Online Dating Horror Stories: Being a ghost is not only for Halloween
We don’t want your dead animals, your group photos at the start and gym selfies. We want your personality, humour, honesty and consistent communication.
Online dating is now the easiest way to find someone who you can have a connection with for a few hours, a few days, weeks, or if you’re lucky, for a long time. However, dating can be spookier than ever for some people because they are not that fortunate when it comes to dating with ‘ghosting’ a frequent occurrence.
Ghosting, where someone breaks off contact with no explanation, is something a recent survey found happens in almost three-quarters of online dating experiences. According to Project gender’s ‘Aotearoa Online Dating & Sex Survey’ in the past 12 months, 72% of respondents had been ghosted by someone they had been messaging with. Researchers Dr. Jennie Coker and Tania Domett also found 39% of those going on dates had been ghosted by someone they’d met up with, and 35% of people who had sexual interactions with people they met online were ghosted afterwards.
We asked a sample of Hamiltonians what their online dating horror stories were. One woman said she was ghosted twice by the same guy and she gave some context saying, “The first time he ghosted me, it was out of the blue because everything was going well. After two weeks, he came back with a reason that he was going through some personal issues and will be better on communicating so I gave him another chance”. Unfortunately, she said he ghosted her again “after just a week. Kind of sad that love in this generation is tough especially when you’re a hopeless romantic in this world full of one-night stands and hook-ups.”
A male respondent said he got ghosted by his dates and some did not reply at all. With one he said “we did not vibe or connect at all because we don’t have the same interest and that is very important in a relationship.” One of his strange encounters on the dating app was “I was talking to this person, everything was going well at first but I started to get suspicious because her profile does not seem to match with our conversation then I find out it is a man pretending to be a woman. Thinking about it now, I just laugh off the experience.”
Connection, honesty and consistency is very important when it comes to online dating because it can be dangerous on what you put online because it will be on the internet for a long time.
