Here’s To Old Fashioned Dating

I have seen many posts and articles across social media over recent years about this 21st Century epidemic that has plagued our modern societies - the one we have coined as ghosting.

To anyone who is new to this concept; ghosting is a term which describes abandoning people on whim with no explantation or apology - usually after a romantic or sexual encounter.

Just deathly, ghostly silence.

I have seen countless Ghostees all over the world sharing their stories. People who are left feeling hurt and victimised having given their heart to someone afflicted with this kind of indifference.

What I haven’t seen is many articles discussing the ghostee’s responsibility in this painful charade.

Why does it happen? Is it really something one couldn’t have seen coming? Are people truly as victimised as they feel? Or do they actually have a responsibility in all of this?

After all, we did attract this person into our life, right?

In a universe founded on law of attraction and law of mirroring, it would be impossible to deny that we have responsibility in who we are attracting.

At the very least we have responsibility to be aware enough not attach ourselves to people who are not safe.

Which means we have a responsibility not to engage in casual sex. We have a responsibility to really, really know someone before we gift them the ability to hurt us through our attachment.

Responsibility

A word that, to most, carries negative connotations. A word that has been used to trap us into giving when we have nothing more to give. A burden. A noose. Something we have to do.

To the dictionary, responsibility is the duty or obligation to carry out tasks, make decisions, or fulfill commitments in a reliable and accountable manner. It involves being aware of the consequences of one's actions and taking ownership of them.

The discussion I am about to present to you is going to keep circling around the understanding that there were many signs present that we were either completely dismissive of or unaware of at the time. Those are your responsibility. Understanding this is your empowerment.

So what were those signs?

Well, we have surely all become fully acquainted with the popular term red flags in recent years. Some of us may even be in the best friends zone with them already. At this stage in my life, I have a masters degree in them.

So let’s discuss these for a second.

What makes it obvious that a person will be likely to ghost you at some point in your relationship?

Before I get into this, I should give you a little background on where my research is based. I studied psychology in my early 20s. I wanted to understand people. More accurately, I wanted to understand mean and hateful people. I needed to. I have been seeking answers to why people can act so cruelly from the youngest age.

Any lotus flower born to this world knows that life is meant to be spent basking in the sunshine by day and floating under starry nights.

She knows that her petals were made to feel raindrops and breezes. She is meant to be admired for the paradox of her immense strength and delicate beauty. She is meant to be unique and adored.

And yet, she finds herself born to murky, muddy waters. Predators roam everywhere around her. The energy is fearful and dark and this darkness infects her consciousness. She becomes scared that her inner wisdom is but a fantasy that will never be realised.

She begins to doubt herself and her understanding of life’s love and grace. She looks around and can only see darkness. Darkness envelops her. Some inner voice, barely a whisper, keeps telling her just keep growing, keep reaching for the light.

And if she can? If she can keep growing and make that journey through the murky darkness….she will be rewarded with everything she ever believed in.

She will confirm that everything she was born knowing was real. If only she can trust herself enough not to give up.

Okay, I am literally going to have to scroll back now to see where this tangent came from. I got far too into this analogy and lost my point…

Ah yes. So like the lotus flower, I always knew what I was seeing around me was not how life should be. I knew the way I saw people treating each other (and me) was not right. And I couldn’t understand it. I needed to understand it to make sense of it.

To a highly sensitive child thrust in a world where parents smacked children, mocked and criticised them, punished them for not being able to handle big emotions like disappointment and fear and hurt and anger (in spite of giving no guidance on how to manage these). A world where parents threatened children with violence when they cried, or smashed their head against a siblings because they were unable to navigate an argument without shouting at each other (perfectly modelling what they were witness to) - nothing made sense. Nothing.

The only way I could even begin to unpack it all was through reading. And I devoured psychology and philosophy like a starving person at a buffet. I read through books, theories and research and took up this long and lonely quest of seeking to understand unreasonable human behaviour.

Somewhere fuelling my search was the belief that if I understood why sometimes loving people could turn so violent and hateful, then I could prevent it from repeating. I could fix it. I could change this world I found myself surviving in. I could even save other children from this silent prison of suffering that I had to endure. Maybe I could even heal my own family. Maybe I could make everything better.

This path eventually, of course, led me into healthcare and the firm understanding that an absence of true health is the root cause of all apparent evil in this world. On a basic level, when people are nutritionally depleted, sleep deprived, hormonal imbalanced and are put under enough threat of survival needs (especially with the responsibility of children weighing on them) breaking point will be reached.

For people in poverty or barely above that line, children are born to humans who are essentially still children themselves. People with their own unhealed traumas (especially in areas of abuse, neglect and attachment).

Specifically they are born to people living in fear. And that fear frequently manifests as anger - whether turned inward (we call this depression - depressed people are incapable of sustaining love) or outward (abusive people are incapable of sustaining love)

Uncontrolled anger is a potent mixture of all of the above.

To be clear (because often people are highly triggered when this discussion comes up and so they prematurely reject the teaching) there is no excuse for abuse.

But there are reasons.

Think about this for a second. What four, five or six year old child thinks to themselves “I want to grow up to be a mum who neglects her kids” or “I want to grow up to be a dad who is violent with my children”

None. The answer to that is None. Not one.

Agreed?

So if we can agree that no one aspires to become an abuser, we have to understand that something has to go pretty badly wrong for that to happen / for them to become that.

This is about patterns of unconscious cause and effect. And we must understand the causes if we are to have any hope to break the cycles. This is why we need to understand.

Not to excuse them but to empower us. People really seem to struggle with this concept so I will say it again. It is NOT to excuse them but to empower us.

I know, I know. You thought this was a lighthearted read about Tinder and dating and red flags for ghosting. It all links in, trust me! Hold on!

Fear and love are the two most powerfully motivating energies on this planet. And true love here on Earth is scarce. Very scarce. Which means that most people are operating from and being driven by fear rather than from any devotion to love.

The academic literature shows us that the fear of rejection (from a social group, parent or relationship) is experienced as just as intensely as the fear of death. Sociology explains this as being attributable to our inability to survive if we were abandoned by our tribes thousands of years ago.

Exile (rejection) would have meant certain death in those days and it is believed that this remains in our genetic memory. However, to me, it is far more likely that it relates more strongly to our childhood and infancy.

We are born completely helpless and dependent upon our mothers for every basic need. This lasts for years. Think about it, at what age does a child become self sufficient? Able to seek food and live independently? Our laws suggest somewhere in the region of 16-21. Examples from poverty stricken countries suggest ages far younger can be independent but at great developmental and psychological cost.

So think about this.

The most formative years of our life are spent being extremely sensitive to signs of rejection, because rejection to a baby or infant or child = certain death. This makes our attachment to a parental figure everything.

If that relationship is healthy and we learn we can trust and depend on that parental figure to meet our emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, social (and so on) needs, then this will transition in to the parent teaching us how to take over that responsibility gradually. We will begin to wean our dependence on that attachment figure and by adulthood we should be fulfilled, healthy, happy and independently meeting our own needs.

In theory.

In actuality most of us do not have this experience. Most of us do not have sensitive and attentive biological parents who meet our every need thus resulting in us having secure attachment. Instead, we develop traumas which go on to negatively impact our ability to form healthy relationships in later life.

Those early experiences of rejection, inconsistency, neglect (and At worst, abuse) shape how we view ourselves, others and our concept of connection. This is why ghosting is not just a modern dating phenomenon—it is a reflection of deep, unhealed wounds and unresolved patterns in both the ghoster and the ghostee.

When we experience ghosting, it taps into our primal fears of abandonment. For the ghostee, it feels like an echo of every time we weren’t chosen, weren’t prioritized, or weren’t seen as valuable. It’s not just simply a loss of romantic connection - it validates our deepest insecurities about being unlovable or disposable.

But what about the ghoster?

Why would someone choose to disappear without any explanation? First and foremost you have to understand that ghosters operate from a place of fear. Many fears, actually.

1. Fear of confrontation

They were never taught or has modelled to them how to navigate conflict or express difficult emotions. Avoidance becomes their primary coping mechanism.

2. Fear of intimacy

People with insecure attachment styles (e.g. avoidant) struggle to maintain closeness. When things become “too real,” they retreat to avoid vulnerability. Past experience taught them that vulnerability = pain. They avoid this at all costs. (Including the obvious cost of authentic love - for you cannot have true love without true intimacy)

3. Fear of rejection

Ironically, ghosting is also typically a preemptive strike. The person disappears before they can be rejected themselves.

Ghosters are not some malicious, evil breed of narcissist (although it’s so easy to label them as such and cut off all empathy) .

They are in fact a standard narcissist.

Their actions stem from emotional immaturity and deep, unprocessed trauma. They likely can not even realize the extent of the harm they cause, as they’re too focused on avoiding their own discomfort.

The Ghostee’s Responsibility

While it’s tempting to place all blame on the ghoster, it’s crucial to reflect on our own patterns and choices. After all, only a narcissist (“deeply wounded and emotionally immature person”) can attract and form an attachment to a narcissist!

1. Red Flags

Remember all those signs of emotional unavailability, inconsistency, or poor communication early on? The ones you ignored or thought you were wrong about? That gut feeling that something was off….. yeah? That was on you. Ignoring these will ALWAYS set you up for disappointment!

2. Clear Communication

Were you clear about your intentions and boundaries in the relationship? Did you walk away when they were first ignored or broken? No?! That’s on you.

We don’t control other’s behaviour, but when we remain in disrespectful relationships hoping the other person will change - that’s on us.

3. Lacking Self-Worth

Did you place too much of your self-esteem in their validation? This points to your unhealed wounds from childhood / past relationships. These are your responsibility to fix. No one else’s.

4. Casual Sex and Attachment

When you deeply value emotional safety, engaging in casual sexual relationships will never be something you choose. If you are seeking for genuine and authentic love - you need to first stop having casual sex. This isn’t about moral judgment but understanding what is harmful and perpetuating destructive cycles.

Breaking that Cycle

All pain is transformative if we learn the lesson it brought to us. And every pain comes with lessons.

Moving towards genuine intimacy and love begins with healing attachment wounds, cultivating emotional intelligence, setting boundaries and seeking out aligned connections (which means becoming great at letting people go!).

Ghosting may seem like a modern epidemic, but it’s really a symptom of deeper societal issues such as emotional avoidance, poor communication, and widespread attachment wounding.

If you are attracting and making attachments with people who don’t value or respect you - ultimately it is because you don’t value or respect yourself. They are actually just the symptom or reflection of a deeper problem within yourself.

I used to very naively believe that if you gave a man everything he wanted - he would of course then love you in return. Because who wouldn’t love the person who gave everything of themselves? (I know, right 😥)

That’s obviously not how it works in this world. A world of Tinder. Of swipe, NEXT. A world where women are treated as disposable commodities. Where it’s easier to bin one and find another. (And I’m certain there will be men who have experienced this treatment too. I used to be friends with women who treated men as highly disposable…. 🫣)

And that’s why I strongly advise any man or woman reading this to seriously reconsider casual hookups, casual sexual encounters and even considering such before knowing a person for at least a year.

If that sounds crazy to you - that tells of just how strong your addcition to sex (or affection) is. And it’s something that will not lead to anything resembling a happily ever after.

This isn’t about morality. It’s about biology. You create bonding chemicals every time you kiss another. You create even more during sex. If you can detach from them easily - you have a massive weight of problems going to drop on you one day. It’s coming. And it will hit like a freight train when it does.

And if you can’t detach easily from these powerful feelings (like a real human human-being!) then you will already realise what I’m saying makes sense. Don’t make these bonds with people you don’t know. With people who you couldn’t hand on heart say “this is my best friend in all the world” and have that friendship based on a solid track record.

Your choices will either lead you to suffering or to joy.

Choose wisely!