With the advent of dating apps that sit on your phone and give you access to hundreds of
thousands of singles in your area, there has never been an easier time to meet people than today.
And why does it all feel so bad? The answer is that all good qualities come
with bad qualities, and if 21st century dating is marked by easy access, the downside is that we've
had to come up with an entirely new vocabulary to describe all the things that can go wrong.
In today's Love U podcast, I'm going to share a few modern dating vocabulary words to help you
make sense of this ever expanding number of ways in which men can disappoint you. Stick around.
I am Evan Marc Katz, the dating coach for smart, strong, successful women and
your personal trainer for love. Welcome to the Love U Podcast. Keep listening to learn about
love bombing, future faking, zombieing and ghosting. When we're done, I'll let you know how
you can apply to Love U to create a passionate relationship that makes you feel safe, heard,
and understood. So to be clear,
just about all of these things that we're going to be describing today have been happening forever.
These are not new phenomena. We just didn't give them specific names until like five years ago.
And as I'm going to point out in this podcast, giving something a label can be productive. It has
the potential to be productive because it helps us identify specific patterns of behavior. We
all know what we're talking about, but as you'll see, sometimes giving labels can be destructive as
well, because people are prone to misdiagnosing situations without having all the information.
GHOSTING So let's begin today with this most common
21st century dating term. Ghosting by definition (and again, I'm not sure if this is Webster's
definition) is the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone suddenly
and without explanation, withdrawing from all communication. In the past, ghosting would have
just been called breaking up. But I think this is a more useful term because it implies that
it was done in the most tactless way possible. But I also want to make an important distinction
between ghosting when dating and ghosting when in a relationship, because there is
a huge difference between the two that often gets elided when we're talking about ghosting. There's
an obvious and qualitative difference between a guy who doesn't call you after a first or second
date, because he's just not feeling it and what we would appropriately call ghosting. The former
is just called dating. And while it would be nice to think that everyone will announce that he's no
longer interested while pursuing your relationship with you, it's just not realistic, right?
If we could wave a magic wand over the world and make people act the way we want them to want,
sure. But realistically, men who have very little investment in you are not going to do that. And
chances are, if we're being honest, your way of signaling your distant interest in men is also
to just stop returning his texts rather than to formally tell him that you're not interested.
So I wouldn't call this ghosting. I call it the slow fade. To call this ghosting actually
minimizes the pain of real ghosting. I've done entire episodes of this Love U podcast on the
subject of ghosting. You can go look them up, and I'm not going to do that again. But I will
say this: if you're in a committed relationship with someone where you're having sex and you're
calling each other boyfriend or girlfriend, and his methodology to break up with you is
ghosting, like actually disappearing on you. You are so much better off without him,
so much better off! As Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them.”
Doesn't matter how much she liked him. Doesn't matter how great the chemistry is. Doesn't
matter whether you talked about the future. The kind of person who could disappear thinks
that's a viable choice is low character, low integrity, awful communicator. There's no
defense. You don't want to be married to someone like that, no matter how much you think you do.
ZOMBIEING Another clever term to describe something that
has been happening forever. Zombieing happens when someone ghosts you, but then decides to come back
into your life as if nothing happened. The person who engages in zombieing is basically betting
that you're so attracted to him, so lonely and have so little self-esteem that he could
do essentially the worst possible thing and you're just going to forgive him for ghosting and coming
back without even mentioning what he did. So the problem here is that these guys were often right,
far too often women let selfish assholes disappear and come back as if nothing happened,
thereby normalizing atrocious behavior. So the only answer to the zombieing guy
isn't “What happened?” or “Promise me you won't do this again.” It's blocking him on your phone,
removing him from social media so he could terrorize some other poor woman who doesn't
have healthy boundaries. People are selfish, meaning they are self-interested and they're going
to do what's right for them, and they're always going to try to see what they can get away with.
If you let a guy get away with ghosting and coming back and not apologizing – you
can't be terribly surprised if he does the exact same thing again. Kill the zombie!
FUTURE FAKING Future faking is when a person lies
or promises something about your possible future in order to get what they want in the present.
Now, future faking is a real thing. The problem with this is twofold. It's nearly impossible to
tell until after the fact whether a guy was a narcissist who was lying in order to manipulate
you, or an emotionally unavailable guy who fell hard for you sincerely,
but later realized he made a mistake. The behaviors are almost indistinguishable.
So let's call attention to a simple but often overlooked fact when it comes to dating,
the early phases of dating are all a performance. Men learn the rules for what women want and are
adept at giving it to you. You reward guys who are the best performers. I personally may not be
the best looking guy in the world, but after going out with a few hundred women for over a decade, I
had a pretty good idea of what women wanted, which enabled me to get more dates and in turn, get laid
more often. Again, that's not the bragging thing. That's why I'm admitting this thing, so I don't
share this to make myself look good but I share this because it's an important distinction. If the
nice guys who really do want to fall in love, get married, have families and build happy, healthy,
respectful, monogamous relationships also have the ability and the desire to get laid sometimes,
it's pretty hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad ones,
which is something you've probably already seen for yourself.
So think of it a little bit like job hunting. You're never going to get a job by telling your
interviewer that you hated your last company, that you have no work ethic, and that you see
this job as a stepping stone to something greater. Maybe after a year? No, you want to get the job.
You have to give the right answers to get that job. And that's what experienced men do on dates.
Yes, I want to fall in love. Yes, I want to get married.
Yes, I think you're beautiful. Yes, I think we have chemistry.
And by the way, it doesn't mean he's lying about any of those things. That's important. He's not
lying. He's telling the truth. Sincere guys can say that and also not want to commit to you.
Liars can say this and not want to commit to you. This is why I have a course called Love U
and I spend an entire month and I got five weeks of material on the dating process, so you can
finetune your radar to figure out which guys are for real and which guys or future fakers.
The problem is that you can't tell this from the first few dates, and in turn you should
probably move a little bit slower before hopping into bed with someone or deciding he's your
boyfriend or getting too excited about him. That's probably the best remedy to avoid future fakers.
LOVE BOMBING Love bombing, by definition, is showing
a person excessive affection and attention as a way of manipulating men in a relationship. Like
future faking, the implication is that the love bomber is doing this intentionally and maliciously
to cast you under his spell, only to later reveal himself to be abusive or narcissistic.
I have a client who had a man take down his profile right after the first date,
writing her poetry every night, even naming his new boat after her. After
about three weeks, it turns out, we learned that he was domineering and controlling, and
the relationship ended up blowing up relatively quickly. Now, stories like this abound. And yet,
I think love bombing is a word that's thrown around way too much, and I understand why.
Women are deathly afraid of getting involved with one of these guys. So when you start to
see behavior like this, this level of excitement, and little hairs in the back of your neck start
to stand up because that's a sign of love bombing. The issue is that there are far
too many false positives to really assume that this is love bombing.
I have women in my Love U group, I've got a Facebook group with hundreds of people and they're
often saying: I think of being love bombed. And what is the guy doing? He's calling every day
or he says he's really excited about you and wants to focus his energy on you after a few dates. Or
he tells you overtly that he's falling for you. Newsflash, this is exactly what men do when they
really, really like you. I've done this with probably a few dozen women between the ages of
25 and 35. And while I'm not saying it's good behavior, probably scared a few people away,
I am always foolishly being authentic, being vulnerable, acting on my deepest impulses,
not playing any games, putting it out there. So the point isn't that love bombing by
manipulative narcissists is a made-up idea, but rather a lot of what's called love bombing is just
lonely, sincere men who have a crush and like you – get a bit too excited, too prematurely.
So beware of throwing all these terms around as loosely as most people do,
because in my experience, most people are not bad people. They're mostly just as confused as you are
about how to know when someone is right, and these terms that we make up are just a way of trying to
describe this confusion. So anyway, thank you for listening. Please share your favorite
modern dating term below in the comments and who knows, maybe I'll do an episode on it.
My name is Evan Marc Katz. Thank you for tuning in to the Love U Podcast. For more episodes like
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that makes you feel safe, heard and understood. Look for the link below or go
to www.evanmarckatz.com to watch my free video about how to gain confidence, attract quality men
and fix your broken man picker. When you're done, you can apply to Love U and join hundreds of other
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get the unconditional love that you deserve. I'll see you there.