It’s like he died—except if somebody dies, they’re not going to show up at your doorstep one day.”
That’s how Lynn describes what it felt like when her ex—let’s call him Aidan—abruptly cut off all contact last year. The two had been dating for seven years, and shared a home in sunny California with their dogs and two kids from Lynn’s former relationship. They were planning to expand their family soon: setting up doctors’ appointments, looking into egg donors, meeting with potential surrogates. Aidan and Lynn had bought tickets for a cruise they’d enjoy when he got back from visiting his aunt in Hawaii.
But Aidan didn’t come back for the cruise. Instead, he told Lynn one last time, “Good night, I love you,” and then silently, inexplicably dropped out of her life. He “ghosted” her.
Ghosting—or ending a relationship by abruptly cutting off all communication—affects somewhere between 50 to 80 percent of people, depending on the study. It crops up in all sorts of relationships, including acquaintances and online dating connections, but also long-term partners, colleagues, family members, and close friends. Even psychotherapists have been known to ghost their patients, sometimes after months of working together. Ghosting has become such a common part of online dating that Tinder, a dating app, put out a fake job ad for a VP of Ghosting as an April Fools joke last spring.
I’ve become obsessed with these long-term ghosts.
Stories like Lynn’s are shocking, but they aren’t exactly rare. It’s not uncommon for people to ghost each other after months, sometimes years, together. In a 2024 study, involving about 200 adults in the United States, Yejin Park, a Ph.D. student at New York University, and Nadav Klein, a behavioral scientist at the business school INSEAD, found that the average age of a relationship in which someone got ghosted was as high as five years.
That finding resonates with what I discovered on the online discussion forum Reddit. The r/ghosting subreddit, which has 14,000 members, is in the top 6 percent by size on the platform. When I called on this vast community of “ghostees,” many shared stories of losing best friends, long-term partners, and, in one case, a fiancé.
I’ve become obsessed with these long-term ghosts—the lost friends, former partners, and estranged family members who stopped answering their loved ones’ texts, blocked their calls, smiled and told them they’d pick them up at 7 p.m. before quietly slipping away. In my mind was the same question Lynn asked herself again and again after Aidan left—the question ghostees everywhere seem unable to answer: Why do people ghost? Why not just tell the truth?
Gili Freedman is an associate professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland who has spent years studying the psychology of ghosting. “There’s a lot of reasons,” she says, when I asked her to weigh in on the causes of ghosting. “I could talk forever about this.”
Freedman explains that the motivations ghosters have for disappearing are highly diverse. There are obvious reasons, like losing interest in a partner, meeting someone new, or realizing that the two of you just weren’t as compatible as you’d thought—but these reasons apply to all sorts of breakups, not just ghosting. There are also practical reasons, like communication overload or lack of time—reasons that might be making ghosting more common as the lives of romantic interests become increasingly digitally connected.
Sometimes people ghost because the relationship is still so new that it doesn’t seem worth the effort or discomfort to have a difficult conversation. That is, the ghoster might not even consider themselves to be in a relationship yet, even if their ghostee feels differently. While researchers haven’t systematically compared the reasons people ghost in long- and short-term relationships, none of these seem to explain experiences like Lynn’s.
Sometimes ghosting can make perfect sense, like when someone in a deeper relationship has concerns about personal safety. These kinds of worries complicate the picture, showing that cutting off all communication can be an appropriate “out.” Some people also ghost out of desperation—a “last resort,” Freedman says—because they can’t think of another way to leave the ghostee. “Like, ‘I’ve tried everything else, I can’t get out of this relationship—I’m just going to cut it off,’” she explains.
But ghosting can also come from a place of confusion or uncertainty about how to end a relationship—as something we turn to when we have no clear “script” to guide us in letting someone go.
Scripts help us navigate our social environment. They’re “certain things we say at certain times,” says Freedman. She gives the example of going to a restaurant: Follow the host to the table, give the server our order, and devour the breadsticks while we wait for our meal. This script is so ingrained that we don’t need to think about it.
The problem is, we don’t really have a good script for rejection. “You could probably think of things you would say,” explains Freedman. “But you would never use them. ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ or ‘Alright, let’s just be friends’—those are scripts, but they’re unusable because they’re all so cliché.”
When we haven’t memorized our lines, some of us choose to improvise. Others, however, just sneak off the stage.
This last point hints at another possibility: that some of us might ghost because of how we think about relationships and approach connection with others. For example, a 2018 study by Freedman and her colleagues found that people with stronger “destiny beliefs”—i.e., beliefs that people are either meant to be together or not—are more likely to see ghosting as acceptable. These same people are also more likely to say they’ll use ghosting in the future, both in romantic relationships and friendships. “If you are someone who thinks, ‘Well this relationship is either destined to be or not,’ ghosting might make a lot of sense,” Freedman explains. For these individuals, it can make sense to “just cut and run,” rather than invest time and energy having a difficult conversation with someone they were never meant to be with anyway.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that ghosting can take a toll on our well-being, causing anger, sadness, frustration, guilt, confusion, and hurt. Ghosting may even affect our attachment styles—patterns in how we think about and behave in our relationships. Whereas people with a secure style tend to be confident they will get support from others when they need it, people with a more anxious attachment style are less trusting in their relationships, craving intimacy while simultaneously fearing rejection. In a 2021 study, Freedman and her colleagues found that these more anxiously attached individuals are also more likely to say they’ve been ghosted. While it’s hard to be sure whether the ghosting causes the anxious attachment, or the other way around, the link to attachment makes sense. When a partner or friend leaves us without explanation, we might find it hard to trust others in the future.
That’s what Leah LeFebvre, an associate professor at the University of Alabama and an expert on all things ghosting, has found in her research. In a 2020 paper she co-authored with her colleague Xiaoti Fan, she asked 358 Americans to describe the strategies they used to cope with being ghosted and how the experience had impacted them. Over two studies, about 18 percent of people said they’d become more cautious in how they communicated and built trust in their relationships, and 15 percent developed a pessimistic attitude about dating in general. As many as 5 percent of people said they had taken a break from dating—in some cases, for the foreseeable future.
However, these negative feelings do seem to get better over time, and can sometimes even lead to unexpected benefits. In the 2020 study, for instance, a small minority of participants (4 to 7 percent) said getting ghosted had made them more mindful of how they treat others and what they look for in a partner. Others described getting ghosted as part of their journey toward a different, happier relationship.
Similarly, in a 2022 study, Freedman and her colleagues surveyed 80 people who had been ghosted, to understand how these experiences made them feel. When reflecting on being ghosted, people reported that they had initially felt lonely, angry, sad, and hurt. However, these negative feelings seemed to fade over time, as the ghostees became less emotionally affected by what had transpired.
He told her, “Good night, I love you,” and then silently dropped out of her life.
Still, it’s unclear how long these negative feelings tend to linger because scientists’ research about the long-term impacts of ghosting has yielded mixed results. In Freedman’s 2022 study, the length of time that had passed since being ghosted didn’t seem to impact how negative ghostees felt about their past experiences. Yet other studies suggest that ghosting can have deep-seated effects, impacting our self esteem, decreasing our sense of control and belonging, increasing our depressive tendencies, and, in some cases, encouraging self-harm. “I really sunk into a depressive state,” Lynn recalls. “I had thoughts of, ‘Do I want to even continue being here?’”
The problem is, ghosters don’t always recognize how their actions affect the people they leave behind. According to new research from Park and Klein, ghosters may even believe they’re doing their ghostee a favor by choosing to leave without explanation. “There’s this huge discrepancy in the experience of ghosting, based on the perspective,” says Park. Ghosters “might do this because they care.”
Over a series of three pilot tests and eight experiments conducted with over 2,000 people of different genders, ages, and cultures, Park and Klein found that people often say they ghost because they don’t want to hurt the ghostee’s feelings, by leaving them feeling rejected, for example. In one of the experiments, people were offered a small cash bonus to ghost a conversation partner, and almost half of them refused the money. They gave up this bonus even though they barely knew their potential ghostees, who were strangers they’d been randomly assigned to chat with online for up to three minutes.
“So many people were willing to give up that money,” says Park. “It’s not just that they say that they care, but that they are willing to give up money to show that they care.” This, for her, was one of the most exciting and surprising findings of the research—that some people care enough about not hurting the person they are rejecting that they will make personal sacrifices to avoid doing so.
Importantly, even those who chose to keep their bonus said they cared about the person they’d ghosted—significantly more than the ghostee believed they did. This finding recurred across the eight experiments, each of which used a slightly different method to assess how ghosters and ghostees interpret ghosting: as a careless rejection or an act of protection.
“Their methodology is definitely very thorough,” says LeFebvre, when I ask her what she thinks of the study. She explains that few studies about ghosting have used experiments like Park and Klein’s, with most opting for surveys or reflection exercises that rely on people’s ability to accurately remember how they felt during a ghosting experience. Park and Klein’s study is also one of relatively few to look at how ghosting affects those who initiate the breakup. “We know far more about the ghostee,” LeFebvre says, “[and] far less about ghosters.”
By studying both ghosters and ghostees experimentally, the researchers were able to test how and why people might ghost in real time and how this impacts both parties. Beyond demonstrating that ghosting is motivated by more than self-preservation, the study found that providing a reason for cutting off contact changes how people experience rejection. When provided with a “why,” people interpreted the rejection as a more compassionate act, even when that “why” was hard to stomach.
LeFebvre has hesitations about some of Park and Klein’s findings, noting that it’s not clear how well the study maps onto our real-world experiences of ghosting, which usually take place between people who already know each other at least a little. Still, she is excited about how the study “sheds light on more of the humanity” of ghosting—something that other studies, including LeFebvre’s own in-progress work, also hint at.
These studies suggest that ghosters often experience sadness and regret for what they’ve done. Some, according to a 2023 study, even report more negative emotional states—like feeling depressed or sad, or being bothered by things that don’t typically bother them—after ghosting their friends (but not their romantic interests). Even so, they may still choose to ghost.
Lynn tells me Aidan had reached out to her the Christmas after he ghosted to explain his actions. “His text said he stopped contacting me as he thought it would be easier for me,” she says. “I, of course, thought that was BS.”
Lynn’s experience points to the fundamental paradox of ghosting. While we might choose to ghost to avoid hurting the people we once loved, or at least cared for, few of us interpret being rejected this way as an act of care. Instead, LeFebvre has found that ghostees often report assuming they are the problem—that they are too difficult, needy, or flawed in some way. Ghosting leaves us without a clear explanation for why the relationship broke down, she explains. Faced with this gaping hole in our understanding, some of us end up filling it with our own insecurities.
This can also make it difficult to move on after being ghosted, especially for those of us who have trouble with ambiguity. “We have different levels of tolerance for uncertainty,” says Nazanin Moghadami, a registered clinical counselor with expertise in interpersonal and relationship issues. “Depending on what’s going on and depending on the depth of the relationship, it can be quite devastating not to get closure,” she says. Lacking an understanding of why a relationship is ending can be “really hurtful, and make the person really spiral into a dark place.”
However, every expert I spoke with agreed that it is possible to move on when we haven’t been given the clarity we crave. Along with the usual mood-enhancing remedies—exercising, practicing gratitude, helping others, connecting with new people—LeFebvre says it’s important to recognize and accept that being ghosted is part and parcel of taking the risk of meeting new people. “Probably everyone will be ghosted in some capacity at some point,” she says. “There’s probably someone who thought they were ghosted by you.”
This outlook might be helpful if you’re actively dating and have been ghosted after seeing someone for a few months. But it’s hard to expect it to help someone like Lynn, whose relationship has clearly passed the point where ghosting is a somewhat common potential outcome.
Yet when I ask Park what she thinks ghostees can take away from her own research, she offers a similar recommendation. “Sometimes, the perception defines the ultimate reality,” she says. Rather than interpreting ghosting as disrespectful or malicious, we can choose to see it in a more generous light. “I can make this intentional choice to interpret it as, ‘They might actually respect me and want to shield me from this information.’” Park thinks this change in perspective may make a big difference in how we experience ghosting and move on after the rejection.
Of course, shifting the way we think about ghosting—as something common, unintentional, and maybe even aiming at compassion—will never provide us the closure we desire. It won’t bring back the people who left us or erase our hurt and grief completely. But a small shift in mindset just might help us relate to our ghosts not as unwanted specters but as a new way to appreciate ourselves—reminders of the many ways we have made ourselves vulnerable, taken a chance, and opened ourselves to the possibility of connection.
One year in, Lynn says she is still hurting from Aidan’s abrupt vanishing. But although she knows some of her questions will never be answered, she’s also started to see her experience differently—as a reflection of Aidan’s flaws, not her own. “My self-esteem—obviously I am still working on it—but that’s started to come back,” she says. “I’m making my own answers.”
This article Why we ghost is featured on Big Think.
The post “Why we ghost” by Hannah Weber was published on 12/17/2024 by bigthink.com