Hung up on someone you never properly dated? Here’s how to get over them

I was ghosted. That’s not the story, actually, we already have an article on that. The story is how much it hurt. The moment I found myself lying in bed, three in the morning, silently crying over someone I barely knew over text, I got both angry at myself, but also, realised I had to do something about it — specifically, I had to get over them. But how do you get over someone you never actually had a relationship with? How do you get a relationship that only happened in your head?

Being a Gen Zer, I’m not afraid of therapy, actually, I love it, so naturally I sought one of the best therapists in the region to answer the excruciating questions around my horribly unpleasant grief. Sisse Find, psychologist who specialises in stress, anxiety and personal development, and co-founder of the Danish consulting and research house HeyPeople, was kind enough to not only listen to my painfully dramatic story but also walk me through the dissection of how these one-sided relationships affect us and how one can rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

Also read: "A boy ghosted me, so I called the police."

The first thing that I needed to know was why it hurt so much — cause believe me, I was in pain. Why was I crying over this person who had absolutely no idea or clue I was that into them? Well, turns out to answer that, one must first look at the base goal of the whole first interaction. “Dating is a means to reach a goal, and very often that goal is to fall in love, meet the one, belong to someone, etc,” says Find, “to reach that goal you must expose yourself and that leaves you in a vulnerable position with a lot of risk and a high investment, you — you’re the investment. When you put yourself out there and you’re rejected or ghosted, that takes a huge personal toll. The feeling of loss and being misled, tricked or betrayed is often what hurts more than the actual person ghosting you.” Cue the knot in the throat and the peripheral tears.

Turns out — completely unsurprisingly — that there is a correlation between overthinking and the attachment created with this person who one barely knows or is involved with. Everything starts with the fantasy or dream of a life together and the fact that we make this person the beacon or personification of that idealised relationship we’ve been wishing or waiting for eventually lashes back into the pain of the realisation that dream is no more. “When we attach that dream to another person it becomes very much alive, we can be so sucked in that we can almost touch and smell it, even though it’s with someone we haven’t yet met,” she explains — it’s looking better and better for me.

At this point, it’s about this attachment we generated with this person which is completely one-sided. “Online dating makes it much easier to generate attachment very quickly, communication online can be very tense because it enables us to focus on our thoughts and feelings. It’s possible to cut off some of the practical initial moves and go directly to exchanging a lot of deep and intimate thoughts and feelings about our past history, future expectations and core values,” explains Find. This particular sharing of thoughts, feelings and future expectations is what characterises ‘love communication’, where you create these bonds over conversations that idealise a future together.

Also, on top of this, when dating occurs in real life (IRL), there is an extra pressure on how one looks, copes and behaves, all focused on how the other person sees us, therefore, one tends to hold back. According to Find, there is always a possibility you might be giving more of yourself in an online dating dialogue compared to what you give to someone you meet in a bar Saturday night. This is why, when ghosted or rejected, the trauma is regardless if one actually dated or not. In both circumstances, one invested time and energy interacting with this person, shared thoughts and feelings with them and created a bond — that is the key as to why it hurts so much, because pain doesn’t distinguish between if one met each other online or in real life, if one dated or not, the connection was there and therefore, the ‘breakup’ hurts as much.

Now, I had to ask, was it that I was doing something wrong when it came to approaching dating? Thankfully the answer to that was no. However, the failure I committed was forgetting how easily it is for us humans to get attached to things that might go away (guilty of charged — I still get sad when my seasonal flowers die). Here actually came an interesting comment on online dating from her side, “Online dating has created this consequence free environment around dating where you can get away very quickly without any consequence. Because you don’t have to face the person or in other way take accountability for your actions.” Talk about being swindled.

Now, onto the main dish, how does one get over someone one never dated? Well, turns out it’s more a ‘character building’ experience than what I would’ve thought — and honestly wished — but while the pain is real, valid and present, it’s a matter of how we deal with the now dead relationship that determines the overall outcome of the situation. The key to it? Not to overthink about it.

“Being ghosted or rejected by someone you never dated is a painful and sometimes even traumatic experience, you will feel terrible and grieve for some time, but most people eventually are able to get over it and some even feel strengthened. While it’s a very painful experience, it can allow for us to value those who are actually there for us and even push us to a better quality of life,” says Find. And bear with us here for a moment, I too thought at some point that I was done with dating, done with love, done with everything — but time truly has helped me get over it and well, here I am, exposing myself to the whole internet, I can testify that in time one heals, even if it doesn't feel possible. There is no magic formula, words or recipe to get over someone, even if you actually dated or not.

Now, the issue with these types of breakups and eventual griefs come when we can’t stop thinking about the person, the situation and the outcome and overthinking starts to take over. The cruellest thing about ghosting is that one never truly knows what really happened — says the boy who was drowning himself to Taylor Swift songs at three in the morning over someone who didn’t reply to his texts — and probably never will. Overthinking won’t answer the questions yet will make one anxious and depressive, potentially even acting in ways that are counterproductive or dangerous — like stalking the person.

Quickly making a personal disclaimer pause — I’m an overthinker, unfortunately I’ve always been and it’s something I’m trying to work on. Even now, reading what I’ve just written there is a part of me that scoffs at it and half-laughs assuming it’s just not possible, or even worse, passing it as something ‘some therapist’ said. It’s really one of those things that’s ‘easier said than done’ or ‘easy to say when you’re not in the person's shoes’, but believe me, I’m in the trenches right there with anyone who has been through this. I too cried over someone who didn’t get back to my texts, I too went back to their instagram profile just to see nothing had changed, I too checked the text conversation just to see if magically I had someone missed the text. I know what it is to overthink, I know what it is to fall asleep thinking what it was that I did wrong or how I could’ve avoided this outcome — to be honest, it still haunts me, but no matter how much or how hard I think, there is no answer.

Fortunately, overthinking is something we can control, even though it doesn't always feel that way. It’s not a fixed personality trait, but a strategy we have learned to use that we can unlearn. “Overthinking is controlled by some unhelpful beliefs about our own thinking processes. For example, believing that ‘ruminating helps me understand and solve my problems’ or ‘I can’t stop worrying’ are both examples of unhelpful beliefs about our own thinking processes, because they kick-off and maintain overthinking that negatively impacts our mental state and ability to cope,” explains Find. Fortunately, these beliefs are just false assumptions. In fact, overthinking is neither useful nor uncontrollable, but if we believe so, we will probably overthink a lot — especially when we face adversity.

According to Find, by changing these false maladaptive beliefs to more realistic beliefs about our thinking, like for example: ‘ruminating isn’t useful’ or ‘I can control my worry’ we can begin to take control over worry and rumination so that we don’t get anxious and depressed when we try to recover from stressful events such as being ghosted.

I would like to say that at the end I do have an answer to the question: how to get over someone I never really dated? But there is no set formula. The best I can give you is: grieve, feel the pain (it’s valid), and don’t think about it, in time the pain will dissipate and you’ll be ready to start again. Also, something a friend told me along the way, is that ‘if they ghosted you, they did you a favour’. I still don’t fully get it, but I guess that if they weren’t able to value the catch I am, they didn’t deserve it.