modernangel

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.

In my defense, my family of origin revolved around a cookie cutter Atlas Shrugged minor villain dad - gaslighter, business cheat and mooch, compulsive womanizer - so Atlas Shrugged's heroes were the fantasy I needed when I read it. I knew I wasn't a "John Galt" so I tinkered with a dutiful Eddie Willers identity for a bit. Some good still came out of it - I got interested in philosophy as a respectable formal academic topic, and outgrew the fantasy.

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.