"A boy ghosted me so I called the police"

“You should ask him for an explanation.”

I’d never received dating advice from a policeman before. And so, as I sat on the sofa that Monday afternoon—dumbstruck, looking out at the grey Stockholm sky and wondering what the fika had happened—I didn’t tell him that I’d already asked for an explanation several times.

“Thank you,” I said. I hung up the phone. The boy wasn’t in fact dead as I had presumed, which was perhaps more confusing than if he were.

As a bit of a rewind—around three weeks prior, when I was visiting Stockholm from Portugal where I live, I connected on Grindr with a very tall, very kind, very handsome 30-year-old man named *Viktor. I thought to myself, “Yeah, I guess I’m in his league.”

I was in a car heading to the airport for a flight from Stockholm to Marseille — where I was meeting college friends there for what we’d intended to be a 'post-pandemic' reunion... it had instead become a modest 'mid-Delta virus horrors' get-together. And so, I didn’t make much of this Viktor.

But during a five-hour layover in Amsterdam (travel in the age of Covid-19), whatever 'textual spark' we’d previously had burst into a flamboyant, raging, and ultimately destructive forest fire. He opened up to me entirely. He had three brothers and three sisters - the latter crop from his father’s second marriage. He went to Barry’s Bootcamp four times per week. He had just received his Master’s in psychology and would soon leave his job at a restaurant for something bigger. He hadn’t been in a relationship in years but felt ready again. I told him I liked being single, but the right person could change my mind.

“You know what my biggest turn-on is?” He asked. I was sitting in the Amsterdam airport and listening to a podcast on the disappearance of Kenny Veach, a hiker who went missing near the Sheep Mountains north of Las Vegas. “A boy that is genuine and kind. And you’re that. I shiver when I think of a guy like you.” (I too shiver, but only because I’m 98 per cent sure I have an iron deficiency, but I kept that to myself.)

“I guess that makes sense,” I told myself, as I picked at the weird Dutch grilled cheese I was eating. Still, I began joking that he must be a catfish. I even saved him in my phone as 'Viktor Catfish.'

He kept telling me I was too good to be true. I told him I’m poor and if he is trying to rob me, it would be wiser to dupe someone who has money.

“Do you think this guy looks hot or crazy?” I asked Astrid, my closest friend in Sweden. I sent her a photo. “Crazy lol,” she replied. When I called her later, she noted that she didn’t have any friends in common with Viktor on Instagram – neither did I – and that his account only had a handful of followers.

“Just don’t waste your entire trip talking to this guy,” she concluded. “Of course I won’t,” I told her.

I hung up to check into my hotel room. Once upstairs, I laid down in my twin-sized bed and texted Viktor all night.

I told him, once again, that I doubted he was real. Perhaps he was a psychopath.“I think emotional players, douchebags, empathetic people...should be punished as severely as criminals,” he wrote. “Because when someone behaves emotionally cold or plays with people, that for me is a crime.”

I spent the next few days shuttling between various Airbnbs in tiny, mountainous French villages like Gourde and Lourmarin. Viktor would text me good morning and goodnight. We began talking on the phone for an hour or so midday. He sent me videos of himself to prove he was real. I was flying back to Stockholm after France to attend fashion week there (I work as a magazine editor), and so, we decided we’d meet the night I returned.

That first evening back in Stockholm, I went to dinner with fellow editors to commemorate the launch of Stockholm Fashion Week. I told them over fish and roasted duck that I was meeting someone who was likely psychotic, but that I was into it.

“It’s sort of my type,” I joked. Viktor met me afterward at my hotel’s bar for a drink. He was taller than I’d imagined. He wore a tight black leather jacket over a white t-shirt. He had small blue eyes and a hairless face. He was nervous and so I rested my chin casually on my palm and spoke with him as if we’d known each other for years. We drank a few glasses of wine and soon the banter came easily.

The Swedish chill had fought off the already-eroded warmth of late August, and so we moved into the hotel lobby for a final glass. I kissed him goodbye on his cheek. “I could have stayed up talking to you until 5 in the morning,” he texted just minutes after he left. “You’re so goddamn interesting.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I thought.
“Goooooood morning,” he wrote the next day. How are you—good, and you—good. “Long day of work ahead of me,” he said, “but I’ll get through it by thinking of you.”

I spent the coming days at fashion shows or visiting showrooms. Filipa K was becoming cool again. Stockholm Surfboard Club was actually making a credible dent in surf culture, despite the company’s geographic improbability (“You can go surfing about an hour south, in the Swedish Archipelago,” long-haired dudes will tell you in their sing-songy, matter-of-fact Swedish accents). Every brand is sustainable.

The entire time, Viktor texted me.

On the final night of Stockholm Fashion Week, a driver was taking me and two other American editors—Steven and Charlotte—to a culminating dinner for the attendees, designers, models, and so on. We passed the restaurant where Viktor worked. I saw him carrying two glasses of wine through the window and pointed him out to my fellow passengers.

“Should we drink there after dinner?” Steven asked. The fashion week dinner was only two blocks away.

“Yeah, we should,” I replied.

Our dinner was an exceptionally boozy affair with 40 or so people. And so, when the dinner dispersed and Steven and Charlotte were nowhere to be found, I texted them and found out that they were already at Viktor’s restaurant, “stalking him” for me. I was mortified. I texted Viktor to say my friends had come there to see him and that I was sorry. He texted back saying he was flattered that my friends knew about him and that, because it was his last night working at the restaurant, he had a ton of free champagne to give us. Afterward, he texted me repeatedly saying how nice it was that we’d all come.

“Good morning,” he texted the next day. “How have you been sleeping? What did you dream about?” On this particular Saturday, Viktor and I had plans to get dinner. It was his mother’s birthday, so she was coming to his apartment for lunch but would be leaving at five and back from dinner to sleep at around 12:00 am. “For that window, I’m all yours. Do you wanna come by my place or what do you wanna do?” he writes. He tells me he can cook and that he has some wine.

I suggested we go out to dinner at Wasahoff, a very iconic seafood restaurant where the servers tend to be blond, middle-aged women who are passively judgmental and motherly (depending on what you order). It’s my favourite restaurant in the city.

We met there at 7:00 pm and sat at the bar, where we ordered a dozen oysters. He drank white wine while I drank red. He became progressively touchy-feely the more he drank. He asked me if there was a type of person I hated. He also asked if I’d ever had a near-death experience. I told him I hadn’t, and neither had he. I felt comfortable and liked, and buzzed.

“Are you American?” someone asked. I spun around on my stool to see a middle-aged Swedish woman sitting on another stool by the window behind me. She had shoulder-length blond hair and had a navy blue scarf hanging off of her small shoulders.

“I’m American. He’s Swedish,” I said to her, nodding toward Viktor. “I was dating a Californian until recently,” she said. “We just broke up and so now I’ve come back here.”

Already giddy from the wine, Viktor and I turned our date into a three-way hang with this woman, whose name was Sofia. She told us about her two children, as well as why she’d lost interest in the Californian. She’d moved into a temporary apartment just around the corner as she figured out what to do next. We drunkenly made plans to meet up in the future, all three of us.

“Are you two a couple?” Sofia asked. Viktor and I looked at each other. “No,” I said. “Well, we’ve really just met a few weeks ago.”

“You seem like a couple,” she said, smiling. Viktor began telling her about when we first spoke. He recalled that I sang a voice note of something when we first connected, a detail I’d purposefully forgotten. “It was so strange but so funny,” he said, putting his hand on my knee. He looked down at his phone. “S***, my mom is going to be home in ten minutes!” It was 11:45 pm. “She doesn’t have a set of keys.”

“Okay, it’s my bedtime anyway,” I said. “I’ll get the bill and we can just go home.”

“It was so nice meeting you both,” from Sofia.

“But I’m only living ten minutes away from here,” Viktor said, enthusiastically. “What if I just go give her the keys and then come back? I’ll only take twenty minutes.” Sofia and I looked at each other, mulling it over.

“I don’t think they’re even open much longer,” I said to both of them. “We can just call it a night.”

“The two of you can have a drink together and then I’ll hurry back and join you for a last round. I’ll be super fast.”

“Are you sure?” Sofia asked him.

“Yes! I’ll come right back. Here—” Viktor dug around in the pocket of his leather jacket—“hold this in the meantime. It’s my most prized possession.” He took out a vial of pharmacy-grade lip moisturiser and handed it to me. “I’ll be right back.”

Viktor leaned in and kissed me. Our first kiss. Sofia offered him her bike, but he said he didn’t want to ride drunk. He kissed me a second time and left. “He’s such a nice guy,” Sofia said. She had taken Viktor’s seat next to me at the bar.

“I don’t really trust men, like at all,” I replied. “But he seems to be a good one.” Nearly an hour later, the bartender kindly told us he was taking last call. Viktor had not returned, nor had he texted me back when I asked where he was.

“That’s very strange,” Sofia said. The bartender handed me a bill for $150. I paid and began to fret, just a little, that maybe Viktor had ditched me.

“It wouldn’t make any sense,” Sofia told me. “He’s so clearly into you.” I charged the oysters and wine to my card, put on my coat and walked outside with Sofia. “Something feels very weird about this,” she said, gravely.

We spotted a couple of kids in their twenties smoking cigarettes outside the bar next door. “I’m stressed. I want to smoke,” I said. “Me too,” she replied.

We asked a young girl and her boyfriend for a cigarette. I called Viktor and he didn’t reply. After exhaustively discussing how bizarre the situation was, Sofia and I exchanged numbers and went to our separate homes.

That night, I had trouble sleeping.

And, when I woke up the next day at 10:00 am, there was no text. The somber hues of Stockholm’s sky cast a sterile blue, making my apartment feel like a hospital room. I drank coffee in bed and thought about how odd the day already felt, how eerie everything was in the aftermath of what was, in one way or another, an unexplained disappearance.

“Are you okay?” I texted. “I am really nervous that something happened.” Viktor didn’t reply.

I took myself to the gym to get my mind off of the night. I went to the grocery store to buy food and cook—something I rarely do, as I simply don’t enjoy cooking—but was too anxious to eat. A full 24 hours later and I had still not heard back from Viktor. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t been online on Whatsapp or Instagram.

“Hey, if you’re ghosting me, I won’t ask any questions about it,” I wrote. “Please just reply to this saying that you’re okay and alive and I will never message you again.”
He didn’t reply. He didn’t answer any calls.

“Oh my god, I’m scared,” Astrid said over the phone. “If he were going to ghost you, why would he insist you stay at the restaurant? Do you know anyone in his family?”

“I know his brother’s name.”

“Everyone has their phone number listed online in Sweden. You could get in touch with him.”

“Is that crazy?”

“No! This situation is crazy! Like what if he’s dead? Is he a ghost or are you being ghosted?”

So I texted his brother. “Hi, I was with your brother on Saturday night and he sort of vanished and hasn’t been responsive since that evening. I just wanted to check if he’s okay? Have you heard anything?”

I realized there were two options: either something terrible had happened to Viktor, or he was ditching me in the most hellishly sadistic way possible. Either way, my response, whatever it was, would be justified.

I Googled his name and checked the “News” section to see if perhaps a piano had fallen out of a window and crushed him. How quickly were obituaries published? Do they even do that in Sweden?

I was spiraling. I decided to call the local hospital. “I was with a friend who disappeared two nights ago—I just wanted to see if anyone under his name has checked into a hospital?”

“We don’t have anyone under that name,” the receptionist told me, “but we only have names for this specific hospital. If you call the police, they can tell you if anyone was admitted to a hospital under that name in all of Stockholm.”

I thought about that missing hiker, Kenny Veach. They never found his body. I called the police.

“A friend of mine disappeared a few nights ago and I haven’t heard from him in almost 48 hours now. I just wanted to check if you knew about anything happening to him?”

The cop asked a few questions and I gave him all of the details. “Well, you are just checking if something happened to your friend. It’s good that you’re calling. I’ll check to see and will call you back within the hour.”

I called my dad. He confirmed that this was, truly, a wildly unusual occurrence (I kept doubting myself for freaking out as much as I was. Maybe things like this happen?) Having married a Swede—my mother—my dad told me he would send me a map with a line that started at Copenhagen, and that I was only allowed to date men south of there. “They don’t get enough sunlight in the north,” he said. “Something’s not right with their brains.”

“Hi again,” the cop said after calling me back. “We were able to reach his mother and she said that everything is fine with him.”

“You called his mom?”

“Yes. We always contact the family if we think there might be a missing person.”

“And...she didn’t say anything else? Everything seemed fine?”

“I’m not really at liberty to say, but everything seemed normal. You should ask him for an explanation.”

I’m, like, a good person. But, since I’m telling truths here, I’ll tell you that I was slightly bummed to hear nothing devastating had happened to him. Because the deeply unnerving feeling of, “Was I the last person to see this man alive?” was quickly replaced with, “Literally who the hell was that person? What was his game?” and, the worst of the worst, “Was it me?” I wondered if perhaps he was “straight” and cheating on a wife. Maybe Astrid and I had zero friends in common with him because he’d spent his life growing up in an insane asylum (very Gay, Interrupted vibes). Did I need to, like, change my Gmail password or something? Was I safe?

I felt incredibly uneasy. I googled 'ghosting' and saw that the term came to prominence in 2015, and joined the Collins English Dictionary, when Charlize Theron reportedly broke up with Sean Penn by ignoring all of his texts and phone calls. Studies suggest that with the rise in easy connectivity via social media and dating apps and increasingly polarising politics, ghosting has become incredibly common. And because of that, we’re all a bit desensitised to it.

There is also 'caspering' (like Casper, the friendly ghost), in which you let someone down gently before disappearing from their lives. There is 'cloaking,' during which someone you met online stands you up for a date and then blocks you on all apps. In fact, there are several ‘cute’ names for disappearing from people. But none of them quite matched my experience, which felt like an equally sociopathic but much gayer version of Gone Girl.

Suddenly, I received a barrage of texts from Viktor.

“I lost my phone!!!,” he wrote. “I just got it back from the lost and found office! Omg, I hate my life!!!!!!! This is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ll call you ASAP. What are you doing? Where are you?”

Of course I hadn’t been ghosted. But why would he not have gotten in touch?

“I’m just at my apartment. I’ve literally been freaking out thinking you were a missing person. I got in touch with your brother and even called the cops.”

“My mom said, ‘He is welcome into the family.’ She loves you,” he wrote. Invited into the family? I pictured myself joking about this story with this same mother years later at Christmas. “I’ll call you in fifteen minutes! I tried to find you on Facebook but couldn’t!” he wrote.

I called Astrid.

“I mean, if it were me, I feel like I would hang out with him again…” she said. “But you probably shouldn’t hang out with him again.”

But Viktor didn’t call 15 minutes later. He didn’t call 30 minutes later, or that night, or even the next day. Of course, Viktor never called me again. His ghost had reappeared for only a moment, only to further confuse me by saying I’d been invited into his family (after three dates) before vanishing all over again.

I stood by my window and took the vial of Viktor’s lip moisturiser out of my pocket. I unscrewed the cap and saw that it was completely empty. “I guess that makes sense,” I thought. “I guess that feels right.”

While I should probably have some sort of emotional “ghost-mortem,” a deeply insightful crumb of advice from having suffered through ghost-traumatic stress disorder, I really don’t. It took me about 24-hours to realise how funny the situation was, and that in all likelihood, the story was better than the romance could have ever been. It was a freak occurrence without much to learn, apart from that you should probably trust your gut instincts about people. Also, anyone coming on that hard and fast is probably mentally unstable. Moreover, if you allow them to, you’re probably unstable too.

That said, Vogue Scandinavia paid me enough to cover the cost of the dinner in writing this piece, so, like, whatever.