He Ghosted You? Here’s the Only Response That Wins

They disappeared. No explanation, no closure. And right now you're probably thinking, what does that mean? And what should I do? Should I text them? Should I call them? Should I call them out on this behaviour? Stop. Before you do anything else, watch this video, because what I'm about to tell you is going to put you back in the driver's seat. What is it that happens to us when someone ghosts us? Initially, what turns out to be a ghosting doesn't necessarily register as a ghosting. It's just someone not texting us back. And so in the beginning it just registers as hurt, maybe even anxiety. Oh, I've said something wrong. I said something that meant they haven't texted me back in five hours. Oh, 24 hours, two days. We've. We start to feel anxious that we messed it up somehow. Then comes the hurt and the disappointment that no text seems to be coming, that this person is no longer engaging with us. That hurt and disappointment ends up giving way to incredulity, disbelief. I don't get it. Where did they go? Well, I couldn't have said anything that bad, could I? And then that incredulity starts to turn into an interrogation of our mistakes, of trying to figure out what's going on in their mind. Could I have misunderstood this situation completely? Is it something I've done? And especially if we have a propensity towards people pleasing or self doubt, then we start to question our worth in this. Any old wounds we have about being abandoned or not being good enough come to the surface. And the real people pleasers among us might even start to wonder if they owe someone an apology for something. Do I need to say sorry? Have I done something wrong? Did they just die? What happened? This is an extremely well trodden path for people who have been ghosted, especially people who suffer from that self doubt. It's an extremely painful place to be. And eventually we cross over into anger. Anger that this person has left us hanging, has left us with no information as to why, and is holding us, us hostage emotionally. The key to not making ghosting about ourselves is to realize that ghosting is a behavioral pattern. It is not inherently a rejection. What we do is we think about it as a rejection. And when someone ghosts us, it feels like the most intense possible rejection. Almost like this is the worst possible way someone could reject me. They didn't even give me the dignity of calling me. I'm not even worthy of being called to let me down. And it's that part that does real damage to our sense of self worth. We think that ghosting is a measure of the depth of our unworthiness. What we have to do, in fact, is completely uncouple the two. Ask yourself, how many people in the world let other people down without ghosting them? Many, of course. Most of us, if not all of us, have been on the receiving end of a rejection that took place in words and not in disappearance. So someone can reject us without ghosting us. When someone ghosts us, that part, it goes beyond a rejection into a behavior that is specific to that person, to the way they handle life and difficult conversations, to their lack of empathy, to their lack of character, to their lack of standards around how they communicate and treat people. So while it might sting when we get rejected, when we get ghosted, we should see that as absolutely nothing to do with us. That part is a behavioural pattern on behalf of the other person. By the way, I know that ghosting is something that profoundly affects our confidence in life. If you right now are feeling like you need to rebuild your confidence after a really difficult experience, whether it's a rejection, a ghosting, or just anything that's knocked you. I am running this month something called the 30 Day Confidence Challenge, which is a wildly popular event I haven't done in years. That is a free 30 day experience where I give you five specific missions deliberately designed to increase your confidence in just one month. We kick off on July 15th with a big call with people all over the world where I'm going to give you the missions and then we spend 30 days going through them together with me as your guide, alongside my team. It's going to be an amazing experience. I really want you to join us. It's completely free. You can register@mhchallenge.com that link again is mhchallenge.com Go register now before you forget. And I will see you July 15th live for our kickoff call, where I will be revealing the missions. There's a lot of things that are called ghosting that I think we almost have to step back from a little bit and say, what's really going on here? There are people that talk to me and then stop texting me. What I think we have to realize is that we're living in an age where it's become far easier to not get back to people. I heard it recently said that we shouldn't attribute to malice something that is produced by a system. It's an argument by sociologists that, you know, Twitter is an example or X is an example. When people lose their minds on X And start tweeting things that they would never say in real life. It's not always to do with malice. Sometimes it's to do with the kind of energy and the kind of behavior that the platform encourages and creates in people. And I think there's something parallel, something analogous with dating there, because dating apps, even just the sheer amount of people that we can have texting us at any one time, produces a kind of indifference, a kind of increased anonymity and ease with which we can just ignore people. You know, what's the old version of ghosting? It's you never called, right? You see an old movie and someone hits someone, says, you didn't call. That idea is like, that's. That was ghosting back in the 1950s. Now, what's changed? Well, what's changed is that was a time when only so many people had your phone number. Now we're living in a time where it can be hundreds or thousands of people who have our phone number, and vice versa. We're living in a time where we can be talking to many different people on a dating app at the same time, where we can be dming many different people on instagram or facebook or TikTok at any given time. So the sociological impact of that is that it's far easier for us to ignore someone, to forget to send a message back to somebody. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't always mean that we can attribute ghosting to malice early on. Now you might say, well, that makes it even harder, because now it was easy when I could hate that person for ghosting me. Now you're telling me that it doesn't necessarily make that person a horrible person. It makes me wonder if I should try again. That's not true either. Because in reality, even if ghosting doesn't amount to malice in that person, what it does amount to is completely misaligned motivations and standards. It points to someone who absolutely isn't motivated to continue any kind of an interaction or relationship with us. And it may well indicate someone who doesn't have the same standards for communication as we do. All of that is to say that in early dating, when ghosting is happening, we have to take it as a signal that you hold no potential for me to focus on and give energy to. I'm going to give my energy elsewhere, and we have to be ruthless about that, Especially if we're excited to find love. Don't get hung up for a second on someone who isn't texting you back or isn't calling you back. There is too little time in this life. Life is too precious and too short. We have to take our limited energy and give it in the direction of people who actually value it. If you don't value my energy, I don't care whether you're a good or bad person or not. You're not worth my time anym. And then you point it in a new direction. Now all of this is a very different story. When we've been with someone for a long time, if you have been with someone for seeing someone for months, in a relationship with them for years, or in a marriage with them, and then all of a sudden they disappear and ghost you, and you never hear from them. This is an extremely traumatic thing to happen. And this happens a lot. This is not uncommon. And when it happens to people, it's deeply, deeply shocking. It's disorienting. It upends our reality. It makes us question what we know. It makes us feel like we must be the worst judge of character on earth, that we did not see this potential for this behavior in this person. And sometimes along the way, we did miss red flags. I've been there. Maybe you have too. When you really look back, you can connect the dots between behavior you saw and the behavior you're seeing now. Maybe you never imagined that they would do it to you, or maybe you never imagined that the worst behaviors they exhibited in certain little moments could lead to them doing something this drastic. But there are also situations where we feel like we didn't see it coming at all. Those are the ones that really make us question our sanity. When it feels like I didn't get any indicators of this, I didn't get a hint of this, and we go, how could that be possible? How could they have been so in love with me? How could they have given me so much energy? How could we have been so happy? And then all of a sudden, it's like they vanished off the face of the earth. And the reality of so many of these situations is that we didn't see who someone was when they no longer felt their needs were getting met. Someone can be an extremely loving person. They can be a portrait of a loving person when they're getting their needs met. But when it became inconvenient, or when they started to change their mind in some way, or when they were no longer satisfied, or when the novelty wore off, all of a sudden, they became their real behaviors came out. They were no longer interested. And for them, when they're no longer interested, they're out and they feel no need to ever speak to you again. And they're quite happy with the malice of never texting you back and leaving you wondering what on earth happened and what's going on in their mind. They're quite happy to do that. They completely lack empathy and they have no problem with the idea of hurting you to that extent or leaving you with no closure. It's a very, very important point that not a lot of people recognize until it happens to them, that some people look like an incredibly loving person when they are getting their needs met, when they are happy. But who are they when they're not getting their needs met anymore? Who are they when it's inconvenient? It's not that they didn't love you necessarily. They were able to present as a loving person, but they didn't love in the way that you love. When you love. You actually care for someone when they love. It was about them. Big difference. So when you're telling yourself how you know, did they ever love me, that person who ghosted me, maybe they did. It's quite possible they loved you. But love means something very different to them than it does for you. Real love has an altruistic quality to it. Real love is wanting the best for someone, wanting someone to be happy, wanting to show up for someone or at least be caring in the way that we deal with someone. That's real love. The kind of love they experienced was they loved you because of how you made them feel and what they got out of it. But the moment they didn't get anything out of it anymore, or they didn't get what they felt they wanted today out of it, they were out. And your idea of love, which is like, how could you possibly do this to someone you love, doesn't exist for them. Our big mistake is in thinking other people are going to behave like us when they are an incredibly different animal from us. And people like this, we can't understand them because they don't behave the way that we would in that scenario. We can't imagine ever doing that to someone. But they're a different animal and they don't love the way you love. And that's been proven by the way that they have ghosted you. And that's the part that, yes, we have to grieve, but through that grief, our brain has to come to terms with the fact that they have proven exactly who they really are by ghosting us and exiting our lives in this way. And that grieving, by the way, starts to change because we realize we are grieving, but we're not grieving the person we thought we had. We're grieving an idea. We're grieving an idea. And by the way, we are grieving a relationship. We're grieving the relationship we experienced with them. But we're grieving an idea of what we thought that relationship was underneath all of that and what it would continue to be and the parts of it that we enjoyed. What we're not. Grieving is a real person in the sense that this person has proven themselves to be a very different person than the person we thought we were with. One of the big things that it does to us when we get ghosted by someone who was that close to us is it makes us lose our faith in people. Or at least it can. It can make us decide, I just don't want to trust anyone, anyone anymore. And that's a pretty good argument after something like that has happened with someone who you let in so close. But I'm a big believer in the idea that when things like this happen, it shouldn't sour us on people in general. It just gives us a kind of awareness of the things that happen. In this world, there are people like that in this world. There are people who are capable of really malignant things, of really nasty things. That's life. And we have one of two choices we can make there. We can either swear off people for life, or it can make us bring a level of nuance to all of our relationships where we keep our eyes open, but allow for the fact that life is a spectrum. And there are some extraordinary people on one end, and there are some truly malignant people on the other. And there's lots of different kinds of people in between. And by the way, there's good and bad in everybody. So even people that we love the most will sometimes do things that are hurtful or disappoint us. And in those moments, what we have to be careful of is that the truly malignant people that have crossed our path in life don't turn the sensitivity on our dial up so high that anyone who comes and does the slightest thing wrong sends it all the way to one side and makes us go. This person's exactly like everybody else. Because everyone isn't exactly like everyone else. When we allow for the complexity in people, we're allowing for the complexity in life and in ourselves. Because while we might not have done anything as nasty as ghosting someone who loved us, we might have been in situations where we weren't perfect. And I think this is a very important thing because once we allow complexity in our lives, we give ourselves the possibility of making real friends, of finding new love, and of truly experiencing life. There's a lesson in the play, Hamilton, for those of you who have seen it. You know the two, two of the leads, Hamilton and Aaron Burr, they represent very different forces in life. Aaron Burr is someone who always waits and sees. He never wants to step in and give an opinion. He never wants to take a risk. He's always is like truly afraid of his own vulnerability. And so he never takes a risk. Hamilton is the complete opposite. Hamilton wades in, has opinions about everything, throws himself into life and people. And because of that he achieves a lot. But he also experiences a lot of pain. And at the end of their lives, Hamilton's fatal flaw is that he's always risking. And Aaron Burr's fatal flaw is that he never is. And he ends up living a life full of regret. These two people need to learn from each other in the same way that we in our lives need to learn from the part of us that has been hurt and take wisdom from the part of us that has been hurt, but not allow that part of us to become our only voice. We have to also learn from the part of us that has taken risks. And because they have taken risks, they have lived. And if we can combine the wisdom of those two forces, not only will we learn how to protect ourselves, but we will live an extraordinary and extreme expansive life. I really appreciate you watching this video. I would love to hear from you. What's your experience of this? What helped you in this video today? Was there a line that made a difference? Leave me a comment below. I'd love to hear from you. And do not forget to sign up to the 30 day confidence challenge that I am holding on July 15th. I know that ghosting knocks our confidence in income incredible ways. It also stokes the insecurities from the past. So this is a chance for you to rebuild your confidence. We're going to kick off on the 15th and then we're going to do 30 days of missions together. It's going to be great. I can't wait. You can sign up@mhchallenge.com for free and feel free to send the link to anyone you know who could also benefit. I'll see you there. And thank you for watching the video, Sam.