Matthew Hussey on Ghosting: What It Means at Each Stage, and Why It Is Never a Verdict on Your Worth
Matthew Hussey
When someone you were building something with suddenly goes silent, the questions come fast: Did I say something wrong? Should I text them? Should I call them out? Should I pretend not to care and ghost them back? Matthew Hussey, a writer and dating coach, says he has coached hundreds of thousands of people over two decades and written two New York Times best-selling books on love and relationships. His advice is to pause before doing any of it. His argument is that once you understand what ghosting actually is, you get back some of the power and control you feel you've lost.
He sorts ghosting into three stages, from least to most damaging. For each, he explains what the silence likely means and how to respond. He then closes on the idea that ghosting says far more about the person who disappears than about the person left behind.
Ghosting Doesn't Feel Sudden
Hussey starts with how ghosting is experienced. We think of ghosting as a sudden disappearance, he says, but it doesn't feel sudden because it doesn't hit all at once. It unfolds as a series of moments. First you notice a delay in their replies. Then comes disappointment at not hearing back, then wondering whether they missed your message. After that there's silent confusion as you try to work out what's going on in their head, and finally the justifications that tell you something must have happened to them. That slow sequence is part of why ghosting is so hard to process: the uncertainty stretches over time.
Stage One: The Early Messaging Phase
The first category is someone you've exchanged only a couple of messages with on an app, who then disappears without a closing message. Here Hussey warns against overthinking. He says the word "ghosting" is used loosely these days. If someone fails to reply before you've even met and you rush to call it ghosting, that may reveal your own overinvestment in the situation.
He suggests it may also reveal a fear of being briefly vulnerable. Sending one more message to clarify, rather than deciding they've gone for good, means exposing yourself for a moment. There are plenty of mundane explanations. Maybe they aren't big on texting. Maybe your last message had no question in it, so nothing prompted a reply.
His main point is that if you haven't built rapport with this person, haven't met them, and have never made plans, there is no emotional investment there yet. At this stage, he says, the best form of closure is often to stop analyzing and simply send a question the next day, or something a little more intentional that invites a response.
Stage Two: Early Dating Ghosting
Hussey says many of the painful ghosting stories people bring him come from early dating. This is the withdrawal of someone you had started to develop feelings for, or whose continued presence you had come to expect in your life.
The stories people tell him, he says, often contain clues about why the ghosting happened. Sometimes a person ghosts because they can't handle new information. He gives the example of a woman in his community who, in a vulnerable moment, told a man she had HPV. He describes it as an extremely common sexually transmitted disease that most people don't even know they have. The man disappeared the moment she told him.
He also describes an "enormous number" of stories about whirlwind romances. The two people talked all night, hung out all day, laughed until they cried, kissed passionately, slept together, felt like they'd known each other forever, and even began making future plans. Then one person ghosted the other days later. The person left behind feels utterly confused, heartbroken, and even stupid. Hussey paraphrases their thinking: they made me feel so safe and secure, they just invited me to their aunt's wedding, so where were the warning signs?
What makes these situations cruel, in his view, is that you feel deeply aggrieved without any conversation to feel aggrieved about. The pain comes not from their explanations but from their silence, from "the wordless severance." That, he says, is why the unjust hallmark of ghosting is so often the feeling that you must have done something wrong.
A Desire for Intimacy and an Unwillingness to Face It
Hussey offers another way to read these whirlwind cases. He sees them as reflecting a person's simultaneous desire for intimacy and unwillingness to confront it. Such people want to get as close as possible to everything intimacy brings: connection, loving feelings, mutual admiration, sex, safety. They want everything except intimacy itself. The moment they feel it, they run.
He ties this to a passage from David Whyte's book Consolations on the idea of running away in life. He quotes: "Wanting to run is necessary, but it can also be extremely dangerous and unwise, especially when running exiles us from the very circumstances that we're about to mature and cultivate our character." He repeats the key line for emphasis. Running is unwise when it exiles us from the very circumstances in which we're about to mature and cultivate our character.
Why Ghost Instead of Just Saying It?
Hussey then asks the obvious question: even in these cases, why ghost? Why not say, "I wanted a quick hookup, so let's leave it there," or "The STD conversation scared me," or "Despite our two-week love nest, I am not capable of genuine intimacy or commitment"?
His answer is that this is where ghosting goes a step beyond ordinary pulling back. He calls it a sign of someone's inability to deal with life on its own terms. Being honest about why they're withdrawing is too much friction for them. Admitting they aggressively led someone on would be too painful a conversation, and it would cast them in too negative a light for their ego to handle.
There's also a strategic element, he says. Honesty might create friction if they ever want to come back, while leaving things open-ended keeps the door open. That's why, according to Hussey, people who ghost and later return often rely on you not bringing up the ghosting.
He acknowledges that these scenarios come in many versions and that every situation and person is different. Even when you know you should probably walk away, part of you may still want to try harder. You might want to send one last message saying how you feel, more for your own closure than to win them back. Or you might wonder what to do and say if they reappear, and whether to give them another chance. He doesn't answer those questions in this video.
Stage Three: Ghosting in a Long-Term Relationship
The third and most damaging category is ghosting inside a real relationship. Hussey's examples include eight months of seeing each other every day, three years together while planning for a baby, and a 15-year marriage. He says this isn't just confusing or painful. It can be deeply traumatic and requires a great deal of processing. It shakes your sense of reality and makes you question your own judgment: how could I have missed something so big? That, he says, leads to self-blame and a complete loss of self-worth.
Sometimes, looking back, you can connect the dots: the red flags you minimized, the moments you brushed aside. Other times it truly seems to come out of nowhere.
Hussey's "hard truth" is that some people can seem incredibly loving while their needs are being met. When things become inconvenient, when the novelty fades, when they stop getting what they want, or when they suddenly get scared, you see their true character. He says it can be chilling to learn how different their character is from yours in ways you never knew.
What you discover, in his account, is the extreme and callous lengths some people will go to in order to avoid confronting reality. That means the reality of a very difficult conversation, the reality of the damage they've done, and the reality of living by the rules of common decency. He argues this isn't only an attempt to avoid you. It's an attempt to avoid themselves, and the realization that their own decisions caused so much pain. In short, he says, these people have "an antagonistic relationship with life itself."
The Consolation
Hussey acknowledges that the fallout can include devastation, regret, lost time, and even lost money. Still, he offers what he calls perhaps the most important consolation. The person who was ghosted gets to go on living on the real ground they have always stood on. The person who ghosted, meanwhile, drifts untethered in "a morally bankrupt alternate reality" that you would never want to inhabit. In time, he suggests, you may realize that a far worse fate would have been staying bound to a world that contradicts the standards and principles you hold dear.
Why Ghosting Is Never a Verdict on Your Worth
Hussey then draws a line between rejection and ghosting. People reject each other every day without disappearing. They communicate, show basic respect, and show up for the hard conversation. Ghosting goes beyond rejection. It tells you something specific about the other person: however they feel about someone, the moment there's internal friction on their side, they will disappear.
He addresses a question he expects viewers to have: if they could leave like this without considering my feelings, did they ever love me? His answer is that they may have loved you, but not in the way you love. Real love, as he describes it, is outward-focused. It includes care, responsibility, and humanity even in endings, and especially in endings. What the other person felt was more self-centered. They loved how you made them feel and what they got from the relationship. When that stopped, so did their decency, attention, and effort. That doesn't mean you imagined the relationship. It means you were loving someone who defines love very differently from you.
For healing, Hussey reframes what the grief is actually about. You aren't grieving who they truly are. You're grieving the version of them you believed in, the relationship as you experienced it, and the future you thought was unfolding. You're grieving an idea. Once you see that clearly, he says, the grief slowly changes shape and becomes less confusing and more freeing.
Ghosting as a Mirror
Hussey ends with what he calls the most important takeaway. Ghosting is one doorway into the many disappointments that come with risking yourself in dating, relationships, and life. This disappointment, he argues, isn't only a source of cautionary lessons for the future. It can also remind you of your own courage and sincerity. In his words, "There is no sincere life that does not include heartbreak."
Seeing someone else behave badly can remind you how far you've come in becoming a caring, intentional, loving person. Your words mean something. You're more careful with people's hearts than you might have been at another point in your life. And unlike many people, you're willing to risk your heart for real connection. Ghosting, he says, doesn't just show you how someone failed you. It gives you a vantage point from which to view yourself and feel proud of how you treat others and the energy you bring into the world.
He grants that for some people, ghosting understandably fuels insecurity. But he argues it can also be an invitation to a more foundational kind of confidence. That confidence comes from being proud of how you show up in the world and how you treat other people, and from that, a clearer sense of what kind of people you deserve to be around in the future. He closes by asking viewers how they've dealt with ghosting in the past and how they're dealing with it now.
If you've been ghosted before, you know how confusing and painful the experience can be. You thought you were building something special with someone. Maybe it was in the early dating stages, or maybe you were much, much further into the relationship. When someone suddenly goes silent and you're left with no closure, you start wondering, did I say something wrong? Should I text them? Should I call them out? Should I pretend I don't care and ghost them back?
Before you do anything, pause. Because understanding what ghosting really is will give you back your power and your control in a situation where you feel like you've lost it. And in this video, I'm going to tell you what to do next, depending on what stage your ghosting happened. And by the way, if you are in the grief of having been ghosted right now, stay till the end of this video. I promise where this video builds up to is the thing you need to hear today.
If you're new here, I'm Matthew Hussey. I'm a writer and a coach who over the last two decades has coached hundreds of thousands of people and written two New York Times best-selling books on love and relationships. As always, make sure you subscribe and like this video. Let's get into it.
When we think of being ghosted in dating, we think of a sudden disappearance, but we don't experience it as sudden because ghosting doesn't hit all at once. It's more like a series of moments. First, we notice a delay in their responsiveness. Then there's the disappointment at not hearing back, the wondering of whether they missed our message, the silent confusion as we try to figure out what's going on in their head, and the justifications that tell us something must have happened. Let's break down the different kinds of ghosting from the least to the most damaging and how to deal with them.
Number one, the early messaging phase. We have to be careful of overthinking it when someone we've only exchanged a couple of messages with on an app disappears without a closure message. The word ghosting is thrown around pretty loosely these days, but if someone fails to respond to a message that we have sent them before we even met and then we rush to call it a ghosting, we may be revealing our own overinvestment in the situation. We might also be showing our fear in making ourselves vulnerable just for a moment by sending another message to clarify before deciding that they have disappeared for good.
Maybe they're not big on texting. Maybe your last message didn't include a question, so it didn't prompt a response. Who knows? You just have to remember that if you haven't built rapport with that person, you haven't met them, and you've never made plans, there is no emotional investment there. Sometimes the best form of closure is to stop analyzing the situation and simply send them a question the next day or something a little more intentional that elicits a response.
The second stage of ghosting is early dating ghosting. So many of the painful ghosting stories people come to me with happen in early dating. It is the painful withdrawal of someone we had started to develop feelings for or whose continued presence we had come to expect in our lives. The stories themselves that people tell me often leave clues as to why someone might have ghosted.
Sometimes we get ghosted because someone can't handle new information about us. Like the guy who disappeared the moment someone in my community mentioned to him in a vulnerable moment that she had HPV, an extremely common sexually transmitted disease that most people don't even know they have.
And then there are the enormous number of stories people tell me about a whirlwind romance they had with someone. One where they talked all night, hung out all day, laughed until they cried, passionately kissed, made love, felt like they knew each other forever, even began making future plans, only to be ghosted by that person days later. These people are left feeling utterly confused, heartbroken, and even stupid. They think to themselves, "They made me feel so safe, so secure. They just invited me to their aunt's wedding, for God's sakes. Where were the warning signs?"
The cruelty of these situations is how aggrieved we feel while having no memory of a conversation to actually feel aggrieved by. We are pained not by their explanations, but by their silence, by the wordless severance. This is why so often the unjust hallmark of ghosting is the feeling that we ourselves must have done something wrong.
But we can make better sense of situations like these by seeing them as a reflection of a person's mutual desire for and unwillingness to confront intimacy. They want to get as close as possible to all of the things that intimacy brings: connection, loving feelings, mutual admiration, sex, adulation, safety, everything but intimacy itself. The moment they feel that, they run.
In David Whyte's book, Consolations, he talks about the concept of running away in life. He says, "Wanting to run is necessary, but it can also be extremely dangerous and unwise, especially when running exiles us from the very circumstances that were about to mature and cultivate our character." Let me repeat that because it's so important. Running is unwise when running exiles us from the very circumstances that were about to mature and cultivate our character.
But even in these situations I've mentioned, why ghost? Why not just say, "I wanted a quick hookup, so let's leave it there." Or, "The STD conversation scared me." Or, "Despite our two-week love nest, I am not capable of genuine intimacy or commitment." This is where ghosting goes a step further. It is indicative of someone's inability to deal with life on its own terms.
To be honest about the reason for their pulling back is just too much friction. To admit to someone that they have aggressively led them on would be too painful a conversation to have and cast them in too negative a light for their own ego to handle. Not to mention, it might create friction if they ever want to come back. Whereas leaving it open-ended might leave the door open, which is why people who ghost, by the way, when they come back are often relying on you not bringing up the ghosting.
Now, obviously, there are many different versions of these scenarios I'm talking about, each with their own nuances. Every situation is different. Every person is different. And sometimes, even when you know you probably should walk away from something, a part of you still wants to try a little harder. Maybe you do want to send one last text to tell that person how you feel, more for your own closure than to get them back. Or maybe your question is, "If they reappear, what do I do? What do I say? Do I give them another shot?"
All of your nuanced, specific questions that aren't answered by this video can be answered by Matthew AI. It has been trained on 18 years of my data, my courses, everything I've ever said. And you can access it for free at askmh.com. And the cool thing is Matthew AI remembers your conversations so you can keep going back for more contextual advice as the story evolves with this person. Check it out. It is an extremely powerful tool to have in your pocket.
Let's move on to talk about the third type of ghosting: ghosting in a long-term relationship. What about situations where ghosting happens in real relationships? Maybe eight months of seeing each other every single day. Maybe three years together and planning for a baby or a 15-year marriage. This isn't just confusing, and it is not just painful. It can be deeply traumatic. And it is something that requires a great deal of processing. It shakes our sense of reality and makes us question our judgment. How could I have missed something so big? And this leads to self-blame and a complete loss of self-worth.
Sometimes when you look back you can connect the dots. You look at the red flags you minimized, the moments you brushed aside. But at other times it truly feels like it came out of nowhere. Here's the hard truth about these situations. Some people can appear incredibly loving when their needs are being met. But when things become inconvenient, when the novelty fades, when they're no longer getting what they want, or when they suddenly get scared, you see who they are, their true character, and it can be chilling to learn how different their character is from your own in ways you never knew.
We discover the extreme and callous lengths they are willing to go through to avoid confronting reality. The reality of a terrifically difficult conversation. The reality of the damage they have done. The reality of life when you play by the rules of common decency. It is not just their attempt to avoid you. It is an attempt to avoid themselves. The realization that they are the person whose decisions are the cause of so much pain. In short, these people have an antagonistic relationship with life itself.
While the effects of this may mean devastation, regret, loss of time, or even loss of finances, it is so important to remember perhaps the most important consolation of all is that we get to continue life on the real ground we have always occupied while they drift untethered in a morally bankrupt alternate reality that we would never wish to inhabit. We may in time come to realize that a far worse fate than the one we have been dealt would be to continue to be wedded to that world that is antithetical to the standards and the principles we hold dear.
This is why ghosting is truly never a verdict of our worth. People reject each other every day in life without disappearing. They communicate. They show basic respect. They show up for the hard conversation. Ghosting goes beyond rejection. It tells you something very specific about the other person: that no matter how they feel about someone, the moment there's internal friction on their end, they will disappear.
Now, you may be left wondering, "But Matthew, if they could just leave like this without even considering my feelings, did they ever even love me?" And here's the truth. They may have loved you but not in the way that you love. Real love has an outward focus. It includes care, responsibility, humanity, even in the endings, especially in the endings.
What they felt was more self-centered. They loved how you made them feel. They loved what they got from the relationship. And when that stopped, so did their decency. So did their attention. So did their effort. That doesn't mean you imagined the relationship. It means you are loving someone who defines love very differently than you do.
Here's what can help you heal from the deep pain you're feeling right now. You are not grieving who they truly are. You're grieving the version of them you believed in, the relationship as you experienced it, and the future you thought was unfolding. You are grieving an idea. And once you see that clearly, the grief slowly changes shape. It becomes less confusing and more freeing.
I want to finish with a very important note for you to take away from this video. Ghosting is a doorway into the many different kinds of disappointments that occur when we risk ourselves in dating, in relationships, and in life. But this particular disappointment isn't just the place where we find our cautionary lessons for the future. It's a place where we can be reminded of our courage and our sincerity. There is no sincere life that does not include heartbreak.
And in seeing someone else's unfortunate behavior, we can be pleasantly reminded of how far we've traveled in our own lives to become the caring, intentional, loving person we are today. Where our words mean something, where we ourselves are more careful with people's hearts than we might have been in a different time, and where unlike so many people, real connection is something we are willing to risk our hearts for.
Ghosting doesn't just give us a window into the way someone else has failed us. It gives us a unique vantage point from which to view ourselves, to feel proud of the way we treat other people, to feel proud of the energy we represent in the world. While for some, ghosting understandably fuels their insecurity, it can, if we choose, actually serve as an invitation to a much more foundational kind of confidence. The confidence that arises from being proud of the way we ourselves show up in the world, the way we treat other people, and therefore the kinds of people we believe we deserve to be around in the future.
How have you dealt with ghosting in the past? How are you dealing with it right now? If it's something you're going through now, leave me a comment. Maybe your comment will help others going through this situation, and I will certainly be reading them. I'll see you in the comment section.
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