In the past year, two women who I cared about very much and who I believed cared about me simply stopped talking to me. The two situations were not exactly the same, because they never are, exactly. Every relationship is both disconcertingly unique and depressingly similar. The first was someone who I had been dating for nearly half a year, who simply and suddenly decided that this life, our life, was not her real one, and she did what many others have done in similar circumstances: she moved (back) to L.A. After a few baffling conversations and a blanket social media blockade, I haven’t heard from her since. Not a word.
The second was someone who I knew briefly but intensely: I thought everything was ahead of us. She was at a complicated moment in her life, but it seemed to me that neither one of us wanted anything in particular, but maybe something like everything in general, and that we could figure out what that was, along the way. She said she felt the same way, and then one day suddenly stopped returning my texts. I haven’t heard from her since. Not a word.
The internet has given us a word for this sort of thing, in much the same way that God named the sun and the stars during the six days of Creation: ghosting. The canonical reference Urban Dictionary defines the term as “cutting off all communication with their friends or the person they're dating, with zero warning or notice before hand. You'll mostly see them avoiding friend's phone calls, social media, and avoiding them in public.” This about gets it right: it means to ignore and avoid, to choose silence over words, and in an age of constant communication to sever contact altogether. When you ghost, you become transclucent and invisible, as if you are not there at all.
A 2018 academic study showed that it has become very common. 25% of respondents report being ghosted, and 20% report that they have ghosted someone else. Anecdotal conversations suggest that these numbers severely undersell the frequency of this phenomenon, which I’d imagine is much closer to 50% in both categories. I’d also surmise that the majority of ghosting situations do not resemble the two I mentioned above, but are instead closely tied to the churn of online dating and swiping: these days, we all have more appointments than we can courteously keep, and we may have forgotten how many balls are in the air even as they come crashing down on our thoughtless heads.
As an op ed in the Washington Post put it, “It’s easy to see how we got here: Our culture of busyness and flakiness, created and enabled by technology, allows us to avoid tough situations every day, and not just in our love lives. Email and texts fall through the cracks, sometimes accidentally, sometimes because we don’t know what to say or are afraid to tell the truth.” A novel entitled Ghosted has sold over a million copies.
In 2019 Buzzfeed conducted a survey about why people ghost. The reporter who wrote up the survey confessed that out of forty-three people she had matched with on the dating app Tinder, she had ghosted twenty-nine of them, and was in turn ghosted by 6. As she succintly puts it, “You ghost, they ghost, we seemingly all ghost now.” But why? Eight in ten respondents to the survey say they ghosted becuase they “weren’t into” the person they were in contact with. Six in ten say that it was primarily about the other person, and nearly half say ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ A little less than a third report being angry and feeling afraid, respectively.
The easy thing is to bemoan this ghostly state of affairs and long for the sepia colored times when people stuck by each other with tenacity and parted from one another with indelible eloquence, when they corresponded about affairs of the heart with verbosity and verve. But the truth is that abrupt silence and flaky communicarion seem more features than bugs of the human condition. Some of us have always fled when the emotional scene gets too sticky, self-justifying excuses in tow. We have places to go: we can’t bother to be detained by the wreckage left behind.
Our digital lives make ghosting less defensible and more inevitable. We are endlessly available but ghostly in our presence: we haunt each other’s lives and news feeds, simultaneously there and not there, everywhere and nowhere. We are nodes of networks that feels omnipresent and not quite real. We can see those with whom we don’t speak, and speak to those we have never seen in person. There is no doubt that some navigate this halluciantory reality with more grace and kindness than others. Some wound as a matter of course, and hurt with an abandon that can take the breath away. But I’d reckon that we are all both sinned against and sinning, hurters and the hurt.
Perhaps being ghosted hurts so much because ghosting is so painless. In an age of endless options, asymmetries of feelings find fertile soil to bloom in monstrous directions. I can understand how the scrim of a screen can render us all ethereal and insubstantial, part of the endless circulation of data. But in person intimacies are no vaccines. The way they heighten the stakes render them even more vulnerable to abrupt endings and abandonments. The opposite of a ghost is not flesh: it is presence.
As lives increasingly migrate onto the internet and eventually to the ‘metaverse’ it is possible that we all acquire the properties of ghosts, virtual extensions of ourselves that are in places but not of them, mingling without mattering. We are relentlessly ourselves online these days, but figuring out how to commute between a profile and a person can be a tricky voyage.
I am no saint, and live in the same glass house within which we have all taken up residence. But I do think the effort to stay as human as possible is worth making. None of us should be dogmatists of silence, stubborn clingers to the easy and cheap posture of a ghost, drunk on the drama of our own abscondment and so self-protective that we strafe others.
Speak. I promise, it’s not that scary.
Have a great weekend,
A