Gutted by Rejection 🥺

[Pete2020]

Hi, I’m 45, been single all my life, had one attempt at a relationship 15 years ago and she simply stopped talking to me, destroyed me for a long time. Here I am now at 45, I’ve lost a lot of weight and am in shape with a great outlook and looking for love. I met a nice lady and we had great chemistry and dates. Our last date, she was completely distracted as setting up a business, then pretty much no communication from there. Then I get talking to a nice girl online, going great until I missed one message from her, now I’m ghosted completely.

I feel absolutely worthless, like no one will ever love me, I can’t understand because everyone tells me I’m a great guy, my employees seem to like me, and I go out of my way to be nice to everyone, follow the rules and do the right things. I’ve now come from elation to complete nothingness and nothing to look forward to except loneliness and old age alone, not worthy of love from anyone...

I have no idea what to do or what’s wrong with me that does this to others. I’m not over the top with women and I treat them with respect. I have enough emotional intelligence and self-reflection to analyse myself and I’m fairly sure I’m doing everything reasonably.

What should I do?

[Juliet_84]

Hi Pete2020,

I’m so sorry to hear about how your relationship ended 15 years ago, you deserved better than that treatment and most importantly you deserved some sort of closure. It seems to have really shaken your confidence and now you have a bit of a complex about being ghosted. That’s not unexpected, that feeling of rejection is what we’re all afraid of and it cuts us to the core. But I wish that you wouldn’t feel this way. The reason is, ghosting often doesn’t have anything to do with the person being ghosted. How do I know this? I’m ashamed to say that I used to ghost people when I was dating. Often it was because I was just dipping my toe in the dating pool and often had a change of heart. Or I would be talking to someone who sounded lovely but I myself feared rejection or determined that they wouldn’t like me for some reason (most often due to an insecurity of mine). Or sometimes it was just that they seemed really nice but I didn’t think they would be compatible with me long-term. And in my brain I thought that ghosting them would be less hurtful than telling them these things to their face. I would have been devastated if I knew that I was hurting someone so badly by my actions. I suppose what I’m trying to highlight to you is that ghosting rarely has anything to do with the person being ghosted and everything to do with the person doing the ghosting and where they are in their life. The other thing is, when you’re texting someone you don’t know, it’s always kinda boring, like “how are you, what did you do today” etc so it’s a lot easier to do. You need to try and form that connection in real-life. You sound like such a lovely guy, is there anyone at your work who you might consider as a romantic possibility and might fast-track that connection? In my experience, people find it a lot harder to let go once that connection has been established.