Remembering my romantic failures

Hi. I felt like I wanted to complain a bit and ask some questions. I haven’t date a lot of girls (3), but all of my experiences ended in the same way. It was much easier to approach girls when I was going to school. So it starts by working together on a school project. We become friend and learn to know each other which slowly turns into occasional dates. 1. I tell her my feelings. She doesn’t feel the same way. She stops talking to me forever. A few years later. 2. I thought it was going well. We were seeing each other a lot outside of school. I didn’t like my human science program so I changed to Information Technologies and had to go to another school. She stops talking to me. Funny thing: She answered one of my messages a year later and never messaged me again after. 3. That one actually asked me on a date. I was working with her sometimes and she asked me out the day before I went to a trip to Japan. I’m back from Japan, I message her how she’s doing. Never heard from her after. I have a good idea of what went wrong in my dates, but what is that with not talking to someone because you have different feelings? Is that a common thing? What are my chances to lose another friend because I want a girlfriend?

Ghosting unfortunately is a very common way nowadays for people to indirectly say "I don't like you that way." Many people don't want to deal with the direct way of shooting someone down they're not interested in, so ignoring or cutting off contact is an easy way of dealing with it. Saying to someone you "like" them, they don't like you the same way, and the friendship eventually dissolves due to the awkwardness is just a risk you have to take in the dating game sometimes. I know for a lot of guys it's not easy to stay friends with a girl who doesn't reciprocate their feelings, but you can't put a gun to someone's head and make them like you either. Sometimes the best medicine is just to move on and try to find someone whom you can gel with, because staying hung up on someone who doesn't like you back is just going to drive you into depresssion.