A couple of years ago, TikToker Katharine Keton (@katharineketon) met a guy on Craigslist, and they became fast friends. He ended up moving down the street from her. They hung out pretty often, going on long walks at the beach and talking for hours.
One night, while they were out, she met one of his childhood girl best friends. Katharine could tell that she didn’t really like her, but she just chalked it up to her having a crush on him.
At the time, Katharine and this guy became more than friends. She started to believe that he was the one. But he slowly began distancing himself, and on Halloween, she received a really cryptic text message from him.
He apologized for not being a good friend and that he owed her a wine night. He added that he still needed to hang the shelves in her apartment and ended the message by wishing her the best of luck.
“I was confused because this text message seemed really final, and I didn’t understand what was happening, so I responded and said, yeah, no problem; let’s go and get wine one night this week, and the man never responded to me,” said Katharine.
After a few days of silence, she felt like she was going crazy. Her friends told her that she had been ghosted, but she refused to believe it at first.
She came to the only other logical conclusion—that something terrible had happened to him. She went straight to his social media page and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, so she was certain that nothing catastrophic had happened.
Then, she remembered that a casting director for a reality TV show on a major network had approached him about two months ago, so she thought he must be busy with that.
He had always wanted to go on the show and had started the tryout process. Katharine ran the theory past her friends. They told her that it wasn’t likely.
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A few weeks later, one of her friends suggested giving him an anonymous call. The call went straight to voicemail. Finally, after a couple more weeks, he texted her, asking to take her out for dinner.
At dinner, he confirmed that he had been on the reality TV show and apologized for not being able to tell her ahead of time. He asked her to be his date to his company’s Christmas party.
She was ecstatic about the grand gesture and thought they were in love. But it wasn’t meant to be.
He then won a million dollars on the reality show, which she found out from watching the season finale. He ghosted her, and they never did attend the Christmas party.
“It wasn’t until a few years ago when I ran into him in my city that I live in, in Texas, that I learned he lives here now, too, with his wife and kid,” said Katharine.
“And you know who his wife is? His wife is that girl I had met that I could tell never really liked me. I basically never stood a chance.”
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
