We knew that was coming when we saw Sundar Pichai in Oligarch Row at the inauguration

Amen, let’s make sure we can live sustainably on Earth before we start carving up other whole planets

You dodged a bullet. Ghosting demonstrates emotional irresponsibility.

This is your opportunity to decide for yourself, just how often is a reasonable frequency of check-ins? Maybe he’s intentionally playing hard-to-get, maybe he’s underconfident and fearful of initiating, mistaking passivity for being “chill” / approachable.

Initiating check-ins should feel somewhat evenly shared. If there are also other red flags this early in the getting-to-know-you stage, then yes just honor your intuition and leave the ball in his court. When I was dating, I checked in the day after a date, and then every 2-3 days thereafter. If you both have full schedules then maybe a week? You’re not a bad person if a week between check-ins is too little connection for you.

If you’ve experienced abuse in one relationship, you’re more likely to find yourself in subsequent abusive relationships. You 100% don’t deserve abuse, but there are emotional habits that people learn in childhood that set us up to be especial targets for predatory partners.

I grew up witnessing my narcissist father cyclically abusing and neglecting my mother. With that baggage, in my late teens I was groomed into a manipulative relationship with a slightly older partner. I broke free after a few years, but this was all pre-Internet, so it was only much later that I learned the vocabulary to name narcissistic abuse flags and connected the dots. It was cyclical, and would almost certainly have turned physically abusive.

I think it’s an oversimplification to say we tend to gravitate and feel special chemistry with people who recreate familiar (abusive) relationship patterns. There’s a lot more complexity to romantic attraction and sexual attraction than just comfort/familiarity. I think there’s usually more subtle, coded things going on that predators use to probe and groom targets - how we respond to a bigoted “joke”, or two-faced cattyness, glorifying drugs and alcohol, etc.