Ghoster reappeared

Hi everyone

I was talking to a guy on a dating site for a couple of weeks then we moved to signal. He asked me out for the coming weekend but I was working so we agreed the following one. He wanted to chat on the phone and would ask to ring every other night for a week and a bit.

Normally I wouldn’t agree to speak on the phone before meeting but since it was me who postponed the date I felt like I should and we got on really well. Then about a week before we were supposed to meet he text me one morning, something benign about his lunch and asking how my day was going and then just disappeared. I could see he hadn’t opened my reply though he did go online the following day but didn’t use the app again after that. Initially I actually wondered if he’d just not got my message since it came completely out of the blue and sent another a couple of days later just to ask how his weekend was but again didn’t open it (and wasn’t using the app at that point) so I figured he’d ghosted.

We’d been getting on really well, we’re both professional people in our early thirties and I’m confident I don’t come across as someone who’ll go ballistic if a person I’m chatting to says they’re no longer interested so I’d have expected even if he’d changed his mind he would have just said. I do think people disappearing in the messaging stage is fair enough in OLD but since we’d spoken for an hour or two on the phone on 4 occasions and agreed to meet it was really jarring and embarrassingly made me feel quite sad (I think partly because I’d felt like my own judgement of the situation had been so wrong). I took a break from OLD for a couple of weeks and then when I felt more normal I did start talking to a few other guys. On paper they didn’t seem as good a fit (he ticked a lot of boxes) so I still had some regret that it had gone the way it had but accepted that’s life and it was entirely possible he wasn’t who he said he was anyway.

Then three weeks after he disappeared he sent me a message on the first site to say his mum had been in a serious traffic accident and he’d been dealing with it really badly. He did apologise for disappearing and said he knew it was really not on to not have told me he couldn’t talk but he’d been a mess. He said he didn’t expect me to reply just wanted me to know that it wasn’t that he’d gone off me. I said I hoped they were both ok, he said she’s improving but very slowly and it sounded like it was still taking quite a toll on him. I said not to worry, I had my fingers crossed for them and we could chat again if he ever felt up to it. He said he thought it might be a little while before he was but then asked if I’d met anyone else yet. I said (truthfully) I was talking to people but I wasn’t dating anyone just yet and he then started making small talk, told me he felt a bit jealous I was getting to know other people, wanted to know my evening plans. When I told him what I was doing wanted to know if it was a date.

I just wanted everyone’s input. I do realise that a) the story about his mum might not actually be true though since it was such a sudden disappearance and he wasn’t using the app the whole time I find it somewhat credible. Also that b) it’s a huge red flag that he disappeared for so long (I get a little while but 3 weeks without taking a few moments just to say sorry I need some space etc seems excessive. But then if the story is true it’s a fairly extreme example and I thought maybe not a complete dealbreaker since we hadn’t met at that point. Him asking about other guys makes me feel quite unpleasant, I don’t want to make him feel worse (or tell him off) but I also don’t think it’s any of his business and i don’t like the implication that he’d prefer I put myself on ice when he doesn’t even want to date me right now.