What to Do When a Guy You Like Ghosts You

Has Your Guy Stopped Contacting You?

I haven’t posted anything in my advice section because no one has asked me for any advice yet. I’m a relatively new blogger so it’s not surprising but I LOVE giving relationship advice. I’ve been in more relationships than I can count in my 39 years and 352 days (I ain’t 40 yet!). I’ve gotten the sh*t kicked out of me by love more times in more ways than the average person will in their lifetime because I want it that bad.  Like the song says, “Love is a Battlefield,” and truer words were never spoken (or in this case, sung).

About a week ago, I started reading some information on this website about relationships and the different phases you go through to essentially get to the old, married couple phase: http://julieorlov.com/

I’m not affiliated with the website in anyway, I just was looking for some answers and Google led me to the site.

I filled out some form with my email address and today I got an email from the site giving me the “opportunity” to listen to a “bonus” relationship track for free. You can listen to it below. I’ll be referencing it for the rest of the post but you don’t HAVE to listen to it to get the gist. The clip is about 15 minutes of a therapy session that Julie Orlov (the therapist) recorded of a session with one of her clients (with permission) who is freaking out because a guy she likes and who she’s been hanging out with EVERY NIGHT for two months in a romantic capacity (mutual feelings expressed and involved) suddenly stopped contacting her:

If for some reason you can’t hear the track, please contact me and let me know.

Here’s the story. Andrea (20s), the client, met a guy on New Year’s Eve (don’t know what year) and they hit it off immediately. They spent two months together essentially attached at the hip. They texted, called, emailed, and hung out EVERY DAY. To any guys who might be reading this, if you engage in this kind of intense interaction with a girl, consider yourself in a serious committed relationship. If you’re halfway mature, this should be completely f*cking obvious to you and to suddenly cut off that intense contact is going to seriously devastate the girl you’ve been hanging out with, I don’t care what Ms. Orlov claims. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

So Andrea’s new boyfriend suddenly stopped contacting her for 3 DAYS and she probably lost her sh*t after about the first 3 hours of not hearing from him. She emailed, she called, she texted. After trying for an unknown length of time, he finally responded with an email that said, “I have friends in town.”

Anyone ready to call bullsh*t? I am but I was ready to declare this relationship DOA when I heard “3 days”. But there’s more to the story.

The night before Andrea’s new boyfriend went AWOL, they’d had an incredibly romantic evening during which Andrea expressed her feelings of love for her new beau and told him she thought he might be “the one”. Then they had sex as if everything was okay.

Anyone still buying the “friends in town” email?

Now I’m no psychologist but I know a damn blow-off when I hear one. Ms. Orlov seems to think that there are some women out there who wouldn’t be completely freaked out by this turn of events and some might be like, “K. Cool. Thanks for letting me know.” I’d like to meet these dead-behind-the-eyes zombie women she speaks of. Until they are produced, they might as well be Big Foot to me.

Did Andrea overreact? In some ways, yes. She let the fact that this jackass let her tell him she loved him, had sex with her without batting a panicked eyelash, and then ghosted her make her feel like she was never going to find true love. And something else about her mom not being a good role model for her so she was never going to be able to find a good relationship.  Oh, and she cursed him out over text and probably email and voicemail as well.

But Andrea’s sense of panic given the events in question is a completely normal reaction in my opinion. It’s just the way she chose to handle that panic wasn’t particularly constructive.

My Advice for Andrea

Andrea’s case is extreme but this is the advice I would give her:

There is ZERO excuse for what your boyfriend did to you. A guy shouldn’t just cut you off like that no matter how scared he is after hearing the “L” word. And was “friends in town” really the best excuse he could come up with to keep you at bay? ‘Cause he was spending 24/7 with his friends and just couldn’t find 5 minutes here and there to text you and make you feel at ease?

Andrea, you thought the guy was “the one” and I’m sorry to tell you (which I’m sure you’re well aware of by now) he most definitely was not. And let’s say he was telling the absolute truth (he wasn’t but we’ll pretend for a moment that he was for the sake or argument), would you really want to spend the rest of your life with a guy who would suddenly stop contacting you just because he had friends in town who’s arrival he conveniently failed to warn you about? Talk about poor communication skills.

It’s not you. It’s him. You have nothing to feel bad about. Hard as it may be to accept, he’s not ready for the relationship he started with you. Go buy yourself a pint of Chunky Monkey, call your best friend and cry your heart out to her (or him), and binge on some rom-coms on Netflix. Just keep doing good things for yourself and reaffirming to yourself that YOU did nothing wrong and he isn’t worth your time. Those hormones and chemicals that had you riding high on love and are now dragging you down to the pits of hell over your dumbass boyfriend’s stupidity will subside in time.

And you will find someone else. You’re only in your 20s. You have PLENTY of time. It never feels like it, I know, but you do. Love will find you when it’s time. Until then, make something of yourself. Invest in your life, believe in yourself, and just keep moving because at the end of the day, though you may find a great partner who will love you and have your back and never be so stupid as to drop off the face of the Earth without letting you know why, the only person who will always have your back, always look out for your best interests, and always try to make sure you have some piece of happiness in this world is YOU. You are your “one”.

Hollywood and the Stephanie Meyer’s of the world have sold women a fantasy about what love is, that it will save us, that our lives should be about finding our “forever love”, and if we can just find it, our lives will be complete. Absolutely, unequivocally NOT TRUE.

We make our own lives complete and when they are, when we are whole people capable of feeding our own souls, THAT’S when love will find us. But it’s not going to ever be easy and it will be nothing like you were led to believe it would be. You will have to learn to accept and appreciate someone who is different than you are, someone you won’t always agree with, someone you’ll have to compromise with and make sacrifices for, and whose back you’ll have to have no matter how hard life gets. And in return, you’ll get the same thing but it won’t be easy for them either.  You’ll get a best friend who you’ll be crazy in love with at first but who will be more like a romantic friend once the frenzy of new love wears off.

And even if you get there, even if you find that person, that doesn’t guarantee it will last. You will never get that guarantee from anyone even with a ring on your finger and your children playing in the yard.  That’s why you need to be okay on your own. So when the rug gets ripped out from under you which it inevitably will from time to time (that’s just life) you’ll be able to get back up on your feet and keep going.

So what should YOU do when a guy you like ghosts you?

If you were born in the 70s or earlier, you may not know what “ghosting” is. I just recently learned this new term that the kids are using. It essentially means someone vanishes from your life like a ghost. They suddenly cut off all contact without explanation and any attempts to get an explanation are ignored.

I’ve heard a lot of girls ask advice about what to do when a guy suddenly cuts off contact. The first thing you should do is just ask him why he stopped contacting you. If he doesn’t respond, f*ck him. No need to text him, call him, or email him. He’s either not into you, not ready for a relationship, or a piss poor communicator and you really don’t need that bullsh*t in your life. The same advice applies if his communication suddenly becomes sporadic. He texts you every two days and you’re sitting around waiting to hear from him whereas a week before, he was texting you every five minutes. Screw that noise. He’s not your guy.

Don’t make it about something you did wrong or something you could do to change things. If you were being yourself, you didn’t do anything wrong. And you can’t change a guy’s feelings for you.

I know this is a really hard lesson to learn for a lot of people, even people who’ve been in a lot of relationships and know the pitfalls. You just have to cut your losses from people whose communication style doesn’t mesh with your own. If they’re okay talking every two days and you need to talk more than that, nothing can be done unless they’re willing to go the extra mile for you and change their ways. In that case, you might have a good one. But that usually doesn’t happen.

If you feel abandoned or uncomfortable in any way because of the behavior of a guy you’re into, it’s 99.99% certain to fail. So walk away. It may seem hard at first but you’ll get used to it the more you do it. You’ve got to get used to rejection and things not working out. Eventually, you’ll come to understand that the failure of relationships is almost never about you. Usually it’s just about poor timing and incompatibility.

And remember what I said about investing in yourself and your life. It’s REALLY important.

If you need advice and want me to answer a question for you, contact me. Even if you don’t want me to share your letter, I’m still happy to advise you. Life is hard for everyone and believe me when I say I have heard it all (and probably been through it all too).

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