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Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by a ghoster.

Being ghosted sucks. The process puts you through an entire gamut of emotions that you have to work your way through. (If my experience is any indication, it becomes easier to deal with the more often it happens…which is the most depressing thing I’ve typed in quite some time.)

Here are some of the stages you go through while dealing with being ghosted on.

1. Realization.You go for a while without hearing from the person you’ve been going out with. This, despite the fact you had a good time and you feel like he or she did too. You send a message or two and don’t get a response. They continue to maintain radio silence, and at a certain point you realize that it’s happening—that this person may want to end things and is going to attempt to do so without having any sort of conversation about it or even letting you know. They’re going to ghost.

2. Shock or disbelief.You wonder something like, "Who does this? Who ghosts?" Then you think, "Why me?" Even if you’ve done it to someone before, or if it’s not your first time as the victim, or if you know full-well that it happens to people every day, there’s still a part of you that is shocked its happening, right now it seems, to you.

3. DenialDisbelief leads to denial. You begin to concoct reasons and excuses for a person to have vanished from your inboxes.

Maybe they’re really busy with work and all of that stuff. Maybe they’re playing hard to get (but then you realize you’ve sent the past five messages and garnered zero responses). Maybe they were at a pool party with friends over the weekend and some jerk threw them into the swimming pool even though everybody knows that in the age of cell phones that’s not a cool thing to do at all. So now they don’t have a cell phone and just haven’t gotten around to letting you know via some form of social media, which they should be able to find you on pretty easily because they know your last name and all. Maybe there has been some kind of family crisis and they’re off the grid because of that. Who even knows? Maybe they’re dead. They’d have certainly texted you by now if they weren’t dead or something close to dying, right?