I know you feel strongly about him, but it's important to remember that you don't owe him anything. If it hurts too much to keep him in your life, that's a perfectly valid reason for keeping him out of it, and any support either of you has given the other in the past doesn't change that. I'd still say it's the a matter of courtesy not to ghost him, and to let him know that you no longer wish to be in contact. The fact that he might make you feel overdramatic for expressing this doesn't make it any less worthwhile to express. However, I also only consider it "ghosting" if the ghosted party reaches out and is ignored. If there is no conversational thread or text to respond to in the first place and you simply stop initiating conversations with him, and he never bothers to reach out himself, that's not truly ghosting.
In the future, I'd say any relationship where one party is much more heavily invested than the other is unhealthy, be it friendship or a romantic relationship. It leads to exactly what it did here: resentment and broken hearts. The truth is, he never committed to you, so he was always free to see other people. It's sucks that you were in this "will-they-won't-they" wishy-washy thing, but though it sucks that he string you along letting you think he might come around eventually, he was also pretty clear that you two weren't together, it sounds.
|