Ghosting
By: Valerie Macewan
Tags: Ghosting, Online Friendships, Creative Non Fiction, Toxic Relationships, Essay

Breaking up is hard to do

Ghosting

Dinah’s Landing. Photo by author.

Used to be, if we didn’t want to talk to someone it was simple. Let’s see, how far back shall we go? To answering machines? 1980s. Then you just looked at the number glowing on the machine and thought “I’m not going to answer that, it’s Mabel.” If there was a message? You deleted it. Easy to ghost. One machine, one avenue. And then there was snail mail — easy enough to throw away a letter, you know, the paper kind. One even found satisfaction in ripping an envelope in half, like we do now with those credit card solicitations.

That was then, this is now, as they famously say.

Today I had to stop talking to an online acquaintance. She’d been in my life for a decade. I’d never met her in real life. We’d spoken on the phone a couple times over the years but mostly we communicated with Facebook Messenger. Hardly a day went by when we didn’t chat online. It’s easy to be lured into conversation during long, boring afternoons spent at home during this horrid pandemic. We all yearn for contact, right? I’d rather be texting someone than doing laundry or taking a walk. Such a passive activity these days.

She lives in the North, I live in the South. It proved to be quite the relationship. We started out as literary friends, ended up with me supporting her financially as she fled a woman’s shelter to live with housemates in a new city three years ago. She’s never had a job or given any money for room and board to her housemates during those years. She never registered as a resident of the state. She lived off of me and others who sent her money. I jumped right into the scam and lived in the middle of it. I’m keeping the details obscure on purpose. There’s an off chance she could read this, a very slight chance.

The friendship deteriorated over the last six months as she requested and needed more of me. More money, more emotional support, more of my time. Someone I’d never met. I spent more time talking to her online than I did my family some days.

She would threaten suicide, curse the fates, claim to be in fear of violence from her housemates, say off-the-wall things like she was going to smash her head against the wall, do self-harm, and I tried to make it better for her. How? She always ended her tirades with requests for a hot meal. Maybe $35 for Dominos. Or Taco Bell. Or $35 minimum purchase order for free delivery from Walmart. Whatever. I always gave in and PayPal would light up my laptop.

I woke up from this nightmare two days ago. She slapped me in the virtual face with yet another nightmare scenario of supposed slights from housemates. Text after text she sent. The owner of the house was taken away by ambulance and put in an induced coma. Now my online acquaintance would be put out on the street along with her belongings. And then she complained because another online friend wanted to send her money through Venmo and that platform takes 3–5 days to deposit and didn’t they know that was too long a wait? How dare they! And how I wouldn’t understand because I didn’t respect her personhood.

Ok, quick — back to ghosting. In case you’ve read this far and don’t know what to what I am referring, read this:

The Wikipedia definition:

Ghosting is a colloquial term used to describe the practice of ceasing all communication and contact with a partner, friend, or similar individual without any apparent warning or justification and subsequently ignoring any attempts to reach out or communication made by said partner, friend, or individual. The term originated in the early 2000s. In the following decade, media reported a rise in ghosting, which has been attributed to the increasing use of social media and online dating apps.

I am not engaging in the traditional ghosting of this woman. She knows why I have left our relationship, so it’s different. She went over the line, cursed me and my family, threatened me verbally, and she told me to leave her alone. So I search for a better term but there’s just not one. Leave out the “without apparent warning or justification” part of the definition and the rest rings true.

How does one go about ceasing all communication? What’s different now is the amount of steps one must take to rid one’s self of an acquaintance. “Leave me alone,” just isn’t enough. How many routes must one follow in order to disengage from a toxic relationship? There are many steps now.

Shut down all communication in the form of social media. Fortunately for me, I don’t do a lot of different types of social media. I’m mostly an iPhone/iPad message user, Facebook follower, Facebook messenger user (rarely), gmail person. So I began the process of disengaging from her.

First I had to stop all her emails. Create a filter to send the emails to the spam or delete folder. Don’t read them. They will contain pleas for friendship, for reconsideration. Apologies. Don’t give in to your sick curiosity. This person is gone now. You don’t know them any more. You don’t want to get sucked into their sick games again ever. She’s clever, she knows too much about me, she’ll appeal to my better nature. I can’t allow this.

Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Of course — block and unfriend her. The quickest way for someone to find out they’re out of your life is blocking them if they use Facebook Messenger, which we did. Have your family unfriend and block them too because after ten years, they’re all in your life.

Instagram. Block messages. Also those to your spouse and family. They must block the person because there will be appeals to them as well. My husband received a message shortly after I unfriended the woman on Facebook.

Twitter. Stop following them. I don’t know enough about Twitter, I’m a real dumb ass, so I don’t go on there very often anyway. It’s just to frantic for me.

Cell phone. Obviously block their number here. I didn’t do this quickly enough and she called and left two messages for me. Pleading with me to be her friend. I read the transcripts of the messages, did not listen to her voice, before I deleted them.

I gave her a Kindle Fire with an active Amazon Prime account. I trusted her enough to use it, to listen to the books I’d ordered from Audible, to watch Amazon Prime on it. She had no tablet and her Chromebook bit the dust a year ago, I sent her my Amazon Fire because I no longer used it. And yes, I bought her a new Chromebook too, after a few months of her complaining about the Fire. I’m shaking my head at this rememberence.

She said the wifi in her house didn’t work well enough for the Fire to pick up a signal, so turning deregistering it was easy enough to accomplish, mentally. My husband just came into to tell me that he realized she could revenge order anything she wanted to from Amazon. Yes, stupid of me. I trusted her for a year with that Kindle, she never abused my trust. Never ordered anything. I’ll grant her that. She didn’t need to order anything. If she asked for it, I bought it for her. Brita water pitcher and filters? Check. Heating pad? Check. Slippers? Check. Window fan? Check. Yes, you should be shaking your head by now. It took three years to purchase it all, but I did.

The seeds of the disconnect were already being sown before this last onslaught of verbal abuse and vitriol. My therapist, the amazing Melanie, asked me just last week if: “If you know you’re being manipulated, are you really being manipulated?”

I answered, “No.”

She said, “You’re willingly giving in to that woman. Perhaps you should consider why you allow her to manipulate you.” The answer is quite simple, really. It’s because I have more than she does so I try to even it out. Guilt. It goes back to when we were destitute, waiting for VA compensation and living on next to nothing. I know what it’s like to be shitpoor, to fear homelessness, and to be out of food. But she’s not me and I’m not her keeper, not anymore.

It is complicated, isn’t it? As Neil Sedaka sings, “Breaking up is hard to do.”

I’m going to take the money I save each month and invest it. I asked my husband if I’d been catfished and he said no, that’s a whole other phenomenon.

No more getting overly involved with people who are not really in my life. I learned my lesson. I think I helped her in the past and I don’t regret it, I truly don’t, but the gravy train has stopped right in its tracks. I refuse to feel foolish or used. I choose to feel grateful that I had enough to share and I shared it. For a time.

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