Ghosted? Supreme Pickme Has a Solution 🤡

(Note: As a disclaimer, I was this woman. Many of us have been this woman. I am writing this as a form of tough love, because this pickme author does deserve better. Every impressionable girl or woman reading it deserves better. This article uses clever language, but the message harms women the same. Please know this post is a critique of the mindset and tactics of a pickme, not her inherent worth as a human being . And of course, not all men (🙄 at having to even say it) ghost or do awful things, but a multitude do. )

Where do I even start with this hot mess of a piece? My doe-eyed naivete was hoping this would be promising:  You’re Going to Get Ghosted This Summer. May I Propose a Solution?

The ghost of my pickme self invaded my brain with hope about this article. Hope about how it maybe wasn't the same inane drivel. Maybe it wouldn't wax poetic about how it's okay to be "vulnerable," to "double-text," to get abused quickly by mildly uninterested f-boys.

Surprise! It's the same exact drivel. What can you expect from a magazine who, back in the day, hired a token man on staff who churned out all sorts of fun advice. 😜 That's right, he wrote about imagining any (and every) woman other than his girlfriend during sex "As a man," he had so much authority, you see! He got in the mind of the guy YOU like, ladies! 🧐 Add in these past abominations of articles and surprise , Pickme brainwashing from 10+ years ago! Accept erectile dysfunction, porn use, and pretty much hating you. Propose? Go for it maybe! Pay for a date? Lol maybe! Ask out the flaky guy? Yah! 🤡 🥳

Back to the Ghosting article, perhaps we can piece it apart. If you feel too faint to click it, I will walk you through it 👯‍♂️:

(First, she describes being charmed and lovebombed by a man who ghosted her).

I was shocked and also a little impressed by Jesse’s audacity—he really thought that he could make me listen to a three-hour Jason Mraz–based playlist and then slip quietly into the mists of time like a twee forest creature when he was done with me.

Well, yes. That's what LVM do. Timid Forest Creatures! 🧚‍♀️

Somehow the bar for how I expected to be treated by men had sunk beneath the level of the water table.

Agreed, so what did you do about it?

I didn’t want him to change his mind and go out with me again. I just wanted him to value me enough to break up with me.

That's not up to you. Unless you have a mind control device? 🤓

When you are ghosted, you may feel like you should quietly accept the rejection and never bother the person again—either to prove that you “get the message” or because you want to preserve your dignity. This is exactly what your ghoster wants: to not have to deal with you. They want you to feel bad and then second-guess whether you even have the right to feel bad over a person who doesn’t even think enough of you to dump you, and then doubt yourself until you’re tired out.

Sure, but maybe the ghoster is so self-absorbed he is not even thinking of you. Again, LVM. A person is treating you like a disposable object? Toss him out of your life instead of psychoanalyzing him. 🤹‍♀️ Preserving your dignity is in your reaction toward him. Don't just act indifferent, be indifferent. Be unavailable to LVM. Be surrounded by a strong friend group. 💪🫂

But here’s the truth: You cannot preserve your dignity, because this person has taken it from you by pretending you do not exist. What you can do is stand up for yourself.

GIRL, NO. 😳 He didn't take anything from you! Why are you letting him have this power over you? Did you suddenly cease to exist once he turned his golden gaze away from you?

A point of clarification: People who don’t want to see you anymore don’t need to provide an explanation. They are not required to hear you out, or “just meet for a quick coffee” or give you a phone call. But they do owe you human decency. 

But you can't make them. Whyyy are you so focused on getting a certain response from someone who treated you poorly?

After weeks of no contact, I called Jesse and left a mysterious, “Hey, there’s something I really need to talk about with you…” . . . He texted back immediately. I said it would be better to talk in person. He arranged to come over right away.

I did not want to be rejected. But I did want my rejection to feel humane.

😶 Oh no.

Jesse materialized in my apartment, winding a beautiful scarf around his beautiful neck. I felt wild, witchy—he had ghosted me, but here he was now in the flesh. He had discarded me, but I had brought him back. I am the necromancer! I thought to myself, feeling crazed with power. My hair looked bad. Jesse looked at me with fear and with pity—I was no longer an object of his sexual interest, just an emotional woman.

😬 You didn't do anything! You're letting him have power over you.

“You ghosted me,” I said. “We went out too many times for that to be okay. If you knew you didn’t want to see me anymore, you should have just said so.”

My eyes are starting to bleed. Stahp. ✋⏹🛑🚦

Jesse squirmed. He had been planning to get back to me, he said. It was a busy time, he said.

“No, you ghosted me,” I said.

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“You don’t have to be sorry you feel that way,” I said. “Just be sorry you did it.”

“I’m sorry you feel like I did it,” he said. We continued on like this, a game of cat and other, more annoying cat. I asked if—as he claimed—he had been meaning to text me, what he would have texted.

He looked pale.

“Say it,” I said. He was silent.

“Say it!” I hissed. “Say it now!” He looked up, spooked, like a peasant child waylaid in the woods by a witch woman.

“I felt like maybe we were moving more toward being friends,” he stammered.

I am the witch queen, I thought, as his steps echoed down the hall. I am the resurrector. I am she who turns ghosts to men and men to dust! I was still sad. I did not want to be rejected. But I did want my rejection to feel humane.

😬😬😬 So he gaslit you with a non-apology entree and a side of "I wAs BuSy." Sis, you do know that even if he "genuinely" apologized, he is 99.999% likely to do it again, right?

(Ok, I thought. Maybe she turns it around. Maybe she had her misguided, "proud" moment then moved on. Hahaha, nope!)

I often hear a kind of nostalgia for the “old ways” of dating. People lament the days of men knocking on the doors for dates, and bringing flowers, and calling on the phone. But we would never, ever want to go back to those days. Those small kindnesses were given in exchange for women staying in a kind of straitjacket of femininity—female pleasure was unmentionable, queerness was forbidden, and there was almost no recourse for rape and harassment. I can buy myself flowers, I can open my own door, and when I make the mistake of dating a person who doesn’t value me enough to be direct, I can even dump myself.

Translation: I can give myself all the benefits of a relationship. In a relationship, I can take myself out to dinner, go to couple's resorts myself, mother him, and perform all the mental and emotional labor of a relationship! Basic courtesies? What's that? If I ask for less and less, that means a man won't have justification to mistreat me. Yay, eQuAlIty! 🤡

It’s nice to take back control, to demand respect, even if it makes me seem crazy. It reminds me that I am real, worthwhile, and alive

"I need to confront men to prove I am real and not a ghost. I need men to give me a healthy amount of adrenaline and excitement in my life. 🏍 I pour my energy into men when I can be reading a book, painting my nails, learning a fourth language, petting my cat, volunteering at the soup kitchen, or bonding with my girl friends." 🤡🤡🤡

Moral of the Story: Ladies, you don't have to prove anything to the person who ghosted you. You don't have to do any of this. You don't have to confront men who hurt you. You don't have to seek closure or overfunction in a romantic interaction.  Block, delete, move on. This LVM Jesse clearly gaslit her after lovebombing-- let the trash take itself out.

The pickme made a fatal error in this article: conflating her sense of self worth with how men treat her. Like many of us pre-FDS, perhaps she deluded herself into believing the playing field was pretty much even, that men generally want the same things as us. In such a mindset, we may start to believe we must be objectively awful in the eyes of all good men if one man ghosted. You do not need an explanation as to why someone dumped you. It is like pain-shopping, no matter the outcome. 

Sure, many ghosters want you to be silent (and often hit you up later because they want their options open). But for others? Reactions like this FUEL them. Your justifiable emotions, when expressed to a predatory LVM, are twisted as "proof" you are "crazy," and somehow you "misread" their actions or intentions. Imagine showing your most vulnerable self, with no other gains, and a man weaponizing it to tell his circle (and his circle's circle) how you're nutters.

To be fair, some of us told off a f-boy for ghosting as we were figuring this out. I remember doing it as a baby FDSer. Did it make me happier? No. Did I gain his love back? No. Did he redeem his character? No, definitely not. Looking back, would that man ever have been good for me, even without ghosting? Absolutely not.

As Shallon Lester says, you cannot sit down in the middle of a battlefield and declare you don't believe in war. You will be in dire, fatal danger regardless of your beliefd. If you insist on entering the battlefield of dating, you MUST know how most men operate and try to con us for temporary sex, emotional connection, ego boosting, mommy-maid duties, or unofficial therapy services.

This Pickme article promoted actions that are desperate, clingy, needy, validation-seeking, leave one vulnerable to physical and emotional harm, CHASING, and "having the last word." Time and energy are finite. We can all do something better than chasing ghosts. 👻