Alternate titles for this post:

• How to Get Away with Ghosting
• Has Anyone Seen Tony?
• The Evolution of the ManChild
• Are You Dead?
• Desperate Gay Seeks Former Texting Partner

Earlier this week I had dinner with a good friend of mine, Janelle. Whenever we get together, she and I inevitably gravitate toward queso dip and all the Mexican food products. It’s as though guacamole is the sun and we just orbit around it. As our second round of skinny margaritas hit the table (yes we ARE that basic), we got onto the subject of heartaches, both past and present. We aren’t particularly cynical or bitter people, but we both had a rough day and tequila has direct access to my heartstrings.

Janelle is coming off of a very recent heartbreak and boy was it a doozy. A man she’s been in love with for almost a decade was indescribably cruel to her. He’s a living, flesh-and-blood, piece of human garbage who I would inflict much violence upon given the opportunity and solid legal counsel. The coup de grace (or final blow, no pun intended) was that this man simply disappeared. After a period of honesty and plan making and vulnerability and connection and joy and love and giddiness, this man simply stopped all communication. It was an impressive Houdini-style disappearing act. Poof! Gone!

This phenomenon is commonly known as “ghosting” but even a self-respecting ghost has the decency to haunt you for a while. That’s why I prefer to call this modern day dating trend simply, “being a dick.” In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a trend. I would call it a pandemic crisis of epic proportions that will leave a mark on all generations to come.

For those of you who found love prior to 2006, this might be a rather illuminating read. If you are currently on the dating scene, then girl go ahead and put down your hymnal because you already know this song. Ghosting is the mark of modern millennial dating. To clarify, you don’t have to be a millennial to experience this; you only need be swimming in a dating pool designed by and largely comprised of millennials. Allow me to demonstrate a typical ghosting.

You’re lying in bed one night playing Sudoku on your phone surrounded by burrito wrappers and regret. As you close out your 15^th straight win, your fingers involuntarily exit the game and make their way to that place on your phone. You know what’s about to happen but you can’t stop it. Your fingers tap the icon and open up that app, the one you hate but that you can’t not use. The dating app. It’s irrelevant which one you use specifically because they’re basically all the same. As a matter of fact, you’ve probably tried most of them.

You check your messages on the app: none. Then you start to swiping. You swipe so ferociously that, pretty soon, you break a sweat and your fingers cramp up. Face after face after face pops up on your phone and you decide within 0.03 seconds whether that face is the potential love of your life. After a few minutes it becomes a near-comical melting pot montage of the human race. Your phone morphs into a blur with a nose and some eyebrows. This is a numbers game and you need to rack up some numbers. All of the sudden, BOOM, you have a match! Success! You and a completely random stranger have simultaneously decided that the other person is not hideous enough to reject. God bless technology.

Then comes the tricky part: someone has to initiate conversation. A majority of guys start off with “Hey” or “Sup” or “Hello.” They provide a lot. You then have to respond in a way that will bring about some actual conversation and not just robotic monosyllabic words that a monkey might have accidentally typed. You settle on something cute or witty or interesting and off we go. We’re talking. Back and forth. You ask the usual questions. “Have you ever murdered anyone?” “How many wives do you currently have?” “When’s the last time you made someone cry?” “Do you still live with your mom, and if so, how many rooms does she have?” Those kinds of things.

It turns out this dude is actually charming. Some of his responses even make you smile. He tells you a little about his life without over-sharing. He asks about you in a way that seems genuine and not like how a stalker asks questions. Eventually you let him know that it’s bedtime (9 p.m.) and that you have an early morning tomorrow (10 a.m.). He wishes you sweet dreams and sends an emoji that makes your nipples hard. You turn off your phone and think about what a wonderful Tuesday it’s been.

The next day you wake up and immediately check the app just to see when he was last active. Did he talk to anyone after you? Did he get on this morning and not message you? Would he have unmatched you in the middle of the night? We need answers. Okay so it appears he hasn’t been on the app since you talked to him. Dodged a bullet there.

After texting every friend you’ve ever had about how you found true love and what to do next, you and your hive collectively determine that it’s best to wait exactly 11.25 more hours before you message him again. Unless he messages you first, in which case you will wait a precise 38 minutes before responding because you don’t want to seem too eager but just eager enough. Great, a plan.

The 11.25 hours goes by and nothing. So you message him. “How’s your day going?” and boom we’re off to the races again. There’s conversation. There’s flirting. Emojis abound and you’ve (secretly) named the 3 children you and this gentleman will raise.

Exactly 10 days go by in this fashion. You don’t text every day but close to it. You always have to initiate conversation but that’s okay because he says, “I’m not on here [the app] that often.” You know that’s a lie because you’ve been tracking his activity on the app with a highly organized and color-coordinated Excel sheet. Whatever. We’ll ignore it. You also notice, as the days go by, his participation in your once-wordy conversations has dwindled. You observe that for every word he writes, you write about 128. That’s not a great ratio, 1:128. You silently promise yourself to do better.

Then it happens. On the 11^th day, you bitterly start yet another conversation, angry that you’re always the one to do that. I mean what else is he going to leave up to you? Raising your three beautiful children?! It’s okay, you just have to meet in person and then he’ll be enraptured by you all over again. So you suggest just that, “Hey you want to grab a drink or something this weekend?” And then…silence.

Not a big deal. He does this sometimes, takes hours/days to respond. He’s probably at work. Just chill out. But as the hours tick by, you find yourself entirely and completely unable to chill out. This has happened many times before with lots of other men. You thought this was different though. There was major chemistry with this guy. Surely you’re being dramatic. Let’s just see what happens, maybe he didn’t get your message.

Over the next 24 hours, you do the following things: incessantly check the app, text everyone in your crew to see what they think, and oscillate between sadness/hope/rage. You finally swallow your pride and message him again, ignoring your previous comment as though it never happened. Hours go by and still nothing. Eventually days go by. Silence. Maybe you keep trying, maybe you don’t. Pretty soon you’re incensed. How could he?! This guy is a jerk and you deserve better. At the same time, he’s an angel and you love him with your whole heart and you’re willing to forgive him if he messages you back. By day 5 of this radio silence, you message him with something to the effect of,

“Well I don’t know what I did to offend you but clearly it was something. But I honestly think you should have the decency to actually let me know you’re not interested any more. I’m a living, breathing human being and I deserve a tiny bit of respect. I’m smart. I’m fun. I have some gooddamm goals and dreams and you don’t even know the first thing about me. Like I’m about to launch my own online t-shirt business! I’m going to be a business owner! But you wouldn’t know about that because you didn’t even ask. Honestly, it’s your loss as far as I’m concerned. Also your political jokes aren’t as funny as you think. I wish you the best but I still don’t understand what happened. Bye. PS if your phone is just dead or you’re out of town or whatever then ignore this whole message, I’ve been hitting the sangria again. Let’s talk soon.”

There you have it folks. That’s your basic model, no-frills, run-of-the-mill ghosting. There are tons of variations on this because each ghosting is unique onto itself. The timeline varies a lot. The ghosting can happen after only a few hours. It can happen after you’ve moved from messaging on the app to texting on your phone. It’s completely possible to be ghosted after a real, in-person date. It can even happen after 4 dates, yes 4! (That was a personal favorite of mine) Or it can happen after finally getting together with 10 years of history between you. The result is always the same though; the guy abruptly ends all communication in one fell swoop. No warning. No visible cause or inciting incident. Silence.

The conversation I have with friends about ghosting always starts and ends the same: why. Why did this particular man in this particular situation ghost me AND why is ghosting culturally commonplace and accepted? Both are valid questions. After much contemplation I’ve boiled this thing down to two causes: UberEats and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Let me explain.

All the apps, social media, and technology platforms that we’re exposed to every minute of every day have led to some amazingly dope things. If you want Shrimp Lo Mein at 2 a.m., all you have to do is get on UberEats, taps some buttons, and within 30 minutes someone brings you room temperature Shrimp Lo Mein for which you are grateful to the point of tears. It’s fast and involves almost no human interaction. However, this becomes the standard for everything in our lives: immediate and completely autonomous. Unfortunately that model doesn’t translate to dating, for obvious reasons. You can’t expedite the sometimes-awkward process of getting to know someone. It isn’t fast and can’t be done solely from your bed on a Tuesday night in between games of Sudoku.

I also blame The Rock because our society still reinforces a “masculine” form of maleness that doesn’t include the ability to articulate emotions. Lots of men, straight and gay, don’t even have the vocabulary to say, “I feel like we’re not really a good match.” The far easier thing is to avoid that altogether and get the hell out. Maybe it even seems like the kinder thing to do. Let me assure you: it ain’t kinder. It’s just lazy, selfish, and disrespectful.

In an effort to combat the millions of ghostings that happened in the ten minutes it’s taken you to read this post, may I present Patrick’s New Rule for Online Dating (PNROD): if you wouldn’t do it in person, then don’t do it. It’s real simple. In almost no human interaction would you simply turn around, mid-conversation, mid-sentence, and walk away never to return again. So don’t do it in the virtual world. That “profile” that you’re talking to is an actual human being, like me, like Janelle. Just grow a pair and tell me what’s what. To quote Mariah Carey from her sophomore album Emotions, “if it’s over, just let me go.”

 

**Disclaimer: Dwayne Johnson actually seems really woke and articulate. I just needed an example. Hi, Dwayne!