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The telltale signs your friend is ghosting you...
I never expect to fall in love again. I feel I’ve had my great love stories and, in my 60s, I’m actively not looking. I’m happy with my partner and if I wanted to feel those highs of first love again – rather than the possible angst of a whirlwind affair – I’d rather adopt a labrador.
But eschewing romance does not mean you escape the pain of losing someone you love, because we still have friendships. And losing a friend can be just as painful as losing a lover.
It’s natural that these relationships come and go, dying from lack of contact or distance or even for more serious reasons such as disagreements.
And sometimes, as with a boyfriend, you get unceremoniously dumped –though frankly, being told by a man I’d been seeing for months that he wanted out has never hurt the way being left by a friend does. Especially if said friend subjects you to the drawn-out death of ghosting.
Marion McGilvary says that ghosting takes you straight back to that time in school when your two besties stopped talking whenever you approached
You don’t realise it’s happening at first. You suggest meetings, but no answer comes. Days later, you send another text. After a meaningful pause, there’s a reply but they’re ‘busy’ and suggest meeting when ‘work is less frantic’.
You reply suggesting they get in touch when their diary is clearer. A month can go past, you try again. ‘Ah sorry,’ comes a reply, ‘Hell has frozen over.’ Well, it might as well have because the excuse given is limp but just about believable. Then, maybe it’s the third time you suggest meeting – and feeling bad at fending you off, they agree to a quick coffee. You’ve had longer sneezes.
They are friendly but busy, busy, busy. Perhaps they’re talking more than usual so not giving you enough time to ask anything too pertinent. And the slow, slow drip of eroding friendship begins again, until six months have passed and they don’t even like your Instagram posts any more.
Oh, it’s agony. For anyone who has ever been the unpopular girl at school, this takes you straight back to that time in year nine when your two besties stopped talking whenever you approached.
Which is why it was galling as a mother of four in my 40s, living my best life with a friend so close I could finish her sentences, to be unexpectedly transported back to those insecure teenage years.
It was long before the term ‘ghosting’ was even coined. Nostalgically, I still think of that girl, as she was then, 15 years younger than me, when she suddenly dropped me.
We met at art college, she was a post-grad; I was enjoying precious time away from my young children. She was posh. I was not. But we clicked. After a while, though, the friendship soured. Now I realise it was my fault. I had asked for leading credit on work we’d both done which she felt was a collaboration. There were other mistakes, too. But I also did a lot of good things for her.
Then she got engaged and our friendship fell apart. At the time, I was unaware what was happening, until I realised she had stopped calling and was never free to meet. Finally, she confessed she could no longer trust me. End of.
A year later, I saw her while I was out walking. I nodded. She stopped and called me over. I was tentative, like a kid expecting to be slapped.
‘I saw you’d written that your dad had died,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I waited a beat. ‘But nothing has changed,’ she added.
‘Well, to hell with you!’ I thought. I turned and walked away. So that was me – dumped. I can see why it had happened, even if I thought it a tad unfair.
But then it happened again. This time the fact my friendship is flailing is much harder to understand. My newly ex-friend is a clever, witty, glamorous young mother and so much fun. What I was to her, I’m not sure – maybe an uncritical motherly type?
It’s natural that these relationships come and go, dying from lack of contact or distance or even for more serious reasons such as disagreements.
Whatever, it seems to no longer be working. She is busy with ‘family and work’ and though I have both, albeit in smaller doses, only I have the time. My texts go unanswered and attempts to meet are ignored then rebuffed. Once again, ghosted.
I understand how it is when a friendship has run its course – I just wish it wasn’t the case because I was so fond of her. What to do? You can’t make someone want you by being a needy whiner. I feel like such a fool, clinging on to something that has already died.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised – because, I confess I’ve ghosted people too. The woman who believed in spirits and told me somebody had died in my house – maybe a cat she proffered – became too odd for me. I answered her texts with an emoji for a good three months. I know. What a b***h, I shudder at my meanness. What can I say? Karma comes for us all...