In Defense of Ghosting
By: Reese Weatherly
Tags: Ghosting, Ethics, Dating, Friendship, Social Media

In Defense of Ghosting

by Hadley Weatherly

Recent neuroscience literature suggests that rejection is experienced in the brain similarly to physical pain, and it seems reasonable to ask that people avoid inflicting physical pain on each other, but just because there’s a poetic truth to a comparison, doesn’t mean that we can treat rejection just the same as a deliberate fork to the eye.

Neuroscience also tells us that the perception of pain differs wildly among people. Chronic pain sufferers sometimes have learned to perceive pain so well that normal or very light touch is received as pain. Feeling like someone is holding a fire to your skin when a doctor lightly touches your skin is a real phenomenon, but damage to your body is different from the perception of damage, and there are situations where some discomfort is unavoidable or even helpful to the person suffering pain.

So it is with Ghosting. The sudden unexplained absence of someone is felt like an unresolvable rejection, it is in our nature as social beings to take it personally, but, while other people’s autonomy is a perceived violence, it’s not an actual violence.

Throughout my childhood, I had sporadic contact with my father. He would be there for me on a weekly basis for months, and then I would hear nothing from him for two years. Sometimes the start of a period of silence would be a planned event, where he had claimed he would drive my little self to music lessons or some other child activity, and the problems would not be only emotional ones of abandonment, but logistical ones about how I was going to get where I said I was going to be, or if I was already there, how I was going to get home.

I understand that this type of abandonment is how people feel when someone leaves you behind whom you’ve known for less than a year. But a valid feeling is not the same as a valid cause for public outcry. A man who stands in a hospital and consents to put his surname on a new person’s birth certificate has some sense of obligation, apparently, to that person, but he only has the amount of commitment he feels like giving.

Ghosting is a weird concept to me. The idea as I understand it is that falling in and out of contact with other adults is fine, if and only if there is transparency about why, including an explanation of what went wrong for both parties to consider for their own self improvement. I do not think that this ask has been considered carefully enough.

The thing is, my father did not always disappear with no explanation. Frequently, he told me exactly what the adult issues were that made him abandon me, what specifically about my mother or my birth was embarrassing to him in his social circles. This information was worse than useless to me, it actively did harm. If he had said nothing, I would still know that he was out of my life, which was the only relevant information to me, about his absence.

His reasons were his, they had no bearing on my life. There was no utility in sharing them with me at that time, or, really, ever. If I had asked far after the fact, fair enough, but I had not. Sharing his flawed understanding of the reasons he popped out of my life for long periods was not helpful. The only thing I needed to know was that he was not a reliable father, and I knew that without his weird justifications around that fact. Had he simply disappeared with no explanation, I would have had just as good understanding of what was happening and each of our roles. In some ways, I would have seen it all more clearly.

Ghosting as a concept is different from abandonment, I think in part because writers know that saying their friends and casual dates ‘abandoned’ them would come off as a little desperate and strange. Also, abandonment implies responsibility, while ghosting can occur in either direction, a powerful person abandons a person to whom they have responsibility to help, but frequently the person with less power is the one accused of ghosting, and the one with more power is complaining of being ghosted, for example, an employer being ghosted by their employee. But let’s leave that heavy emotional example behind and look at how we understand ghosting as a word, with counter examples from other similar situations:

There has been a critical wave against using “Friendzone” as a verb. Let me recap the consensus on friend zone:

As a noun, Friend-zone describes the mental categories any person draws, of some people as friends and others as dating partners. But as a verb, as in “she friend zoned me,” the usage isn’t neutral, it’s an accusation. The implied value behind that accusation is that dating is an expected response and that friendship is an insult. Using this analysis, when we hear “why do I keep getting friend zoned!” it is interpreted as a cry of entitlement to romantic attention.

A mountain of think pieces have been written criticizing the entitlement behind anyone whining about being friend zoned. They say, you aren’t entitled to me because we talked, you aren’t entitled to me because you were nice to me, you aren’t entitled to closure to your satisfaction about why I don’t want to date you. But these same writers will villainize anyone who has supposedly “ghosted” anybody.

Ghosting, like friend zoning, is a verb used by someone who wants contact, applied as an accusation to the object of their interest. It is almost always about dating, but as the word ghost suggests, ghosting includes all parts of existence. Ghosting is now used to refer to leaving a job without notice.

Just like ‘friend zoned,’ there is an imbalance of empathy, the feelings of the rejected are more important than the boundaries of the uninterested. But while friendzone was applied to a wide variety of behaviors, ghosting is applied to a range of situations so broad, even subtle and normal behaviors are labeled as ghosting.

One story about the horrors of ghosting includes a screenshot where the supposed ghoster said “I’m actually very busy this month” before the extended silence. The article analyzing this and other ghosters expounds upon the pain of those ghosted, and imagines emotional immaturity in this liar who is not actually busy. Guides of the “never ghost” school of thought provide a script for setting a more opaque boundary, “I don’t have room for you in my life right now” or “I feel like we have to be on different paths” and so on. But this supposed ghoster did provide a believable explanation for not talking. I’m not sure how repeating that explanation with a condescending tone and a bunch of pseudo-therapist jargon would be any clearer.

I like to watch animal rescue TV shows. Every so often they will get a call for neglect, a thin dog chained up in a yard, and the cameras will hear from those concerned neighbors.

“I hate people like that.”

“Who would treat an animal that way?”

“I used to see that guy play with that dog, what happened?“

We get so caught up in judging people, setting a high standard for conduct and jumping on anyone who falls short, that we punish the weak and miss the obvious. In this case, the dog’s owner is dead. That’s why his beautiful dog was starving on its leash, that’s why the neighbors stopped seeing the owner play with the dog. He died of an accident in his home and was not discovered until the police attempted to contact him about the animal welfare complaint.

Some portion of the people accused of ghosting are like that man, maybe not dead, but, something happened to them.

Of course, that’s often a part of the complaint, that the pain of being ghosted involves imagining something terrible happened, that it’s wrong to make someone worry for someone else’s welfare, or worry that they’ve hurt or offended someone. But I would argue that to be fully human, a person gives the impression of the possibility of being harmed or offended, both normal parts of personhood. It’s disturbing that causing a period of worry or reflection by ghosting someone is framed as almost abusive.

Discarding people, drawing boundaries or withholding information might sometimes happen inside of a wider abusive pattern, but accusing people of wrongdoing after needing space from you is far more controlling and ridiculous. It’s also a little disturbing to worry about someone and then become unhappy when it appears the person is doing well.

“You made me worry about you as a real person who could be hurt, and then made me consider that it’s possible that I’m not perfect and that I was in the wrong somehow, and you’re such a mastermind you manipulated me into doubting my ethical perfection without saying anything manipulative at all.”

Sometimes the ghosted party is correct in thinking that there was something between them that was severed. But always, the ghosted party is incorrect in believing that they deserve an explanation for why that potential relationship is no longer being pursued.

Speaking of advice, etiquette and articles, have you ever looked up the advice on exit interviews? For writers of career advice columns, the consensus is, you probably shouldn’t give an exit interview: it’s not confidential, it’s a waste of your time. Think about why you left the job, and then think if you really believe that your feedback will result in a better workplace for others, when it did not have that result when you actually worked there. This advice is nearly universal. Those that do have some advice for someone wanting to do an exit interview also come with specific warnings. One article suggested postponing the exit interview in order to compose answers that would be really helpful for people in your future situation but unlikely to burn bridges. But in the world of relationship bloggers the advice is just the opposite. Postponing or forgoing explanations is a terrible behavior for some reason.

There are a lot of essays advocating that people shouldn’t have to make their partner grow or change during a relationship, but apparently the reverse is true when a person doesn’t want a relationship. After it has ended, the person declining contact apparently has a responsibility to maintain unwanted contact long enough to help the other person grow. You may guess that I have a problem with this on emotional and philosophical terms, but there’s a practical problem as well.

In general usage, ghosting has slid in meaning from “No contact, with no explanation” to “No contact, with an explanation that I don’t believe.” In practice, this is bad news for people who don’t want to share their personal reasons to want space, but it’s very annoying for people who were telling the truth, people who actually are busy, who have organization or memory problems, who had something come up that changed their priorities. At least someone with a genuine dislike has the option of giving in airing that issue (against their better judgement,) but the person with no issue at all is subject to an eternal loop of this conversation:

“Oh, sorry, I was really busy.”

“Am I giving off some bad vibes? Did I do something wrong?”

“Sorry I didn’t see this message, I’m really busy.”

One time, a friend of a friend added me on Facebook, and continuously invited me out on Friday nights. I mention that he is upper middle class, because he was free on the weekends, while at the time, I worked in a service job at a restaurant, which would never give me a Friday or weekend day off unless I requested it months in advance. Each Friday he would invite me out and I would explain that I was working, and then he would suggest several times over the weekend for us to see each other, and each time I would make the “excuse” that I worked very long and disgusting days and didn’t do anything after work, that I was working or commuting to work during the times that he suggested.

His messages became increasingly needy and sad, while mine became more perfunctory and bored. I decided to get candid when it occurred to me that he saw me out on weekends in the past. I explained plainly that those events were things I got time off for, months in advance, but that in general, I would be unavailable on weekends and Fridays. And then he invited me out on a Friday and I said I was busy.

“I hope I’m not giving off some kind of vibe…?”

“Does it bother you that we’re poly?”

“Can you just be honest with me?”

So, if you’re a “never ghost anyone, ever!” true believer, what is your mature reply in this situation? The true reason why I was not hanging out with this man was shared with him, many times. When I told him that we had opposite schedules, he not only did not listen, but transformed everything I said into some debate on his likability, or the ethics of his polyamorous marriage, things about which I have no opinion, things I never brought up, but he imagined I was bringing up constantly. Would his life, or my life, be improved if I told him he was too insecure and inconsiderate to be my friend? If the fiction that he built in his head was so robust against the information that I worked on Fridays, why would it be any better if I shared my amateur psych analysis of the weird things he said to me?

Speaking of the advice of therapists, I uninstalled Facebook for a few months, ghosting him and anyone else who left me a message there during that time. Obviously I did know that he was pretty likely to take this as a personal rejection, since he had taken every shift I worked as a personal rejection. It isn’t that I have no sympathy for this man, it’s also that I had no time or ability to help him. My sympathy only served to prolong the issue. We’re all insecure people and we all read into what people say to us with that insecurity adding layers that may not actually exist for the other person. People are often annoyingly oblivious to differences of economic status and cultural priorities. But I don’t have control over his insecurities. I can trigger them but I cannot resolve them. A post about how I was taking time off of social media for my mental health would surely be more loaded for him than “I am working Friday” had been.

And the above situation is a bit wacky, but about as low stakes and ordinary as it gets. If it was okay for me to ghost this guy, then surely no one owes anyone an explanation for their decision to not continue a conversation — which of course, is my position. In relationships with higher stakes than my economic failure to get coffee with this man, it’s even more important to accept people’s boundaries without explanation or questioning.

Talk begets talk. With our phones in our hands and fast reliable connections, that’s even more true today. A person with a compelling and dangerous reason to distance themselves from you is better off not telling you what that reason is, most of the time.

What do you think would happen if I had a friend and said to them, “I don’t want to hang out with you because this friend of yours is dangerous and obsessed with me.” I can tell you the most likely outcome: they would mention this to their very nice friend and get to the bottom of this thing in the interests of fairness and justice. The only thing you can say to someone if you want them to say nothing, is nothing.

Is there any scenario where it’s safe to tell someone, for instance, “You make me feel physically unsafe?” How about “I blame contact with you a flare up of the stress related symptoms of my chronic illness?”

Those examples may seem extreme, hyperbolic, and maybe cruel or even paranoid or false. But reality is sometimes extreme. And feelings can often be that way, too. Feelings toward other people may be hard to express or wrong to express, they may be logically unfounded or unfair. The example that someone is unsafe, that someone is cruel and just talking to that person is contributing to an illness, could be misguided while still being a good reason not to keep hanging out.

For example, an ordinary decent conversation could cause an emotional reaction because it reminded you of a traumatic dynamic with another person. That emotional perception might be wholly unfair to throw onto another person, but it would be equally unfair to keep trying to hang out with that person and reliving that trauma, if you could both spend your time elsewhere with no problem, perhaps productively processing the trauma rather than reliving it and blaming a friend for that.

The argument goes, that these are special cases, extreme circumstances, and that outside of these, we should be mature and transparent about our feelings. But everyone has a background and a history, a different language and expectation for conduct interpersonally, every human being is a special case.

Emotional transparency can be a part of a mature relationship, but demanding other people become mature on your schedule isn’t healthy, it isn’t kind, and it’s also fairly silly, like yelling at the clouds for being in the sky.

Nobody knows why we click with some people and not others. There’s no science behind why friends fall into and out of the ability to flow and comfortably exchange ideas, and there’s hardly any vocabulary for discussing it. We are so accustomed to stretching the tenets of talk therapy into every second of every day, so addicted to dramatic transparency, that we now require people to share information that is categorically unknowable.

The very idea of ‘ghosting’ is that individuals have a responsibility to have a very rare self knowledge about who they want to talk to and why, and then considers it wrong for the person to keep that information to themselves, even knowing that it’s almost certainly going to offend the person they don’t want to talk to.

I know it hurt when someone suddenly disappeared from your life. But now imagine, prior to that disappearance, you got a text. “Sorry I didn’t reply yesterday. I didn’t want to.” Puzzled, you ask if this is a joke. It is not a joke, and there is a clarifying text, that this person doesn’t want to ever talk to you. Is your problem resolved? Are you any less curious about what happened to your relationship with this person? I think we would all do best to consider that people’s fear of vulnerability is not the problem, that their lack of transparency is not the problem.

Friend zone as a verb also places the agency on the party doing the zoning and not the party who wants to be more than friends. So, while the typical usage is “I asked her out but she said we could be friends” it is also used in situations like “I want to ask her out but she has totally friend zoned me.” In the first case, the wants and behaviors of the two parties are different, one asks for dating and the other declines. But in the second case, both parties have not expressed interest in dating, and then one of them complains about being friend zoned, even though both of them have consistently acted like friends. In that situation the entitlement switches from “I want my affection to be reciprocated” to “I want to be pursued without pursuing.”

Being “ghosted” often happens in exactly the same way. The accuser often made very little attempt to reach or check in on the person, and really both parties are guilty of falling out of contact.

Before people started carrying phones around with them, this language was different, because you had to be in the room with someone to know that you were definitely being ignored. Being snubbed was rude, but there were fewer snubs that could be happening at any given moment. A person could casually fall out of contact with a circle of friends and leave several ongoing conversations hanging, the resulting confusion would be more likely to be along the lines of “What ever happened to him?” If you arranged a hookup with a person you didn’t really know, you hardly expected to keep chatting. But now apps advertise connection where sex pretends to be companionship and companionship lies about having some thrilling connection to sex, now the expectations and the results are all jumbled by the process, and yet we try to adjudicate it by trying the individual as wrong.

Every time someone deletes a blog or uninstalls an app where conversations happen, an act of ghosting happens. And several ongoing conversations, people who thought they could really be friends, who thought they were meaningfully flirting, may also feel they have been ghosted, may take it personally even if it had nothing to do with them. And, the thing is, being ghosted really doesn’t have anything to do with you. If one person gets a creepy vibe off of you, you’ll meet other people who would think that vibe is ridiculous and probably based in a larger societal prejudice, and both of those impressions belong to the people who hold them, and tell more about those people than about you. Even if the person who ghosted you does blame you for something or is withholding a specific narrative about why you can’t talk, it still does not actually have to do with you. You should change and work on yourself based on your own read of the situation, or maybe the advice of a qualified professional, whatever goodbye text you are missing would probably be a very poor guide to handling the pain of disconnection and rejection.

What can you do to stop getting ghosted? Stop making articles with snippets of the text of the last conversations you have had with people. Instead of having villains who ghosted you, have former friends and one night stands. Instead of declaring how you’re entitled to an explanation you’ll accept, say that you just haven’t heard from someone in a while, which is the truth. Accept people’s autonomy, that their good judgements and unfair prejudices aren’t for you to know. Know that closure is about your own decisions about what lessons to create or ignore about this stranger whom you used to know.