So, why *do* men act so nice right before they ghost you?
It’s long been a running joke (see: traumatising truth) that men have a bizarre ability to change their minds about a romantic partner overnight. One day they’re sending you gushy ‘good morning’ texts, and the next they’re in the ‘hating my girlfriend’ phase.
Of course, it’s probably not really that they changed their minds overnight. It’s more likely that they’ve been quietly stewing on their feelings for a while before having the certainty and courage to do something about it. And yet, for some reason, many men seem to have the sociopathic talent to not just act totally normal with a partner while having doubts about the relationship, but to actually be over-the-top ‘in love’.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this, you’ll be thrilled to know that you’re not alone: there’s now a whole TikTok trend about it! This week, creator Taylor Rosen posted a POV video of “dudes the day before they ghost you”.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he says in the video. “Hey, let’s go to Italy… Do you have plans for Thanksgiving? Do you want to come meet my family? My nonna would love you… You just got me thinking different, like [about] more serious stuff: white picket fence, dog, kids… I told my mom about us, is that okay? She follows you on Instagram.”
Rosen’s is just one of many similar POV videos, in which men pretend to be resisting saying “the L word”, suggest moving in together, and claim to be “the luckiest man in the world”. Under each of these videos, there’s a slew of women begging the (usually male) creators to “PLEASE TELL US WHY Y’ALL DO THIS PLEASE”, and sharing their own stories of being love-bombed then ghosted.
“My ex took me to my father’s grave and said, ‘I will take care of her now’ exactly one week before dumping me,” one person wrote. Another said: “I went to the bathroom and closed the door. He jokingly opened the door and said, ‘We gotta get used to this for when we are married!’ And then he walked outside to smoke and I never saw him again.”
“I had a guy tell me he wanted me to meet his parents and that he had never felt that way before,” someone else wrote. “I didn’t hear from him for three days so texted, ‘Hi! You ok?’ And he said, ‘Woah slow down’.”
Over on X, someone else shared a story about their ex suggesting they bake cookies at the weekend because they “wanted to do cosy things” together. “I was so thrilled by that, I got all we needed to bake cookies together,” the person wrote. “Haven’t seen him since.”
Depressingly, this overnight change-of-heart isn’t just a thing that happens in casual flings (though in long-term relationships, it’s less likely to be a total ghosting). Last month, TikToker Jillian Lavin shared a viral story about moving to Texas to be with her boyfriend of over three years. She quit her job, drove 18 hours with all her stuff, and built furniture for their new shared home, only for her boyfriend to return from a family holiday and hand her a break-up note that said the pair were “incompatible” and had “nothing in common”. “How did I not notice this whole time?” she questioned sarcastically in the video.
Even more depressingly, it’s apparently not just a thing that happens in relatively short long-term relationships. In a comment under Rosen’s video, one person wrote: “My husband and I were together for 15 years. Before our 10-year wedding anniversary, he printed our wedding photos for a gallery wall and we were planning something exciting. He filed for divorce five days before it.”
So, why do men (and, okay, people in general) do this? “Not many of us learned how to take rejection well, which, on the flipside, means that many people are terrified of doing the rejecting because they know how much it could hurt,” says sex and relationships coach Lucy Rowett. “I am guessing that for many of these men, they just desperately want to please their partner and are unconsciously terrified of being the ‘bad guy’. Now add in that not many of us learned good communication skills in relationships, and men usually don’t learn the same social and relationship skills as women do, and you have a perfect storm.”
“Instead of actively saying they want to break up, many men (and I would also add women too) will do other things to unconsciously sabotage the relationship to prompt his partner to do the breaking up instead,” she continues. “I don’t like to say it’s the coward’s way out, it’s simply that none of us learned these relationship skills or were encouraged to do them. I’m also guessing that for many men, some of this behaviour before the break-up is a last ditch attempt to cover up their feelings. They might tell themselves if they just went all in, they might suddenly feel different — which again can come from a place of not wanting to be seen as ‘the bad guy’ or hurting somebody.”
It could also be, as one X user pointed out, that because we’ve all been taught “to just move on and be the bigger person” that people know they can get away with this behaviour, and, if they’ve never been confronted, might even think that this is a fine way of ending a relationship.
“It’s easier now more than ever to not just check out of a relationship, but know there are so many other fish in the sea, which means a lot of people are treating relationships as more disposable,” adds Rowett. “It’s much easier to run away — literally or metaphorically — rather than stay and face not just your partner’s feelings, but your own too.”
As to why these men are just so nice right before they ghost you, one TikToker has a hypothesis: “Someone said it’s like when people take their dog to the beach before having it put down.” It sounds kinda nice when you put it like that.
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