What's worse ghosting or benching?

Last week we shared an article on the Metropolicks Facebook page and Twitter account called "Benching Is the New Ghosting." What is "benching?" It's a sports metaphor for the bizarre textual limbo that single people in the dating scene sometimes find themselves in. These days, it seems like a lot of people prefer texting to picking up the phone and making a call. Benching is about more than text messages vs. phone calls though. Here's a definition of the word based on the "Benching Is the New Ghosting" article.

I've both been ghosted and benched- quite recently in fact. And I can tell you that as I read the article, I thought to myself that benching was much worse, but only because I cared and was holding out hope that maybe there was a chance with this guy. That is what makes benching so painful- the cycle of hope and disappointment.

When I thought about it much later, I realized that there have actually been numerous occasions in which I've been "benched" but the difference was that in those cases I didn't care a rat's ass if I ever saw or heard from the guy again. It was all a huge joke to me- the random text messages and feeble attempts that they made to reconnect with me. I never seriously considered these guys. One of them I had met once. He stood me up the day we were supposed to meet again in person. For up to a year afterward he would randomly text message me. The other had made an awkward, inappropriate pass at me. After I rejected his advances, he continued to text me for months afterward. It was hard for me to believe that these guys actually thought that they 1) had a chance with me and 2) that they could resurrect things after their behavior. So in those cases it was more of an annoyance than a frustration.

But perhaps the two cases mentioned were not actually cases of being benched because as the article explained: 

In a romantic scenario, you’re not going to go along with this unless you want to actually date the bencher. If I were to pull this on someone who’s over the idea, he just wouldn’t respond. The benchee is complicit because he wants it.

The one who benched me recently- we had seen each other a handful of times before the benching started happening and I thought we had a connection. But whatever was going on, on his end, it got to the point that I had to put an end to it. How did I do that? By text of course.