It’s Halloween time, and for the occasion, in today’s video I talk about what might be the most insidious form of ghosting. What does it mean when someone pulls away after saying they want to be exclusive, or after texting constantly and telling you they want to see you all the time?
In this brand-new video, I give you three reasons why someone might do this, what you should do when it happens, and the strange reason why they may choose to ghost but leave the door open. You can’t miss this topic!
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“Why do men ghost?” says Kelly. “I had a whirlwind romantic weekend with a guy where he did basically everything but tell me he loved me, and he insisted that we date exclusively. I’ve barely heard from him since. I didn’t come on strong at all, and in fact, I told him we should probably take things slowly, but now he’s the one who disappeared. What happened here?” Let’s deal with the best case and the worst case scenario of who this human being is and why they came on so strong only to disappear. And then I’m going to give you the three honest reasons why people ghost. The best case scenario is that this was a person who got carried away with his feelings. It happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? Sometimes we get carried away. We trip over our feelings in real time as we’re experiencing them.
And if we’re not disciplined about what we say, we could end up saying some pretty crazy things. Have you ever been so attracted to someone or so into someone that if you let your mouth just run wild with the things that your brain wanted to say, you’d sound like a crazy person? Well, some people lack the impulse control to stop themselves from saying those things, so they’re on a weekend with you, they’re having a great time, they have that flood of chemicals that makes them feel like, “I love this person.” And then they actually say those things. They say the things that the rest of us think, “I’ll probably wait a week and see if I still feel that. In any case, it would be irresponsible to say that right now. In any case, it would seem mad if I said that to this person right now, and I don’t want to seem that way.”
Some people lack that restraint, so they just say those things. Now, if we aren’t the kind of person who moves that fast, even if internally we can get carried away, externally we don’t show that, it can feel like a very rushed pace, and it can feel… I mean, sometimes it feels really good, doesn’t it? It can feel really good when someone really wants you and when someone is giving you this unbelievable amount of energy and attention and is zoned in on you. It can be very easy to get swept up in it. That’s why I actually want to commend Kelly in saying to him and being brave enough to say, “I think we should slow things down.” That takes guts, that takes courage, that takes character to do that.
Nonetheless, some people want to have that frenzied experience, and it doesn’t necessarily come from a bad or malicious place. It’s just something that they’re feeling and they’re going with it. The problem is they can’t back it up because when they’re away from you and their emotions settle down, there’s a very good chance that that person goes, “What have I done? Why did I say all of those things? I can’t back that up. I don’t know if I’m actually ready to be in a relationship with this person that I’ve just spent a weekend with.” Now he freaks out and he starts backtracking. That is one possible explanation. We could kind of, I suppose, just define that simply as impulsive.
The worst possible explanation is that he’s just a love bomber. This doesn’t come from a good place. Either bad intention or simply, really, truly selfishness around it that makes him say, “I don’t care what happens to you in all of this. I am just going to dazzle you and make you fall in love with me over the course of this weekend and say whatever I need to say to get the absolute zhuzh of your attention.” Do you know like in Monsters Inc, where they have to… In the beginning of the movie, they have to make the kids scream and cry, and that’s what fills up the energy tank. That’s what they power their electricity on. The love bomber is like that. It’s like the monster that comes out of the closet in the middle of the night, but to make you feel as much love as possible because that’s how they fill up their energy tank, and then they get back in the wardrobe and disappear. That’s the love bomber.
That person, there’s a real deep, deep selfishness to it, almost a solipsistic nature to it, that, “I am all that matters. My feelings are all that matter, and I want to feel really, really intense and have the best weekend ever. I don’t care what happens to you after this. It’s about what I want to experience.” Now, the really insidious thing about that is how it leaves you feeling at the end of it. There’s a beautiful Oscar Wilde quote. Wilde was writing to his past lover Bosie while in jail, and Bosie had treated him so badly, so poorly, used him for his own ends, used him for his own status and frivolity, but never really… As soon as Wilde was in jail, Bosie didn’t care anymore, was just out of the picture. And there’s this beautiful line that Wilde uses when writing this scornful letter to Bosie. He says, “The thing that you have personally long ago forgotten or can easily forget is happening to me now and will happen to me again tomorrow.”
Doesn’t that just describe the effect that someone like that can have on us? Someone who can so easily come in, do this damage to us, and then leave and carry on with their life as if nothing happened, but we will be experiencing it today and tomorrow and the next day. So why is it that this person, even if in the best case scenario they just got carried away with themselves because they’re impulsive, would just ghost or fade out in such a dramatic fashion with no real explanation? A complete Jekyll and Hyde scenario, two personalities, one where last weekend you wanted to be with me and be together and be in a relationship, and then the next week where I barely hear from you. I believe there are three primary reasons why people do this.
Number one, they want to avoid a difficult conversation. Having the conversation with you where they say, “Hey, I got really carried away. I didn’t mean those things I said, and I know that’s hurtful to you, and I’m sorry. I got too carried away, and I need to be honest with you because I don’t want you to truly think that that was an indication that I want us to be together.” Or, “Hey, I got carried away. I went too fast. I’d like to slow things down, but I do like you and I want to keep seeing where this is going. I apologize for letting my emotions get the better of me over the weekend.” Someone doesn’t say that because either way, it’s a difficult conversation and it might hurt you, and no one wants to be in that position of having a difficult conversation.
The second reason is it makes him look bad. No one wants to have a conversation that makes them look like they’re reckless, look like they’re selfish, look like they’re impulsive. No one wants to do that, especially, by the way, people who have that narcissistic streak. They’re not going to have a conversation with you where they have to admit fault and risk being criticized in the process. The third reason people do it is because they want to keep the door open. Now you may say, “How on earth does ghosting me keep the door open?” A lot of people who ghost other people have actually learned that if they ghost someone, there’s a kind of gaslighting that goes on there. Last weekend I made you feel like this love was something special, that we were going somewhere, that we had something, and then I disappeared with no explanation.
And I’m almost relying on the next time I reach out to you, you not actually having the guts to say anything about that. You being passive, you ignoring it, you being so happy to hear from me again, because now that represents hope, that you brush it under the carpet and I get to say, “Hey, you want to do something tonight?” And you say, “Yeah, that sounds really nice.” And now we go out. The elephant in the room is you thinking, “What the hell?” But he’s relying on the fact that you’re not actually going to say that. And that’s what people do all the time. They rely on the fact that you really, deep down, more than you want to have standards, you want them back. So in that moment, when they reach out to you after having disappeared for the last two weeks, when they say, “What are you up to tonight?” The wanting them back, the wanting the attention, the wanting for it to go somewhere is going to be the primary driver, and that’s going to make you say, “Yes, I’d like to see you.”
They’re relying on that. They’re banking on your passivity. They’re banking on you ignoring your standards, shunning your needs. Ghosting can actually tick a lot of boxes for someone. I don’t have to have a hard conversation. I don’t have to have my own problems reflected back at me in the way I treat people. And there’s a good chance that by not having this conversation, the next time I ask you out, you’ll say yes, because I haven’t presented you with any actual information. I have plausible deniability. I thought we were good. You didn’t say anything. This gives someone away to keep you potentially on tap and withhold closure. With Kelly in the situation with this guy. It wasn’t one bad thing that happened. It was a couple.
One of the things that was bad was him going at break next speed on this weekend that he couldn’t actually back up, saying to her on this weekend that he had really strong feelings, saying to her that he wanted the two of them to be together. So his first bad was going so fast and not backing it up. But the second thing he did wrong was having no ownership of that. No moment where he said, “Hey, I just want to talk to you about the weekend.” Now, if you take an impulsive nature, and impulsive people can be very attractive, can be very exciting, but they can also be incredibly reckless, if you take an impulsive person and you marry that with a lack of accountability, that becomes a very dark pairing, because you’ve got someone who’s reckless and doesn’t own the consequences of their recklessness.
In psychology, there’s that term, the dark triad, that’s narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and that makes an incredibly dangerous person. Well, in our love lives, there are people with dark pairings. You will, if you know my other videos and you’ve followed me for a long time, know that one of my ideas, one of the things that I talk about is the idea of unique pairings in attraction. These are a positive thing. When you find two different things in a person that are both attractive and you don’t normally find those two things in the same person, that person becomes uniquely attractive and much more irreplaceable. A unique pairing. You’re sexy, but you are also funny? Wow, that’s a unique pairing. You’re clever, but you’re also humble and a good listener and curious? Wow, unique pairing, really attractive. Unique pairings are good.
Dark pairings are like the inverse of that philosophy. Dark pairings is when you find two things in a person that are both bad, but together they make someone not just bad, but dangerous. This person is demonstrating a dark pairing, and all of this, hopefully all of this information will help you realize that this person, even if you suddenly start getting attention from them again, is actually a dangerous person to invite into your life. All of this entitles you to be very direct with this person if they do reach out again asking for something instead of trying to be too clever or too charming or too charismatic, and, “How am I going to send this person a message back that’s going to get them to try harder?”
That’s not the mission here. The mission here is to communicate to this person, “This is not okay. This is not energy that I ever allow into my life, and this is behavior that I find deeply unattractive.” So if that person ever reaches out to you and says, “Hey, what are you up to?” You can either ignore it completely, and if they text again and say, “I wanted to see if you were around, I’d love to catch up,” you can then say, “Hey, it was really strange to me that we had such an intense connection over the weekend, but then to barely hear from you afterwards. And for me, the kind of energy I want in my life is from people who are consistent, people who are communicative, and people who I trust to be in my life day to day, not in my life one day and out the next. The things you said and how strongly you came on only to disappear was deeply confusing and had a real impact on my trust. So I don’t know what else to say to you, but I wanted to be honest about that with you.”
When you say that to someone, you’re telling them in no uncertain terms, “This is not acceptable to me.” None of this is me saying you should try and get a person like this back. This is me saying to you recognize dangerous combinations, dark pairings, when you see them. Now that you have the information of why someone might do something like this, don’t spend a second longer analyzing it. Go live your life and direct your energy to people who deserve to be taken seriously. If watching this video has already been a bit of a pressure valve for you, and you want to build on that and get stronger, I have a free video for you at MoveOnStrong.com that is going to help you do that. So go check it out now. It’s free. It’s a great video. It was taken from a private session I did, not for the public. It’s called MoveOnStrong.com. I will see you over there.
Fionnuala Mckenna
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