Ghosting
The Feels Guide is a field guide to internet emotion — new feelings, moody machines, emotional design, and wherever, whenever, however emotion and technology mix and mingle.
This week’s feeling is an emotional behavior that’s motivated by avoiding emotions but leaves a strong emotional aftertaste.
Ghosting
🔑 DEFINITION
The act of suddenly ceasing communication with someone.
See also: Caspering, cloaking, orbiting, cold shoulder, silent treatment
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Ghosting happens when someone cuts off all online communication with someone else without an explanation. Like a ghost, they just vanish. The phenomenon is common on social media and dating sites, and it seems to be happening more than ever.
The word ghosting is relatively new but the behavior — leaving without further communication — is age-old. In person, there’s low-level ghosting like leaving a party without saying goodbye or not responding to a call. Spouses running away from relationships or parents abandoning children are its most serious form.
In the online world, the term originated in the early 2000s in the context of romantic relationships. Merriam-Webster found traces of the current definition of ghosting starting in 2006.
In the following decade, media reported a rise in ghosting, which has been attributed to the increasing use of social media and online dating apps. A 2019 YouGov survey of US adults found that 30 percent had ghosted a romantic partner. And now people ghost friends, relatives, and employers too.
❝ QUOTE
“Honey, I rose up from the dead. I do it all the time.” — Taylor Swift
🧩 MOTIVATION
The reasons why we ghost are complicated.
Conflict avoidance, the most common cause of ghosting is to avoid emotional discomfort. Avoidant attachment types may be more prone to it.
Fear, especially fear of the unknown — about getting to know someone new or how they might react to a breakup.
Feeling overwhelmed, the volume of choice in dating or the number of friendships can make it difficult to maintain casual relationships.
Inflicting pain, more rarely ghosting can be passive-aggressive or just plain vindictive.
Growing apart, relationships evolve and people change so this type of ghosting might be more of a slow fade.
Lack of consequences, if you’ve barely just met someone, the stakes of ghosting seem low.
Self-care, cutting off contact may be the best way to end it with someone who lies, sends inappropriate content, makes you feel unsafe, or just doesn’t get the hint.
Meh, just not being that into it, getting too busy, or too much time passing are sometimes the reasons behind ghosting too.
💬 EXPRESSION
By definition, ghosting is a lack of response but that doesn’t mean there isn’t nuance.
- They ignore your text, email, or other message but like your post elsewhere
- They ignore your text and you can see they are active on other platforms
- You see a read receipt but they never respond
- They leave a text unread and don’t respond
Each carries a different emotional weight.
💗 EXPERIENCE
Ghosting can have negative consequences on mental health. Short term, rejection can stir up all kinds of uncomfortable feelings resulting in lower self-esteem. Long term, the ghostee may be less apt to trust in future relationships. If they internalize all those negative feelings, there’s the possibility of sabotaging subsequent relationships too.
As for the ghoster, feelings of remorse or guilt are common. Some may feel that it limits their growth or their capacity to form bonds if it becomes a habit.
For both the ghoster and the ghostee, it might make it harder to establish intimacy in any relationship. Whether you are the ghoster who is avoiding difficult conversations or the ghostee who is worrying about being hurt all the time, ghosting limits vulnerability which is the number one pathway to forming bonds.
👩🏽⚖️ LEGAL IMPLICATIONS
In 2022, a bill was proposed in the Philippines declaring ghosting to be “a form of emotional abuse when a person is engaged in a dating relationship with the opposite sex, affecting the victim’s mental state.” The bill equates ghosting with social rejection that “activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain” meaning that this type of “emotional abuse” could be seen as equivalent to physical abuse.
That bill may not pass, but there is already legislation pertaining to marriage and divorce, pregnancy and children, and many relationship-adjacent crimes like stalking, rape, and partner violence. The law is no stranger to emotion either. Crimes of passion, for instance, are not punished as harshly as “cold and calculated” offenses. In this case, the ghoster could be perceived as lacking in emotion while causing the ghostee emotional distress.
Beyond that, ambiguous emoji use and emotionally manipulative texting have already shown up in the courts. People have apparently already tried to sue each other over ghosting, and even celebrities are not safe from ghosting lawsuits. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that we will see legislation on ghosting in the near future.
💪 PRO TIP
Ghosts typically aren’t proud of their behavior, they just don’t know how to have uncomfortable conversations. So, here are a few ways to head off ghosting or just feel better about being on the receiving end.
- Set expectations. Do you expect them to check in every day? Week? Be transparent about what you need.
- Be honest. Say that you’ve been ghosted before and would prefer that they just say farewell rather than leaving you wondering.
- Give it a time limit. Haven’t heard from them and are tired of waiting? Send them a message asking for a response, or you’ll assume the relationship is over. Harsh, but it can give you closure.
- Don’t automatically blame yourself. Since you may have no idea why the other person left the relationship, try not to cause yourself further emotional harm.
Whether you’ve been ghosted or are the ghost in question, the golden rule still applies: treat others how you would want to be treated, with kindness and respect.
🎉 FUN FACT
Gothic tropes haunt our experience of the internet. We have social media stalkers and digital doppelgangers. People live on after death as an online presence. As we slip through solid objects, our lives can start to seem more spectral presence than flesh-and-blood.
And relationships online are the stuff of gothic novels. There are ghosts, who disappear into the ether all at once or slowly fade out. Then there are hauntings, where a ghost rematerializes unexpectedly. And there are zombies, springing to life years later.
🤔 LEARN MORE
- Read about why ghosting is so painful in New Scientist and how to get over it in The New York Times
- Hinge had a podcast called Ghost Stories, which disappeared after only 5 episodes
- On MTV’s Ghosted, Travis Mills and Rachel Lindsay hunt down disappeared best friends, cousins, and exes
- Yes, there’s been a novel about ghosting too, Ghosted by Rosie Walsh, which has sold over 1 million copies already
- Self’s guide to modern dating slang includes a few terms that are new to me!
<👻👻👻
That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗
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The guide behind the guide
I’m Pamela Pavliscak, a tech emotionographer who studies emotion on the internet. I’m writing a book, All the Feels (Algonquin, 2024), about how technology is changing our emotional life — mostly for the better. I run an emotion tech consultancy called Subjective Labs and teach emotional design at the Pratt Institute in NYC. And I’m starting to share what I learn here and on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter.
