\n<\/p>\n
Ghosting existed in some form long before modern technology made it ubiquitous. \u201cDisappearing without word or warning is no doubt as old as the human race,\u201d the cultural theorist Dominic Pettman notes in his slim new book, Ghosting. The infant first detecting maternal absence, the pet abandoned in an alley, the friend suddenly iced out have all felt the sudden departure of someone who was expected to be there. What has changed in recent years, Pettman argues, is the ease\u2014and cruelty\u2014with which people can enter and exit one another\u2019s lives. Today\u2019s version of ghosting, he writes, \u201cis abandonment with a contemporary garnish\u201d; a plethora of options for ignoring others have turned it into a \u201cuniversal, even banal, experience.\u201d Or, as he puts it pithily, \u201cwhen we came up with texting, we also came up with not texting.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was curious to read Pettman\u2019s book, because I\u2019d been thinking about the banality of ghosting\u2014or, rather, how it can seem so commonplace as to be expected and, at the same time, be hurtful and infuriating. Culturally, ghosting is a paradox. It can be something you brush off even as it lives rent-free in your head. It\u2019s still considered rude, and people on both sides tend to feel bad about it, albeit in different ways. It\u2019s also extremely common: 90 percent of respondents to one 2021 study reported that they had ghosted someone. Last month, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd bemoaned the fact that online dating has become a \u201cdigital derecho, with oh so many ways\u201d to \u201cmake and drop connections.\u201d<\/p>\n
But perhaps ghosting\u2014or being ghosted\u2014doesn\u2019t need to be so upsetting. I recall a text I received at the end of the summer that illustrated, for me, the ways we apparently still tiptoe around ghosting. It was from a guy I had been on three dates with and then hadn\u2019t heard from in weeks. I\u2019d thought the third date was the best of them\u2014a nice dinner with lots of talking, a little making out at my place\u2014so I was surprised when the guy, a divorced dad, offered a tepid response to a follow-up text I sent before disappearing completely.<\/p>\n
In the new text, prefaced by a cheery \u201cHello!,\u201d he apologized, telling me he \u201cdidn\u2019t intend to ghost\u201d and that he\u2019d been \u201cfocused on other connections (and life in general).\u201d Mulling my response, I decided on \u201cthanks\u2014be well!\u201d and then blocked him. The blocking was superfluous\u2014he and I were unlikely to ever talk again\u2014but it spoke to a twofold annoyance on my part. At the point that the guy texted back, I had mostly forgotten about him and moved on; his outreach was an unnecessary coda. I also felt like I should appreciate the fact that he reached out at all, though it seemed like he was doing so to make himself, not me, feel better; to, essentially, correct the record: I\u2019m not someone who ghosts. It came across like a performance of nicety.<\/p>\n
Contemporary ghosting, according to Pettman, is a by-product of what he calls an \u201coverly social world,\u201d one in which the real and the virtual are so intertwined that we can lose sight of another person\u2019s humanity while engaging (or disengaging) with them. Ghosting can also often undermine a person\u2019s perception of reality. In the case of the guy who ghosted me, my surprise stemmed from both his unanticipated disappearance and what I believed to be true: that he and I had had a genuinely good time together.<\/p>\n
Ghosting – On Disappearance<\/p>\n
By Dominic Pettman<\/p>\n
Some of this was projection. \u201cWe love an avatar more than a specific being,\u201d Pettman writes, \u201ca gestalt abstraction, lifted from all the love stories we\u2019ve imbibed since childhood.\u201d I wanted this guy to be the sort of guy who liked and wanted me. As for my irritation when he reappeared? Research shows that people who acknowledge or apologize for rejection risk activating the rejectee\u2019s ire, rather than alleviating hurt feelings. Gili Freedman, a social psychologist who has studied both ghosting and apologies, told me that although apologies after a ghosting can in some cases provide closure, ghostees can also interpret ghosters\u2019 apologies as insincere or self-serving.<\/p>\n
Apologies also put ghostees into a double bind, she said. Ghostees can feel pulled back into a dynamic they didn\u2019t choose to be part of, or be forced to confront the feeling of a wound being reopened, a sort of secondary rejection. The guy\u2019s apology, I found, reminded me of the ghosting infraction in the first place, reasserted his control (he dictated the timing and the terms of communication), then created a social obligation for me to respond\u2014a sort of obligatory forgiveness that can erode the ghostee\u2019s sense of agency or even humanity.<\/p>\n
The guy\u2019s ghosting of me also dehumanized him. When he vanished after that seemingly promising third date, he quickly went back to being an idea of a man I had met: a profile picture on an app. After he apologized and I replied and blocked him, he became a different sort of ghost\u2014one of my, not his, making. His belated effort had left me more dismissive of him than if he had simply stayed gone.<\/p>\n
Many of us might have been ghosted enough times over the years that we\u2019ve developed a thicker skin about what appear to be arbitrary disappearances. The cultural critic Kyle Chayka, for one, recently mused in The New Yorker about whether ghosting was such a \u201cpersistent feature of twenty-first-century life\u201d as to be unavoidable. Pettman considers detaching a \u201cnecessary skill\u201d and an \u201cemerging discipline\u201d for \u201cthe typical citizen of the new millennium.\u201d And with the benefit of thicker skin, perhaps there\u2019s room for more curiosity, room for ghosting to be, if not embraced, at least better understood.<\/p>\n
Pettman is useful on this front. Ghosting may indicate individual cowardice, he writes, but \u201cit also doesn\u2019t get us very far to demonize individual behavior, as if the answer to structural social woes was to simply instill better moral codes in everyone\u2019s hearts and minds.\u201d (What to do about this? He doesn\u2019t really say.)<\/p>\n
The phenomenon is also perhaps indicative of our alienation from a sense of shared community. We\u2019re spending more and more time alone, and some have suggested that we\u2019re in the midst of a crisis of societal rudeness. One writer recently posited that contemporary self-help books might be encouraging people\u2019s selfishness and self-interest (even at the cost of alienating or hurting others) by espousing the idea that \u201cit\u2019s OK to be a little bit of a jerk.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth considering a slightly counterintuitive idea too: that ghosters do care about their interactions, and the people who are affected by them. Somewhat. As Freedman told me, ghostees tend to underestimate ghosters\u2019 contrition, and ghosters\u2019 choice to disappear can actually be evidence of their complicated feelings. I\u2019d add that not being informed of the reason for a ghosting might save many of us from embarrassment or self-loathing. One study on ghosting in a hiring context\u2014say, an employer\u2019s nonresponse to a job applicant\u2014found that those who were ghosted had more self-esteem than those who got personal feedback.<\/p>\n
Is this an argument for accepting ghosting in its contemporary form? Probably not\u2014especially in the case of being stood up, which has always felt particularly egregious. And a new study that examined the consequences of being ghosted or rejected directly found that the adverse psychological effects of the former appear to last longer than those of the latter, because of ghosting\u2019s \u201cunique consequences linked to its ambiguity and lack of closure.\u201d But I do sense that a certain softness might be found under the surface of this particular expression of our so-called epidemic of rudeness.<\/p>\n
Maybe we can extend some empathy, or at least the benefit of the doubt, to those who disappear on us. Perhaps, in reaching out to me, even six weeks after our previous communication, my date was showing evidence of care, though he expressed it in a ham-handed way. Or, as Pettman puts it, \u201cin a world of atomized, liquified, symptomatic and transactional relations,\u201d maybe the act of ghosting can also \u201cbe a merciful one.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ghosting existed in some form long before modern technology made it ubiquitous. \u201cDisappearing without word or warning is no doubt as old as the human race,\u201d the cultural theorist Dominic Pettman notes in his slim new book, Ghosting. The infant first detecting maternal absence, the pet abandoned in an alley, the friend suddenly iced out<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7798,165,17316],"class_list":{"0":"post-29296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-anymore","9":"tag-care","10":"tag-ghosting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}