Ghosted?

A guy can see your messages coming in on the “notifications” on his phone and read them there. They will continue to show as unread on the app.

It seems like there was a good amount of sex happening with him for the last 4/5 weeks. You said:

“So our last date we spent in a hotel room, and spent the following morning together then both went to work.”

Know this: Sex and love have nothing to do with each other for a man.

Nothing.

And for a woman, sex powerfully pushes a woman’s “love buttons”.

A woman will feel an enormous, overwhelming cascade of emotions from sex. Some explosive and profound. Some subtle and building. Some invisible and unnerving.

The point of these emotions (from a nature standpoint) is to encourage the woman to pair bond with this man, as she might be carrying his children.

Men, on the other hand, do not have this biological, emotional reaction.

For a man, sex is just sex. It’s great, there’s a continuous appetite for it, but it doesn’t trigger love feeling for a man. Not even “ongoing sex” like I’ve seen some sources try to imply.

What pushes a man’s “love buttons” with a woman happens outside the bedroom.

My point in bringing this up is that it can seem impossible to imagine that you feel so much of a connection to him for him to not feel anything for you in return.

But for a man, sex is just sex. It doesn’t push his love buttons.

So for him not to feel anything isn’t a surprise at all.

It’s not because he’s immature. It’s not because he’s a narcissist or sociopath. It’s not because he’s a commitmentphobe.

Sex doesn’t push a man’s love buttons.

Now…

Ghosting is shitty, it’s true.

I don’t like it, but it happens.

Be that as it may, you need a different way to look at relationships. You need a different way to evaluate how things are going and the relationship progress and potential.

When I look at this, it really sounds like this man had the rest of his life to deal with and then, when he saw you, it was like an escape away from his life.

So in a sense, his time with you was kind of like an accessory or satellite outside of his life.

The true progress of a relationship with a man is where you are in terms of being a part of his life and world.

It’s not a race, this happens gradually.

But it happens every time he drops the mask and shares what’s actually going on in his life at the moment. What’s he working on, what’s he dealing with, what’s challenging him, what has him motivated, what’s inspiring him right now?

See… women generally believe that men are clueless when it comes to relationships. And that belief is to a woman’s detriment.

Because… if a man is good at any part of a relationship, it’s the beginning part where he plays the perfect part from the moment you meet him up through when you’re sleeping with him.

If you’re dazzled and enamored with him, you’re really just getting excited about his “mask” or “performance”.

That’s not to say he’s lying to you. He is expressing a part of himself to you, but it’s the polished, buttoned-up, “advertisement” of himself.

It’s not the full person, it’s an outside layer. It’s his social “mask”.

And it makes sense that a man should have this. It is unwise for a man to walk around the world vulnerable with his heart exposed.

But if you don’t know this about men, you’ll spend the beginning of the relationship interacting with his mask, never touching his heart or his life.

The mask is for his protection. He’s able to go out and be social without getting his heart broken.

And men don’t do well with heartbreak. In fact, there are higher suicide rates for men versus women at the end of relationships.

Men aren’t heartless, they have vulnerable, sensitive hearts. Therefore, they have excellent masks to protect those hearts!

If you are dazzled and excited by his mask, you’ll take the ride thinking you’re on the way into a relationship. You’ll think there’s a connection forming.

Meanwhile, his heart isn’t touched at all. He has his life… where he has his fears, failures, frustrations, aspirations, inspiration, etc.

And then he has you, getting all excited about his “mask” and the sex.

That’s not to say that he has negative feelings towards you. He probably thinks you’re a perfectly nice person.

But there’s no overlap between the two areas.

And sooner or later, then novelty of the sex winds down. That’s not a problem in a relationsihp, there’s plenty more to sex than just novelty, so that’s OK.

But then there’s the whole mask thing… see, sooner or later, the bag of tricks runs out. There’s no more “mask”… sooner or later it’s just him, the man.

And that man has the whole rest of his life to deal with.

These “ghosting” incidents tend to happen after the novelty has run down, she’s only interacted with his mask and then his life starts getting more demanding.

He feels the emotional overwhelm of his life and he goes to deal with that.

When he’s stressed or overwhelmed, he can’t simultaneously uphold his “mask” to you, so he opts to go silent.

Then you feel something’s wrong and start texting him, wanting reassurance from him.

He feels this is another source of pressure since, after all, you don’t really know him at all. You know his mask.

And on top of that, he’s got a problem on his hands to deal with, so his attention continues to be on solving the problem at hand.

To make matters worse, because the whole time so far had been spent interacting with his mask and having sex, you never touched his heart. You never began the process of getting to understand the real man underneath.

So when he’s feeling stressed, he’s not going to open up to you. He won’t bother because in his male-logic, he’ll feel that you never really “got him” anyway…

Again this is odd logic to hear, but his male rationale would be that if you actually understood who he really was, you wouldn’t have only interacted with him on “mask level”.

You would have had interactions that ignored the mask and drilled deeper to where the real man is, where his actual feelings are… his fears, failures, frustrations, aspirations, inspiration, motivation, passion, dreams, etc.

It’s the stuff that he doesn’t have an instant great answer for. It’s the places where he’s not polished; he’s raw, rough, crude, off-balance, messy, etc.

You may have felt a closeness to him, like you knew him deeply and had an incredible connection, but that’s what you felt on your side. If you weren’t interacting with the real, raw man underneath, then he felt no kind of connection like this.

To put a bow on this, you said towards the end:

“it’s so out of character to what I knew of him.”

Yes, that’s exactly it. You knew the mask of him. There’s the mask and the man underneath. If you don’t interact with the man underneath, you won’t really know him.

Then when life boils up and emotionally overwhelms him, he will act “out of character” because the “character” you know is the mask version of him and he needs to go deal with his actual life as the actual person he is… he can’t uphold the mask version at that time.

“As much as I don’t want a blame game, also don’t want him to assume I gave it to him.”

You don’t want him to assume you gave it to him.

You didn’t, so what does it matter if his assumption is wrong? Play it out, what’s the real problem there?

In general…

You have chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease. This is now a medical issue and could affect others beyond just him.

From that perspective, the sooner you tell him, the better.

My read here is that you want to be able to have this conversation in a good way, so I can give you an example that might work.

Before I do, I always add the disclaimer that I just share my thoughts and ultimately only you can decide what’s best for you and what your actions will be.

So you could say something like:

“Listen, I went to the doctor and tested positive for chlamydia. Obviously this isn’t a text I want to send or news you want to here, but when I found out I knew you needed to know right away.”

That’s it.

And his response is his response. You can receive it and go from there. You have no idea how he’ll respond, so fearing anything about how he responds won’t do you any good.

My perspective is it’s best to tell him right away and let the chips fall where they may. Good luck.