I’m Being Haunted By A Ghost. Plot Twist: They’re Alive.
One minute you’re texting someone. A friend, a partner, a potential job offer. Then the next they vanish into thin air, ignoring your messages and phone calls. No red flags, no goodbyes, no reason why. They become a ghost – a sudden unexplained death of a connection. They become a magician – not a very good one if they know how to disappear but not reappear.
Ghosting is when someone suddenly stops communication with you without a clear reason. They won’t answer any messages or return your calls. Sometimes they even block you on social media after having a seemingly normal conversation hours earlier. A 2018 study showed that 25% of people reported being ghosted by a romantic partner, with 40% of people having been ghosted by a friend. Yes, ghosting doesn’t only happen in romantic settings.
It even happens in professional settings, such as after a job interview (from both the employer and the applicant). Ghosting isn’t new to the job market. When there are more job seekers than open positions, candidates often don’t hear back from recruiters. And a lot of us have come to accept this as standard.
But why? I’ve not met a single person who likes being ghosted, even if they’ve once before done it to someone else. I was ghosted by a friend a few years back and I still don’t understand why. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, getting some form of closure by seeing them again – not talking but seeing; I’ll take what I can get. For some though, it’s more convenient, and for others it feels like the safer option. One of my friends ghosted a man they were seeing because of their previous traumatic dating experience where the guy became quite aggressive and violent towards her after wanting to call it quits.
Sarah Calvert, a psychosexual and relationship therapist based in London, says that “people who have been ghosted question themselves because they can’t get answers…they ask themselves what they might have done rather than cast doubt on the other person. Our minds scramble to understand. We crave certainty, and that’s what you can’t have. It’s easy to tie yourself up in knots.”
The increase in using technology to establish relationships has resulted in them being more impersonal. The rise in ghosting links arms with the rise of social media and how many of us interact with others through a digital wall. The anonymity that technology provides plays a key role in this. Ghosting has become so mainstream that MTV released a TV show in 2019 titled “Ghosted: Love Gone Missing”, which tried to help people contact former partners to get to the bottom of why they were ghosted.
Being ghosted can leave a sour taste in your mouth. You feel angry and betrayed, confused and anxious. But as a society, we’ve come to accept this. In one sense, ghosting is the nicer option – no yelling matches or drama. A clean ending to a short-lived (or sometimes long term) relationship where no one says anything they might later regret. In another sense, it’s the worst option – leaving questions circling in someone else’s minds for months on end. Your brain can literally become obsessed over nothing – becoming fixated on an absence while frantically trying to find a reason to fill the void.
A study from the University of Padua suggested that the people who ghost find it more rational and acceptable also have higher scores for the so-called “dark triad” personality traits. What are the three “dark triad” personality traits? They can be put into Machiavellian (manipulation and cynicism), narcissistic and psychopathic. Not saying that everyone who has ghosted someone fits into one or all of these categories – the study just found a correlation between the two.
“These are people who see the world differently for a variety of reasons,” Peter Jonason, the lead researcher in the study, explains. “But we all have these traits in us [to a certain extent], and good and evil is never black and white.”
Personally, a final message saying something along the lines of “I’m sorry, but this relationship does no longer benefit me” is better than leaving the other person in the dark. Even if you send that message and block them, it’s better than radio silence.
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