what to do if you are being benched
[Two Saturdays ago, 2:30am]: Hey there.
[Terminal Sabbatum, 7:12pm]: Hey you.
[Monday, eight:02am]: Skillful morning!
Before nosotros get olfactory organ diving into the calamities of dating in 2016, can we all simply agree on one thing? That in that location's not much to those text messages, correct? I mean, they're pretty harmless.
Wrong. Well, supposedly. According to the last moving ridge of articles sweeping the Cyberspace this June, these sort of text messages actually are savage. They are the shallow baitings of (cue drumroll) the bencher . Or, in plain English language, the selfish transactions of an asshole.
Elaborate? You got it.
Rather than dating yous—that is, taking yous out and engaging in moments that intentionally enable your human relationship to develop and evolve—the so-called bencher is benching you.
Let me repeat myself. A bencher doesn't date, he benches. He gets y'all all dressed for the game and and then throws yous in the dugout. Information technology'south just every bit it sounds.
"Benching" is the latest trend in dating. Actually, in my opinion, it's less a tendency (always heard of playing second fiddle earlier?) and more a trending word made pop before this calendar month past Jason Chen in his article, "Benchinge Is The New Ghosting."
Only, is information technology the new ghosting? I've been ghosted earlier. Which is why so many of my friends sent me Chen'due south article to read. In full-disclosure, it hit home. In fact, now I have a term that softens or makes sense of what my ghoster is now doing—which is, ultimately, benching me.
As I see it, though, this is nothing to banking concern on or to arrive a tizzy nigh. It's just Phase II or the second deed of a lost/unavailable/egoist's dating life agenda. He'due south tossing me crumbs. Narcissists do that. As do sociopaths. The lone are triggered into texting crumbs simply the aforementioned, likewise. Basically, these crumbs, aka bite-sized letters, act equally "feelers" – texts that propose interest or offer interaction but which crave the receiver to run across them half-manner and do the real leg piece of work.
Which is why the messages themselves tin be so irritating. They are non-committal. They're half-assed and self-serving. They may make our phone go "bing" but, read aloud, the content of the message sounds far from brave. That said, they injure the states.
After reading Chen'due south commodity, I began to see more and more manufactures cropping up and echoing his same sentiment. That is, that benching is non only replacing ghosting but that information technology hurts the person on the receiving end way worse. This astounds me. There'due south simply no way being ghosted is more endurable than beingness benched. And anyone who tells yous otherwise, believe me, has either:
(1) not actually e'er been ghosted, or
(2) is a lot more than similar the "bencher" than they would e'er allow themselves, let lone anyone else, to think.
I desire to intermission this correct open up. First, what none of these articles seem to address is why the bencher's advice pains us. Yes, the consistent inconsistencies—the likes and "miss me?" and promised plans and commencement thing in the morning texts—string the states forth but how is this plenty to elicit heartbreak rather than but badgerer?
Take the texts I've been receiving as our example. How could messages void of any personality really feel like a personal gift to begin with? How could a "hey you" 1 minute and then silence for weeks (then on and then forth) create in usa not only a craving and devastation but such a sense of opportunity? The articles I've read advise that the bencher feeding usa these desultory doses of attention is at fault. And in a sense, he is. Whoever is doing the "benching" is at the error of their own arrested evolution. They do not know how to fully engage. They don't know how to "become there." They don't. And that'due south the painful role. But that's painful for them, and should be less upsetting for the recipient.
Benching also isn't the beliefs of an asshole, it's the small-scale acts of a person who just hasn't found his manner. He does want more. Eventually. He but doesn't know how to be more right at present.
Just because he hasn't figured that out though doesn't mean he doesn't want to be tied into you and your earth. He does want to know you lot are still receptive and open to him being in your life. In fact, he fifty-fifty feels similar he needs to know this—which is why the texts are often so in the moment and erratic—because they are triggered past the discomfort surrounding his sense of the unknown, the unknown as it relates to his life and also himself on a soulful and intimate level.
Is he likable? He doesn't fifty-fifty really know. The breadcrumbs you eat are supposed to offer him hope. The bottomline is this, he but doesn't know how to show upwardly fully—vulnerably and not self-consciously—and he doesn't know how to exercise that for anyone yet. That'due south what we are witnessing: someone who is missing a sense of cocky merely can't say why or when they will take it.
If we had more compassion, we could let the back and forth go. We could only be annoyed past the bencher'due south mode of communicating and non let it toy with our mind and eye. The fact that nosotros do ways we want everything to mean more. We want everything to exist nearly us. That's why all these articles are calling this behavior out as that done by an asshole. Because if someone's an asshole, that means we deserve an apology, that ways we've been wronged and it can exist stock-still.
Even better is labeling the person and terming the beliefs (e.1000., "benching") because it suggests that it's non just happening to us and that we've also got that person nailed. We run into through them and know them ameliorate than themselves. The disappointing affair is that that actually makes a lot of u.s.a. experience good, at least for a moment or two.
This again is where I diverge from the common way of thinking about this whole affair.
I don't believe those who are confused or destroyed by their being benched know themselves any ameliorate than the person benching them. Considering whoever puts such importance on rather elusive and evasive relationships is at fault, too.
It'due south the benchee's fault that she values such lowly validation. And, not just that merely that she turns a toad into a prince or, at least, doesn't intendance to differentiate. That's what'southward painful. How little nosotros really wait out of each other and for ourselves, how little nosotros empathise that which involves our heart, also. Non simply have nosotros set the bar existent low, assuasive people to treat us in means that just doesn't feel right, merely we've also become wildly resistant to acknowledging our own part in the drama. Why? Why is the arraign always passed off on one person, every bit if blame for a political party of 1 solves anything for a party wishing to be 2?
Information technology's our ego. It'southward exactly the culprit of the bencher's behavior which we discover so selfish and appalling. That's what is so backwards about this hot topic, that no one is really acknowledging how short-sighted it is to actually feel that being benched is worse than being ghosted.
Beingness ghosted is having an entire person pulled away from you. Non being left breadcrumbs.
Non "hey you lot'due south" or selfies over Snapchat but an unabridged reality which then is immediately degraded into an idea.
Thinking that that person wasn't a reality, that person maybe wasn't fifty-fifty real. Our innocence and judgment is stripped from us. When you're ghosted, it'south not that you suddenly receive a few less texts, no. You receive an unshakeable sense of absence, a silence where at that place once was laugher, where in that location once was promise and beloved. Time turns into an obscure misunderstanding. Your relationship feels like a sham. At least with benching, your beingness is every once in awhile acknowledged.
When y'all're ghosted, at that place is no more acknowledgment. For no reason at all, you lot have become nothing. And mayhap you were nada to begin with.
Benching doesn't create this suspicion in y'all, though. Instead, it makes your ego spring up and dance, wondering whether y'all might be something to someone, wondering how much of something you are to someone. Condign so consumed in that measuring is at your control and fault.
When you lot are ghosted, somewhen there is no wonder. There is really no sense of cocky-control. If annihilation, you can even feel controlled by someone else's cowardice and cant. There'due south just this unwantedness. This sense that y'all were never really something, that perhaps you lot weren't fifty-fifty someone worthy of reaching out to at all. Maybe y'all were a error.
If our text message history is any conveyor of truth, then the person who is ghosted is a person who is forgettable.
The silverish lining is, if you've been ghosted and make it out live and on the other side, beingness benched will be a field day.
Because you will take lost your ego and yous volition empathize how wrapped up people are in their own. That'southward all it is. 
Source: https://thoughtcatalog.com/chelsea-leigh-trescott/2016/06/move-over-ghosting-benching-is-here-and-its-even-worse/