Cowardly option
Q – I’m a woman, 40, divorced, with one daughter. Years back, I was working in a large organization, eventually dated and started a relationship with one of the company managers (not mine).
He was divorced but had been involved with someone else who worked in another department when he and I met.
I felt awkward about the situation, which initially caused office gossip. But our relationship won out.
I fell hard. He met my daughter, then age eight, and was very sweet and kind to her. I honestly thought we all had a future together.
Then one day, he didn’t respond to my texts. For seven months we’d never missed seeing each other at some time every day. We’d never not connected online.
I feared something terrible had happened to him. I even asked his previous girlfriend from our workplace if she knew whether anything had happened to him.
She just said, “This is what he does.”
He ghosted me. It’s six years ago, I work from home for another company, and I never discovered why he suddenly was finished with me.
When he returned to work from a two-week absence, he still didn’t contact me. One day, from my home, I called and screamed at him, then hung up and sobbed uncontrollably while my daughter tried to comfort me.
I never spoke to him again. I heard that he moved away with another woman a few years later. I’m over it now. But he stole layers of my self-confidence as a woman, for which I’ll never forgive him. I feel stronger for carrying that anger instead of giving it up. Your Thoughts?
A - Being ghosted feels so cruel that any reasons for it never take away the sting.
But it’s cowardice that’s evident on the offender’s part, not a statement about you.
The common, hurtful effect of being ghosted is to feel rejected, as if you were disposable. But six years later, you know that’s wrong. The action was on his part, and it was about him – he’s a serial betrayer.
I urge you, for the sake of your two most important relationships – one with yourself, the other with your daughter – to heal that wound now.