When The Banshees of Inisherin became such a hit last year, I couldn’t help wondering if one of the reasons it was resonating so powerfully was that – despite being set on a fictional island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s – it was essentially about ghosting. A man stops talking to his friend without explanation, and the emotional fallout is devastating.
In the 1920s, ghosting a close friend would indeed have been shocking. Ghosting as a social move was pretty much unheard of into the 2000s. Remember that 2003 episode of Sex and the City where Carrie is outraged that Jack Berger breaks up with her via Post-it note? “I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me,” says the offending scrap of paper.
“Today, that would be seen as almost respectful,” says a young woman I often talk to about modern dating. “At least he said something.”
Today, ghosting is all too common, especially in the world of online dating. According to a recent study from the University of Vienna, ghosting has become “notorious” as the go-to method for ending a connection that began on a dating app. Another study this year by Forbes found that “a staggering 76% of respondents have either ghosted or been ghosted in the context of dating.”
The word “ghosting” – to mean suddenly ending communication with someone with whom you have a personal relationship – wasn’t added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary until 2017, five years after the launch of Tinder. It’s not hard to see how ghosting arose out of dating app culture, based on how these apps restructured the world of courtship.
There’s an endless sea of options. You choose someone based on the flick of a finger. “It’s like ordering Seamless,” a young man told me in a story I did in 2015, “but you’re ordering a person” – a person who is arguably being treated as a commodity. So what does it matter if you ghost them? It’s unlikely there will be any social consequences, since you probably don’t have mutual friends. And the sooner you discard this person, the sooner you can get back to swiping, which these addictive platforms are designed to make you want to do.
Women and men ghost about equally, studies say, though their reasons somewhat differ. Women are more likely to say that they ghosted someone who made them feel unsafe or scared, which is understandable. But more common among ghosters is the feeling that they are avoiding a difficult conversation that could cause them distress.
And what’s the problem with that? “It’s disrespectful, mean, and downright rude,” says Bumble, which recently gained kudos for allegedly “banning ghosting”. “No ghosting on Bumble!” the dating app announced on its website – though on closer inspection it seems that Bumble has not so much banned ghosting as it has encouraged users to report it when one of their matches has failed to show up for an agreed-upon, in-person date. After which, the company claims, “a human moderator will then fact-check the information before taking action.”
That sounds complicated and difficult to prove, and one wonders how many users will actually be banned by Bumble for failure to appear. It’s also ironic that a dating app is promising to ban behavior it helped to foster.
And ghosting doesn’t only refer to being a no-show at a date, but to abruptly ending a conversation or even a relationship that has lasted for weeks or months, even years. Social media is awash in videos of people expressing their frustration at being ghosted by people they’ve been dating both casually and seriously. “Ghosting: The practice of dating ghosts instead of wack-ass humans,” says the caption on a video by the YouTuber Gustavo Victor Carr, which shows him in a restaurant drinking a cocktail and chatting animatedly with an empty chair.
But Bumble is right about something – ghosting can feel “abusive” to the person who has been ghosted, according to studies. Being ghosted “can have a profound impact on a person’s mental health, leading to feelings of depression, anxiety and deflated self-esteem”, as a Bumble press release accurately reports.
And that’s why it’s all the more alarming to see ghosting bleeding into friendship and work. A recent study from the University of Georgia says that researchers were surprised to find that over half the participants in its survey on ghosting and dating said that they had also been ghosted by a friend – which felt “just as bad” as being ghosted by a romantic partner, or even worse. And in their professional lives, people are now routinely being ghosted in work situations involving hiring, pitching, networking and more.
Ghosting diminishes our collective sense of connection and personal sense of wellbeing. In thinking about how we relate to each other – or fail to relate – in the digital age, I’m reminded of a quote from Martin Luther King: “In spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”
It’s worth thinking about that the next time you’re about to block, delete or leave someone permanently on read.
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Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno