When I got ghosted, it felt as though my heart had been ransacked.
I felt hurt, betrayed, used, and shocked. But most of all, I felt confused. I couldn’t understand how someone who was so special to me could toss me aside like I was worthless. It made me question every moment we had shared together. Was any of it real?
There were no warning signs. No big fights. No tearful goodbyes. Just painful silence and a lot of unanswered questions.
Breakups are never easy. There will always be one person more hurt than the other. But there’s something about being ghosted that is extra hard to get over.
That’s because ghosting robs us of closure. It leaves us feeling powerless with no opportunity to ask questions. We’re left in a whirlwind of confusion where nothing makes sense.
I asked myself so many questions after I was ghosted. If you’re asking the same questions, know you’re not alone.
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1. What Did I Do Wrong?
It’s logical to think you did something wrong when someone suddenly stops communicating with you. Your brain will scramble to find a possible explanation to make sense of the hurt. After all, if you know what went wrong, you can fix it, right?
The truth is that in 99% of cases, you won’t have done anything wrong. You could have been the most perfect human on earth, and still have been ghosted.
Why?
Because it was probably never about you.
It was more likely about them. Maybe the person is emotionally avoidant, has commitment issues, or just likes to play with people’s hearts. They could be a narcissist who feeds off hurting other people. Or maybe, they’re just too cowardly to tell you that their feelings changed.
The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter what their motives were. Even if you did do something wrong, a healthy person would have the courtesy to let you know what happened.
Anybody worth your time will value your time. They wouldn’t leave you hanging on a thread wondering what you did wrong.
2. How Could Their Feelings Change So Fast?
One of the most confusing things about being ghosted is the speed at which it can happen. Ghosters can go from love-bombing to cutting all contact overnight.
Jumping from the heady infatuation stage of a relationship directly to a breakup is an unnatural progression. We don’t expect someone who’s been showing all the right signs to suddenly cut us off. It’s only natural to feel shellshocked and deflated.
The loss can be hard to make sense of. Suddenly all the feelings we have inside have nowhere to flow. We bounce back and forth through the 5 stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Confusion reigns and the feeling of abandonment can be overwhelming. In fact, studies show that social rejection can activate the pain network of the brain, especially if the rejection is unexpected.
3. Was It All a Lie?
Few things make you doubt your own sanity more than being ghosted, especially, if you were love-bombed and discarded.
Being ghosted makes you question every aspect of every moment you ever shared with someone. It’s normal to wonder if any part of it was genuine, or if it was all just a trick of the mind. The ambiguity and lack of closure can be maddening.
While it’s possible that the person meant to hurt you all along, it’s unlikely. If someone put effort into spending time with you originally, then they must have liked you (at least in the beginning).
Regardless of the other person’s intentions, it’s important to focus on your own feelings. How you felt was 100% real, and those feelings need to be honored and acknowledged.
4. Why Wasn’t I Good Enough?
Being ghosted can make your self-esteem crumble quicker than a cookie in milk. You’ll ruminate endlessly about all the ways you must have fallen short.
“Maybe I was too needy”
“Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough”
“Maybe I was boring”
If someone cuts you out of their life suddenly, it’s only natural to have self-doubt. It leaves the reason they left us open to interpretation, and our minds can fill in the blanks with any number of possibilities.
Without the courtesy of closure, we are prone to assuming the failure of the relationship is down to our own personal inadequacies. This is especially true if we have low self-esteem or abandonment issues.
While no one’s perfect, it’s important to go easy on yourself. Chances are the person has done this before, and will do it again. Ending a relationship without an explanation is very emotionally immature, and speaks more about them than you.
5. How Could I Be So Stupid?
I felt angry with myself after being ghosted. But more than that, I felt embarrassed and ashamed.
On the Psychology Today website, Jennice Vilhauer, Ph.D. states that “One of the most insidious aspects of ghosting is that it doesn’t just cause you to question the validity of the relationship you had, it causes you to question yourself”
I beat myself up for a long time, agonizing over how I could have made such a stupid mistake.
“How could I have thought he actually liked me?”
“Why did I trust him so easily?”
“What did I do to drive him away?”
Surely, there must have been signs that I’d missed, some blatant red flags.
But the truth is, there wasn’t. After reading through the streams of daily texts, there was nothing to imply that this person was untrustworthy. We had spoken every day for months. He had put in time and effort. We were making plans to spend more time together.
Short of being psychic, I couldn’t have predicted the sudden 180° shift in his feelings towards me.
Questioning yourself is a natural part of the ghosting grieving process, but don’t beat yourself up long-term. See if there are any pearls of wisdom you can learn from, but know that anybody can be a victim of ghosting. It doesn’t say anything about your intelligence, or worth as a person.
6. Who Can I Trust?
It’s easy to become jaded after being ghosted. I felt scammed and robbed for all I had. Opening yourself up to another person takes courage, and when someone abuses that trust, it’s normal to feel betrayed.
Research shows that victims of ghosting can become more guarded and less able to trust others when building new relationships. People become more cautious in an attempt to shield themselves from future hurt and betrayal.
While you can minimize the risk of getting hurt by taking things slowly, you can never eliminate the possibility of getting hurt. The harsh truth is that even when you try to protect yourself, you’ll still meet plenty of wolves in sheep clothing.
7. Will They Come Back?
Even when we know the person who ghosted us is not worth our time, it doesn’t stop us from craving their contact. It’s beyond frustrating, but there is a scientific explanation.
When we fall in love, our brains are flooded with a cocktail of chemicals including:
- Dopamine: The dopaminergic pathways of the brain are highly activated in the early stages of romantic relationships. Dopamine causes us to feel ecstatically high when we are around our new love and causes us to crave their presence like a drug when they’re not around.
- Norepinephrine: Norepinephrine is a form of amphetamine that is prevalent during the infatuation stage of love. It gives you a boost of energy and makes you feel restless when you’re not with your crush.
- Serotonin: According to research, we have a reduced level of serotonin in our brains when we first fall in love. This causes us to feel discontented, and long for contact with our love interest.
As screwed up and cliche as it sounds, we are literally addicted to love. When we get rejected during the infatuation stage, it’s excruciating because we are basically trying to quit an addiction cold-turkey. We miss the ‘high’ we had at the start of the relationship.
8. How Do I Make Them Care Again?
We got them to care about us once, so we can do it again, right?
“If I send them the perfect text, maybe they’ll remember I exist”
“If I explain how I feel, they’ll realise they love me”
“If I go no-contact, they’ll miss me and come crawling back”
“If I date someone new, they’ll get jealous and want me back”
It’s human nature to want what we can’t have. Let’s face it, any kind of rejection is a blow to the ego.
Sometimes a ghost will return to haunt you, but ask yourself, do you really want that? How someone treated you, in the beginning, is irrelevant if they treated you like crap at the end.
Good relationships are built on trust and mutual respect. Be honest, will you be able to rely on this person to be there when you really need them?
9. Why Wasn’t I Worthy of Goodbye?
This is a natural question to ask after being ghosted, and one that I asked myself many times. After a lot of consideration, the answer came to me:
They were never worthy of “hello”.
The problem is, I didn’t know that at the time. Every relationship requires trust, and there’s always the risk of getting hurt. Sometimes people will rise to the occasion, other times, they’ll fall.
“Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first, and the lesson afterward.” – Oscar Wilde
The truth is, short of death, there’s no excuse for not saying goodbye. Everybody deserves an explanation. It might not be what we want to hear, but everyone is entitled to closure.
Breakups are always hard; no matter which side you’re on. It’s never easy to tell someone that your feelings have changed, but it’s the act of a coward to vanish without a trace.
***
Being ghosted by someone you care about is painful. Every time you think of them, it will sting. There’s no quick way to get over hurt and disappointment. That’s why it’s important to allow yourself time to heal. The questions swirling around your head are completely normal. They might make you feel crazy at times, but are a natural step towards healing.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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