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Dating can be a long, painful and confusing process – particularly when you’re doing it online.

Just when you think it’s going OK, the banter is flowing and the invitations to meet up for coffee are coming thick and fast, it suddenly goes quiet.

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Days turn into weeks with no communication.

Did they die? Did they get mugged at gun point for their phone, laptop, tablet and any other electronic gadget that might have your number stored on it?

After a while, you come to accept that perhaps they weren’t ‘The One’ after all – even if they kept sending you pictures of their Frenchie. Maybe it’s unrealistic to hope that you’ll be holidaying together in Croatia by August. You might have to look for another plus one to that family wedding.


And so, you resume your pre-crush life. It’s fine, you didn’t really like them in the first place. Their choice of cafe was a bit basic and they kept unregular hours. You had to keep waking up in the middle of the night to reply to their 1 am jokes and drunk Snapchats.

Months go by.

And then, out of nowhere, you receive a text from your ghoster.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’ they ask – a good three months after they left your last ‘Sure, when’s a good time for you’ message hanging.

What the f*ck is happening?

Well, my friend, you’re being zombied.

Zombieing is the new term doing the rounds in the dating world. It’s basically where you’re ghosted for a while and then out of nowhere, your ghoster gets back in touch.


And it happens all the time. If it hasn’t happened to you, chances are that you’ve done it to someone else. After all, it’s easy to resort to a bit of light flirtation when you’re bored and alone on a Wednesday evening and Bumble is just at your fingertips.

‘Men do this all the time on Tinder,’ Meg tells Metro.co.uk.

‘I always respond with “are you going back through all your old matches?”‘.

Yes, the is most definitely what they are doing.

My pal Poppy was a classic victim of zombieing.

She tells Metro.co.uk: ‘There was this guy who was in my college at university but our paths never crossed until we were both living in London after graduation. We ended up going on three dates and got on so well that it began to feel super serious very quickly.


‘Then he went home for a couple of days and we were meant to meet up upon his return. So, I messaged him while he was away to check if we were still on for our date. And I heard nothing. Until four months later when he returned my text.’

His excuse?

‘He said he had gone to Tel Aviv and it’d all got too much but that he was back in London and wanted to resume where we’d left off.’

Poppy says that after telling her that he’d be around the following week, he went quiet again.

‘I was so gutted the first time but more bemused the second because I knew this time that I’d definitely not done anything wrong.’

And in my friendship group, this kind of story is de rigueur.

‘My whole dating life is just one big cycle of men who come across really keen, ghost me, come back, and ghost me again,’ says Gina.

‘This is an interesting trend yet and a very common one,’ Mairead Molloy, CEO of introductions at Berkeley International tells Metro.co.uk

‘Acting like nothing has happened is a tactic many people use when faced with a tricky situation, and they fear confrontation or are being cowardly.

‘Whilst the person implementing ‘zombieing’ may not understand the implications of their actions on the other person, they use zombieing as a way boost their own ego and check that person is still interested in them. It is a way to let the person know they aren’t taking the relationship forward but they are interested in something more casual.’


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