For ghosting gay men, the scariest part of dating apps isn’t always the bad date. Sometimes it’s the silence afterwards, when a promising connection simply disappears and leaves you trying to work out what went wrong.
You know the routine. You match, the chat is quick and funny, and he’s only ten minutes away. You meet, it goes well, then suddenly there’s nothing. No rejection, no explanation, just a profile that remains suspiciously active.
Dating apps were built to remove friction, and honesty is friction. Sending an awkward message takes emotional effort. Closing the app and opening it again tomorrow costs nothing. Ghosting becomes the path of least resistance.
That doesn’t make it pleasant, but it does mean someone disappearing isn’t necessarily a grand verdict on you.
Why ghosting gets under your skin
Ghosting is genuinely spooky because it leaves the story unfinished. A creaking door eventually opens. This one simply stays shut, and our brains aren’t particularly good at leaving incomplete stories alone.
So you fill in the gaps. You reread the messages, search for the exact point where his tone changed and start reviewing your own behaviour like a detective investigating a case nobody actually reported.
Closure by séance, essentially.
If you learned early in life to look for signs of rejection, ghosting can bring that old radar sharply back online. Suddenly, you’re behaving like a version of yourself you thought you’d left behind years ago.
The important thing is to separate what happened from what you think it means. He vanished. That’s the fact. The story your brain starts writing about why he vanished is something else entirely.
Maybe he was avoidant. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he couldn’t be bothered to have an uncomfortable conversation. Whatever the reason, his silence isn’t evidence against you.
Give it 72 hours, delete the thread and stop checking whether he’s been online. Closure doesn’t have to arrive as a beautifully worded message from someone else. You’re allowed to issue it yourself.
Put that energy somewhere it gives something back: your mates who reply, the people who make plans and keep them, and the Sunday evening that isn’t spent being held hostage by a notification.
Halloween is for costumes, questionable punch and regrettable fake blood. It’s not for standing in the dark waiting for a reply that isn’t coming.
The kind of connection most of us actually want doesn’t disappear the second things get slightly complicated. It replies. It turns up. It’s still there on Monday.
Happy Halloween. May all your ghosts be the decorative kind.
Alan Cox is a life coach and CBT practitioner specialising in helping gay men build a genuine alternative to dating-app culture. Find out more at lifecoachingempoweringgaymen.com.
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