This is Pod Populi podcast for the people, The Greatest Love Debate. It's
the Greatest Love Debate, the Great Love Debate. It's a Great Love Debate.
Hi again, everyone's Brian Howie. Welcome to The Great Love Debate,
the world's number one dating and relationship podcasts. It's twenty fifteen little special episode
today. So first of all, I want to give you guys a heads
up. I am recording this in the onset of summer and as you guys
know, each year we do a different theme on our annual Summer Love in
mailbag, and this year we are doing summer activities in summer sports. So
if you have a boyfriend or a husband that likes to do something in the
summer that drives you crazy, or if you have a girlfriend that does something
only in the summer that you don't understand, shoot us an email Great Love
Debate at gmail dot com. We are going to tackle that on the next
episode. All of your summer and that could be anything from barbecue habits to
corn home, So send those along and we're gonna break open the annual Summer
Love in Mayo Bag on the next episode this one. So the thing that
comes up the most at our shows and emails, and I did a whole
episode on it about two years ago, and that is the subject of ghosting,
and I have my own personal philosophy on that, and I've heard from
you over and over and over. So rather than revisit it, I wanted
to run that episode as like a best of which. Don't call me lazy.
I haven't run out of things to talk about, but people keep asking
me about it. I guessed it on a podcast about it about a week
ago, and I'm like, you know what, let me go and see
if that episode that I did still holds up. I don't even know which
episode it is, so I don't want you to go back crawling through the
animals and the archives to try and find it. So I'm gonna run it
again. I believe it still holds up. I believe it's still important.
I believe my philosophy on ghosting and and everybody's seeking closure still holds up.
So without further ado, here you go. As I mentioned previously on a
bunch of episodes, I'm sure I devour a ton of news every day,
every single day. It drives me nuts to not know what's going on from
all sorts of sources. I like to know what's happening. I like to
feel in the loop. I don't like the feeling of something happening without me
knowing about it, or being involved in it, or more importantly, having
an opinion on it. My worst nightmare is having somebody ask me something and
not have three hundred very well thought out and eloquent words in the holster ready
to fire back at them. But, as you're probably aware, whether you
are a keen observer of current events or not, news stories, especially in
a clickbait culture that we live in, they tend to either be fabricated or
exaggerated to get attention. So a writer, blogger, reporter, alleged journalist,
they may hear of something happening once or two people engaging in something or
some activity, and suddenly it shows up in the New York Times as a
trend. This is the hottest trend or the latest trend, and it's really
not a trend. It's a couple of people doing it, and the journalists
journalists is like, well, I see a story here, and suddenly it's
in New York Times, and millions of people believe something is a trend.
When it's really just two people in Brooklyn doing something that nobody else is doing.
It's not a trend if nobody ever heard of it, and almost nobody
is engaging in it. And because media outlets absolutely love the dating and sex
and relationship stuff, which is very good for our business, obviously, excuse
me, they tend to latch onto every half baked term or talking point and
they try and spin it as a trend. So I think that started.
I think the first one was cuffing a few years ago, which then turned
into cuffing season, and that turned into a more mainstream term used to describe
how you simply could go out at night in Chicago in the summertime and you
couldn't anymore because the weather turned miserable, so you might as well just took
up with your neighbor or make your neighbor your girlfriend or boyfriend for three months
till the thought comes okay. So they labeled a term for an activity that
was not a trend. It was something that people had always been doing,
but somebody put a label on it. So the word cuffing it actually had
some behavioral significance, and it, for better or worse, has stuck.
Cat fishing. That's another term that didn't really exist fifteen years ago. It
gained some significance in traction as online dating began to grow, because people were
obviously hiding behind fake personnas and profiles. But then it got this bigger societal
stamp of approval when MTV decided to do a show about it. Okay,
you want to get the mainstream culture. MTV is going to do a show
about it. But then we got into these these little microbehaviors, and I
get called to do interviews about them or comment on them all the time because
of, you know, the status of this show, and people think I
have something to say, So I get asked about them, and they ask
me, and they'll email me or they'll call me and say, you want
to come on and talk about kitten fishing or fleabagging. And then when the
reporter asked me these things, my answer is some variation on that's nothing.
That's not a real thing. That's somebody sitting in a room and try to
come up with something clever to add to the modern vocabulary. They want to
be somehow some sort of nomenclature trend setter, and it's really just I'm trying
to be super clever, and I'm trying to get out front, and I'm
trying to label something that's just normal behavior. And a huge percentage of these
terms tend to fall under the auspices of a term that didn't have a name
twenty years ago, but certainly the behavior did and has been around for millions
of years, or at least as long as we have been around, and
that is ghosting. So that's where we're going to take a deep dive today.
I want to give you sort of the definitive definition and explanation of what
it is, when it matters, why it doesn't, and most importantly,
how to get over it. So let's start there. Since Adam and Eve,
there's always been a situation where somebody just didn't like somebody anymore and there
was no goodbye, there's no neat ending, no movie style tier parting.
It was simply that was that, and for millions of years it was actually
sort of fine. I'm sort of bullish on ghosting. People think I'm kind
of a dick about it, but I think if you don't want to see
someone again, or somebody just want to see you anymore, oh well that's
it, and just quitting it cold turkey is not the worst thing in the
world. We didn't used to be such babies about it. You didn't used
to have to call somebody who you went out with a handful of times and
very politely explain to them that you don't like them. And that just seems
weird to me. I don't want somebody politely telling me they don't like me.
You're basically putting a little polish on something very it's the old lipstick on
a pig, Like you don't like me is really the nugget here. I
don't care how politely you tell me or don't tell me. You know,
back in the day, fifteen years ago, ten years ago, you simply
didn't call them back, or you didn't call them again. Don't call us,
we'll call you. And honestly, that was absolutely fucking fine. And
in the days and the dates before, you were actually in a committed relationship
exclusively dating boyfriend and girlfriend, whatever you want to call it, you could
and you can pull the parachute whenever you want, however you want. That's
how I feel about it, especially the ladies. You aren't feeling it.
You see red flags, you don't feel entirely comfortable and you're not completely into
him. Fuck him, you don't know him. A phone call or a
text or a farewell you can delete or block or move on without a second
thought or a moment's notice. Because guys can be dicks, and they don't
take rejection well, and they don't take no easily, and they can be
manipulative, and it's sometimes not worth the headache when he doesn't want to hear
your explanation anyway, he doesn't want to hear your polite I just don't think
it's a fit. You owe him nothing. Boop, goodbye. And guys,
you owe her nothing. This person that you went out with once or
twice or three times before, this sort of pre relationship status, not a
she isn't your girlfriend, not if you haven't gotten anywhere, that's anything in
terms of relationship. And as we talked about add infinitum on this show,
there is no such thing as closure. Things don't end neatly. You're never
going to get the answer you want when you want it. I would rather
have somebody lie to me than tell me they don't like me. What would
you rather hear? I don't think this is a connection which is the truth
or listen, I am so attracted to you, I will never be able
to get my work done and I'll lose my job because of thinking about you
all day. Give me that one, give me the second one, give
me the lie all day long. I feel great about myself if you just
give me that response. But basically, you're asking somebody to bullshit you,
so asking for one extra piece of bullshit at a person that's not necessarily better
either. When did we get to this point? How did we get to
the point where we had to tell somebody that we didn't like them. We
spend a ton of time on this podcast talking about ways to communicate that you
are into someone that our signals are not getting picked up on. The reason
we spend less time on telling people that you don't like them is, honestly,
who fucking cares? Who cares? Why do you need to know to
satisfy your curiosity? Here is your answer, and you can plug and play
or copy and paste whatever you want to do with this. Here's your answer
of why you haven't heard from them anymore. They just didn't like you enough,
They didn't like you the old They're just not into you. Oh well,
too bad. The end. That's it. Dating is not neat.
Things are always messy and fraught with bad communication, especially early on, and
online dating has made it worse. Not that you're less likely to make a
true connection that way. I have come around on that, and I think
you're just as likely to make a true connect in that way because eventually that
how you met is going to move offline and move somewhere out. So you're
not less likely to make a true connection that way. But the whole online
dating landscape is set up with a distancing, a technological barrier of protection between
you. We hide on the way in and we hide on the way out.
That's the way we are. I care a lot more about us hiding
on the way in, because hiding on the way in takes you out of
the chance the game and doesn't give you as many chances or possibilities. If
you're hiding on the way out. I don't care nearly as much because that's
the way it is. It's over safini, so we're not close to say
elfin finito, but we do have to take a quick break, and then
we'll get into how to do it and how to deal with it right after
this, and we are back, and before you get all he's such a
dick. Brian is such a cold, unfeeling bastard, especially you gen zers
and you sensitive young millennials out there. We did come up with something that
seems to work for everyone when it comes to parting ways amicably. If you
don't like someone, or you don't like them enough, you need to handle
it Shark Tank style. And I know all you guys watch Shark Tank because
you have all you all have some terrible idea for a product that won't change
the world. It won't, I'm sorry, and you simply turn on your
hidden mister Wonderful and say, I like you, but I'm not feeling it,
and for that reason I'm out. Okay, just like they do on
the show. I like you, I'm not feeling it, and for that
reason I'm out on Shark Tank. When that happens, the contestants, they
simply nod their head, they take their medicine, and that is it.
It's clean, it's quick, it's neat, and it doesn't require any more
explanation beyond that. The Shark Tank contestants aren't like wait, no, mister
Cubean, you don't understand the revenue model. No, that's it. It's
done, game set match. So my shark Tank one liner probably would work
most of the time. But sometimes life and love and dating doesn't fit into
a neat package, no matter how clever and practical you're thinking is. So,
let me back up a tad and explain further. When do you owe
somebody something? And the short answer is still almost never. If it's somebody
you've been messaging with online and then suddenly you don't want to or you meet
somebody else, do you owe that person you were messaging with a formal goodbye?
No, you do not. And if they need a formal goodbye,
the person's fucked up and you shouldn't have been dating him in the first place.
If you went out for drinks with someone and the next day you decide
it wasn't that great, do you owe that person a phone call to tell
them? No, you do not. If you went out to dinner with
someone where one of you and I, God, I certainly hope it was
him spent I don't know one hundred and forty bucks and three hours of time.
Do you owe them a text or call to say you don't want to
do it again? No, you do not, but you do owe them
a thank you for last night, and then that's it. That's the end
of it. Thank you is goodbye. It's appreciative and it's dismissive. You
might never see the person again who held the door for you at Target.
You owe that person a thank you, you don't owe them a formal farewell,
same sort of thing. Now, did you spend some time in an
outfit and some emotional capital on someone you went out with once or twice or
three times, and you have so much fun when you went out with them,
and even more fun when you went home with them, and then you
never heard from them again. Oh well, that's dating. You had your
fun, be appreciated for that, and on to the next You really want
to hear, oh my god, that was so much fun. We won't
be doing it again. That's what you want. That's the response you want
that you need that, of course not. It's the pride and the curiosity
that is interfering with your logic. Enjoy what you had, don't focus on
what you don't, and you most certainly will be better off. You know,
there's a friend of mine who was on a podcast a couple of years
back, maybe it was the Great Food Feud. I think it was the
Great Food Feud. It's another show. I do you should listen to the
Great Food Feud? I forget. I host a lot of shows. She
was dating someone for I think like three years maybe longer, when he suddenly
he stopped communicating with her, and eventually she just moved and people would ask
her, like, whatever happened with him? And she's like, I don't
know. Is that fucked up? Yes? Did? She deserves some explanation
short of he died? That would make sense for sure, absolutely, But
would any answer really change things? Once a few days and weeks went by,
Probably not, it's fucked up. A few days and weeks went by,
she quickly realized that. She basically said, I guess this isn't what
I thought it was. She got a little angry and then sad, and
then she was totally fine. And if he had called her up and sat
her down or written a letter on day one and said I don't want to
see you anymore, she would have gotten angry and then sad and then again
totally fine. And I guess my point is you are focused on something that
you really have no control over, and the person who i'd control over it
simply didn't feel the same way you did or think that you merited continuing communication
with that sucks. It's sad, and so what, seriously, so what?
I don't really believe it makes it any easier to get the answer just
a little bit more satisfying. And you know, if you're dating to try
and get satisfying situations, I think you're doing it wrong. You want to
be satisfied by something that ultimately wasn't satisfying enough to the other person. So
who really cares? This weird combo platter that we want served up? That
is a mixture of pride and need to know and curiosity and closure and satisfaction
and mostly at the end of the day, manners, and none of that
will matter if you move forward and on to the next. Our manner is
nice to have. Yeah, do you need them out of your ex or
somebody doesn't want to see you anymore? Fucking cares they're not that into you,
They didn't care enough, didn't matter, didn't get it, and they
didn't have the balls or courtesy or anything else you want to use as a
reason. But at the end of the day, who fucking cares. They
did not care about you, They did not care about the situation or the
relationship beyond the point they decided not to care anymore or at all. Is
it confusing? Yeah? Does it hurt? Sure? Is it frustrating?
Of course? Does it feel like betrayal? Probably? But always focus forward.
Every second you worry about what you are owed or what you deserve or
what you should have gotten or what you need from someone who doesn't care nearly
as much about you as you want them to or need to, is a
wasted second. And you might say, but I feel used. Listen,
we are all used. We're all using each other. We want what we
need, and we need what we want, and at the end of the
day, we're hoping for the best. But dating doesn't always bring out our
best. You might not get the best response, You might not get the
best outfit when he shows up. You might not get the best reaction.
You might not the best communicating because it never brings out the best, not
in our behavior, not in our manners, rarely in our emotions, and
most definitely not in our communication. We're not that great on the way in,
and we're a lot worse on the way out. But you know,
we have said over and over around here, all dating success is about two
things. It is about confidence and communication. Confidence on your end may have
been adequate, the communication on their end insufficient at best. So yep,
it sucks, it's confusing, it's frustrating, it's often very hurtful. But
that person did not look out for your best interest. They looked out for
their own. And you know what, at the end of the day,
they might have been right to do. So you look out for you.
That's your responsibility here. Can't change them, and you shouldn't go backwards.
And the right person, when the fit is right and the time comes along,
they will look out for them, you and both of you together,
So onto them, onto the next. Bygones and bygones, that's a good
word. It's a great word. Bygones not only has the word by in
it, and has the word gone in it. Bygones, the literal definition
of bygones is in the past, dating from an earlier time, dating from
an earlier time. That's exactly what this was. That it's exactly what you
did, and now it's gone. Ghosting, eh, ghosts aren't real.
And whatever that connection or commitment was, it wasn't real either, So let
it go onward. As far as us, we are moving onward. Live
shows coming up, live live shows, come to the Great Love Debate.
We're not gonna do that many for that much longer, that many more years,
So you better get it while the getting's good. October seventh at the
Beautiful Boca black Box for the Center Backla Boca black Box Center for the Arts.
You say that one several times. October seventh, tickets are on sale.
Come see me in a whole lot of fun and fancy South Floridians.
October twenty feet at the Lovely Citywinery back for an encore, Boston, Massachusetts.
Shoot us an email please, Great Love Debate at gmail dot com and
go to our website Great Love Debate dot com to see if we're adding a
whole bunch of more shows. We shall see because, as always is at
the Great Love Debate, we never stopped making love. See you next time,
the Greatest Love Debate. It's the Great Love Debate, the Great Love
Debate. It's the Great Love Debate.