It's not me. It's you.
"I just don't understand it. Women keep on ghosting me."
He said this during one of our phone conversations. I had sympathy in the moment, as I too had been ghosted before and it's never a good feeling. He was from the East Coast and was complaining about how West Coast women are more flaky. I jokingly assured him that more than likely it is just LA women, since LA men tend to have the same tendency.
We had a few phone conversations before he asked to meet me in person. He wanted to know if I liked the beach and when I said I did, he set up a date for us to meet up at the Santa Monica pier.
It was a Saturday night.
We were meant to meet at 8 pm, but I had not heard from him all day. Wanting some reassurance that we were still on for our date, I called him around 6:30 pm to confirm. He didn't answer, so I left a message. He had told me previously that he was getting off work at 6 pm and I figured maybe he was either on his way home or perhaps in the shower.
Turns out neither of these were the case as you'll see in a moment.
By 8:15 pm I had not heard anything from him and so I settled in for the evening. Around 10 pm he calls me. Reluctantly, I answer. He immediately asks me if we are still on for the evening. I tell him that we are not because we were meant to have met up 2 hours ago and that the beach is closing soon anyway. His response was, "So, it's gonna be like that, huh?". I said, "Yes, that's right. I contacted you like 4 hours ago and you are just now responding. I could have driven 30 minutes to the beach and 30 minutes back home to not have you show up or hear from you 2 hours later? That is very inconsiderate."
He was very annoyed by my response and seemed even more annoyed that I wasn't ready to go out for the evening. He continued on justifying why it was okay for him to be calling me hours later. That is when I found out more about his job. He taught hip-hop classes for street performers. Once they got to a certain level, he would have them go out and perform for the public. Turns out they were performing that night at the 3rd St Promenade in Santa Monica and it lasted longer than he expected. He also said that I shouldn't be upset with him for not responding because he doesn't check his phone during performances.
I wasn't having any of it.
I told him that I can understand if work lasts longer than expected, but because he didn't communicate that, I had to assume he had stood me up. He finally understood that all I wanted was some communication. At the end of the conversation, he asked for a second chance to make it up to me. I agreed to his request and told him that I would in fact give him another chance. The following week, he sent a message through POF.
The problem is, the message was to my sister.
It's great to have a sister who is close in age, because I'm able to vent to her about all my date experiences and at the time when she was single, we would exchange pictures of the people we were talking to.
So, right away she recognized his face. The message he sent was pretty generic and harmless, but she was mad about what he had done to me a few days prior. She decided to respond by asking him how he liked the 4th picture on her profile. The funny thing about that is, it was a picture of the two of us. He responded by saying that it was a really nice picture. I too had a picture of the two us on my profile, so either this guy never looked at our pictures or he just doesn't remember the faces of the people he is talking to. Either way, we got a pretty good kick out of it. Something really small and pretty petty, but funny to us just the same.
I never heard from the guy again, so he never got his second chance. It was for the best though, because I could see now why women were ghosting him.
This is why you're single:
- You are flaky like no other...
- You are a poor communicator...
- You are selfish...
I often think about how much time and energy and money for parking I could have spent on going out to the Santa Monica pier and how he wouldn't have been apologetic for not showing up. I shouldn't have agreed to a second chance, even though he never took me up on it. You live and you learn and I've learned that people will waste your time if you let them. Now, I only give my time to those who respect it.
