Learn About Yourself And What You Want As You Move Through Ghosts In Midlife Dating
Ghosts happen. People who seem interested then quickly disappear. When you’re dating in the middle of life, this can be truly unsettling. In fact, ghosts can haunt you if you let them. Before you know it you’ll be asking yourself self-sabotaging questions like: Are men attracted to me? Will this ever work out? Do I even deserve love?
Keep It Real in Traditional Dating
In your younger years, you may have had fewer experiences with ghosting. Why? Because back then, before online dating was so embedded in our reality, chances are you were dating people who were known to you. You got fixed up through mutual acquaintances, or met at a friend’s party. You both lived in the same small town, went to the same college, worked together. Whatever the circumstances, some or most of the men you dated in your teens, 20s, 30s were not strangers to you. They were part of your circle in some way. This brought with it some sense of accountability.
Accountability is the opposite of ghosting
In today’s online dating world, you are meeting and getting to know total strangers. It’s a little scary! When I walked into an Italian restaurant in Seattle to meet my now-husband for the first time, I had no idea what to expect. He wasn’t recommended to me by people I know. I hadn’t “seen him around.” He was a complete unknown. In our case, that meeting was fateful in all the right ways, but I have had many chance encounters that didn’t work out, and a few cases of men vanishing after I thought we’d made a connection. It stung, but eventually I came to see these interactions as important stepping stones.
What can dating ghosts teach us?
If you pay attention, and look past your hurt feelings, ghosts can teach you what you want and what you don’t want when it comes to love, romance, and partnership. At the surface level, you don’t want someone who is going to disappear on you – that’s an easy one. But go below the surface. What else don’t you want?
You don’t want someone who:
behaves selfishly.
is reckless with your feelings.
doesn’t see you for the valuable, once-in-a-lifetime gift that you are.
can’t be bothered to stick around long enough to get to know you.
doesn’t have the basic communication skills to kindly tell you he’s not interested or not available.
Shift your Focus from Ghosts to Desires
All of this is so important because once you can see what you don’t want, you will get a lot clearer – and bolder – about what you DO want.
Instead of focusing on someone who isn’t there, think about what you WANT to conjure.
So let the ghosts float away, and spend your time thinking about what you want to manifest in your dating life. Pick some words that resonate with you, and search for people who embody those words: Reliable. Grounded. Present. Engaged.
Shine the light on the ghosts and see how quickly they fade away. They weren’t meant for you and that is completely fine. Because at this momentous stage of your life, you are meant for something much bigger, better, and a lot more real than a ghost.
