Ghosting: the act of slowly cutting someone out of your life romantically by ending all contact and ignoring your former partner’s attempts to communicate.
Since dating apps have become popular, it has become increasingly easy to disappear from someone else’s life. You can unmatch someone in a matter of seconds and it’s like you were never there. All messages, gifs, and images disappear in a flash; this leaves the other person alone, confused, and with no way to ask you why you disappeared.
Ghosting originated in 2011 and became more widely known around 2015 when news outlets reported that actress Charlize Theron broke up with Sean Penn by ghosting him. She ended their engagement by ignoring all texts and calls he made until he simply stopped calling. This isn’t just a thing that happens to celebrities though. Ghosting has become a common phenomenon. A statistic released by dating site Plenty of Fish in 2016 claims that nearly 78% of single millennials (between ages of 18-33 at that time) had been ghosted at least once.
If everyone knows the pain of being ghosted, why do people still do it? Maybe because these “ghosts” are primarily focused on avoiding the awkward moment where one person has to break it off with the other. There’s no chance of seeing someone cry, or chickening out when all you have to do is unmatch. The lack of social connections developed by people who meet online also means there are less social consequences of dropping out of someone’s life.
For those who are ghosted, the lack of closure can be infuriating. People end up feeling used and disrespected. Rejection can activate the same pathways in the brain as physical pain can, so ghosting can feel like a punch to the stomach. The difference between a punch to the stomach though and being ghosted is that there’s no set protocol on how to react after it happens to you. We need social cues to tell us how to react to what has happened, and the silent treatment leaves us with nothing to react to. Ghosting is the ultimate use of the silent treatment, a tactic that has often been viewed by mental health professionals as a form of emotional cruelty. It leaves you unable to emotionally process the event that has just occurred.
Unfortunately, the more you get ghosted, the more desensitized you become and the more likely it is you’ll end up ghosting someone else. Ghosting is a passive aggressive move and leaves you scarred and hurt on both sides. So why bother?
