The Online Dating Silent Killer — Ghosting!

Many of you who are online dating may have experienced a similar story, much to your chagrin:

You join an online dating site. Someone interesting checks out your profile and sends you a note. You’re elated!

Finally, you’ve attracted a potential match with the right age, similar interests, intelligence, and good humor. You quickly respond to the first message or like. They respond back.

Things are happening effortlessly and you’re having fun. What could go wrong from here?

You have consistent text messages full of inside jokes and easy banter, but then you have to go out of town. It’s OK. You’ll meet him when you get back.

He is still in contact during your trip and you’re sharing pictures. You’re comfortable and you really feel like you’re hitting it off.

You get home, hopeful that now you can finally meet, but you find out he’s had a family emergency and is busy dealing with that all week. You’re still in touch and he’s keeping you posted on updates.

Finally, things gets back to normal. You’re home, so now’s the time. You’re ready – date ready.

But somehow between his work, your work and each others’ busy lives, you’ve missed something very important: making plans.

Oddly, now your conversations are more strained. Eventually no one is talking and you’re not entirely sure why. Did your perfect match turn into the ghost?

The wind got taken out of the sails and now it all feels stale. It seems over.

“Don’t wait too long

to start making plans.”

Online dating isn’t supposed to go like that. You never even got the chance to meet!

The details to this story may be different, but the theme remains the same: Too much time is the online dating silent killer. It causes the romance and excitement to fizzle until you or the other person ghost on the conversation.

You needed to meet in real life before all of this digital intimacy snowballed into nothing. You were too fast too soon in a relationship that had false intimacy with no substance behind it.

Phone calls, emails, video chats, and texts are not real ways of emotionally connecting, but what’s worse is these things make you feel a level of comfort with a person who you actually don’t even know.

In fact, once you met in person, you may not have experienced the same chemistry. You knew that was a possibility, which made you both feel a silent pressure on meeting.

Generally, you want a meeting to be as quick as possible from the time you decide you have potential with this person, but sometimes things happen to prevent that.

If there is no conversation happening, that’s OK. You don’t want to force a puttering car to drive up a hill.

Wait it out. Give it a little breather. Give it time for both of you to remove yourselves from the expectations of hearing from each other in your faux relationship.

Then after you’ve given yourselves some time for independence and reflection, circle back. Shoot out a friendly conversation starter.

There’s a good chance neither of you have met another person you’ve hit it off with as well. Reconnecting will make it easy for you to start again without all of the pressure, so set something up ASAP.

Learn for the next time. Don’t wait too long to start making plans.

Has too much time passed and killed your shot with one of your online prospects?