. You could try and explain this away or you can just cross your chest and thank yourself for not being cruel like this guy in your class.
And by the way, this tweeting behavior is not exclusive to males and romance, that’s why I’m telling you to not see yourself so much in it, to not think you did something to cause that tweet. No. Empty people write empty tweets. It’s that simple.
On Thanksgiving I stumbled upon a tweet about myself that was written by a woman/Facebook friend I’ve never had a relationship with. She’s 1/2 social justice warrior and 1/2 comedian, and that day I was the punchline. It was retweeted and retweeted and retweeted and liked over 600 times. Just like you, my head spun for a second. My stomach dropped. It wasn't that I was embarrassed, it was that I was appalled. Who does this and why am I even in their line of sight?
I’ll tell you who does this, those who are passively at war with the image they have of themselves.
She used me in that tweet because she knew something about me would give her attention. This guy used you because he knew that it would, too.
It wasn’t so much to hurt you as it was to benefit off of you.
Here’s what I did about that. I shared her tweet on my Facebook wall. I put in quotes the false sincerity she had written to me in a private message a week prior. She responded by saying sorry, that it was written out of pain and confusion toward the “type” of person I am, that my name hadn’t been revealed in her tweet, and that now I was “lambasting” her by exposing her. This is how I responded to that:
The point is pain isn’t a responsible excuse for putting anyone at the center of a joke, and whether the 98 people [and 500+ on Twitter] that laughed at me on your Facebook wall know they were laughing at me or not matters little. I know and I see how careless you are willing to be. Focusing on me won’t help you, I can promise you that. If feeling exposed has taught me anything in my life it’s to live with so much sincerity that you don’t have to keep apologizing.
Now, how did this all play out in the end? She blocked me from the tweet so I could no longer share it on my Facebook wall.
I’m sharing this because deception and laughter and confusion is going to happen to you. And it won’t always come from a man and, very often, it won’t even be personal. In other words, it won’t be a sign that you need to change something fundamental about yourself or that you are a person worthy of humiliation and rejection. I’m sharing this because there’s no reason to feel sorry for yourself. However, there is every reason to explore and understand and honor what you stand for.
My advice is to live with so much sincerity that you don’t have to keep apologizing either. My advice is to remind people when necessary how cool they would be if they were able to do the same.
Sometimes people do stupid things to show us how stupid we don’t ever want to be.
Do good things, smart things, kind things. Abandon fear, and do them with love.
Love,
Chelsea