Expecting to Get Ghosted? A Therapist Says That Fear Might Be Sabotaging Your Dating Life

There’s a viral TikTok telling daters to treat every meetup like it could be the last time they ever see that person, and the comment section filled up fast with ghosting stories. People warned it can happen after weeks of talking, after great dates, even inside relationships. So yeah, the anxiety is real.

But psychotherapist Mandy Lam told Cosmopolitan that expecting to be ghosted often comes from a protective place, like a trauma response to getting hurt before. The trouble is what that fear does once you’re on the date. You start reading rejection into neutral stuff, like a slow text or a quiet moment, and that’s confirmation bias at work. Over time, that guarded energy can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where you push away the exact connection you wanted.

Lam’s advice isn’t to drop all boundaries. Being careful early is healthy. But constant distrust makes it impossible to actually connect, and you can’t control whether someone ghosts you anyway. So the move might be giving people the benefit of the doubt and letting dating be fun again instead of a worst-case rehearsal. Have you ever gone into a date expecting to get ghosted? Tell us how it went.