Why I ghosted my ‘perfect’ girlfriend

When Liam started dating Amanda, he thought it could lead to a serious relationship – she seemed perfect. But after four months, he realised she wasn’t quite what he was looking for. 

However, Amanda clearly had deeper feelings and, when she started talking about travelling overseas together, he knew he had to find an escape route.

“But I wasn’t brave enough to tell her right away,” Liam told news.com.au. “I knew she’d be devastated because she’d told a mutual friend that she wanted to marry me someday.

“There was no way I wanted to marry her. I liked her, but I wasn’t in love with her.

“I’d broken up with girls before and it was always the biggest drama. So, this time, I thought I’d go about it a different way. So that’s when I started slowly ghosting her. Gradual ghosting.

“I started by only returning about 20 per cent of her phone calls. Then I only communicated through text. I’m not proud of how I treated her. I came up with all sorts of excuses not to see her and stopped having sex with her when we did catch up.”
 

Amanda eventually “got the hint” when Liam told her he was “too busy” to celebrate her birthday and then she had the guts to officially end it herself.

“She ended it by text, and I don’t blame her for that,” he said. “I was a coward, really, I just got her to do the dirty work.”

Liam and Amanda’s story is just one case of ghosting news.com.au is exploring in our podcast Ghosted.

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Author and documentary maker Rusty Young admits he slowly ghosted a woman he’d been in a relationship with – he refers to his experience as “partial ghosting”.

“Our relationship was over and I was transitioning out of Colombia at the time but we stayed in touch and there was a lot of mutual attraction and respect,” he says. “But, a year later, she’d still be sending me selfies, bikini photos, and messages appearing at 3am due to the time difference.

“I found it uncomfortable and told her, but she didn’t stop. I didn’t want to block her, because I find that cowardly and disrespectful … so that’s when I discovered partial ghosting.”

Rusty started using the mute feature on several platforms, stepping into the grey area of ghosting and “not ghosting”.

“You can mute a conversation for eight hours or one day or forever. So it gives you a range of tools to slow things down, so the other person isn’t aware of it,” he says.

“It worked out very well because I was previously feeling anxious anytime I went online to answer questions from readers or reply to other emails – she would see I’m online and start chatting to me and, when I wasn’t responding to her, I’d feel guilty and anxious.

“But by muting her, I got around it by not knowing she was there and she eventually got the message that I wasn’t interested in chatting at all times.

“It’s interesting to see the psychological gymnastics we all perform to think of ourselves as good people. In real life if I had a problem with someone, I’d just say so, but online there’s so much pressure to be responding all the time … it’s not just a matter of blocking on one platform because they’ll find you on another one and it just drags it out. So muting is a great way around ghosting.”

 

Ghosted the podcast will be available on news.com.au, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all the usual suspects every Friday.