How to Be Ghosted
TIP
Let go of your desire for an explanation. It helps to seek connection elsewhere.
By Malia Wollan
July 13, 2022
“You don’t have the control in this situation,” says Gili Freedman, an assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College in Maryland who studies social rejection. In the past few years she has become particularly interested in “ghosting,” a method of ending a relationship by ceasing all forms of communication and simply vanishing — like a ghost. Humans, of course, have always been rejecting one another; ghosting is just a newfangled form facilitated by technology, particularly online dating apps.
You can never truly know what is happening in another human’s mind, so don’t try. A person’s reason for disappearing might not have anything to do with you; trying to suss out a rationale for their behavior is an impossible task. Let go of your desire for an explanation. “One of the things that characterizes ghosting is uncertainty,” Freedman says. Still, you might find it reassuring to know that the person not replying to your texts and calls isn’t having a good time either. In one study, Freedman and her colleagues found that ghosters often were filled with guilt. “There are emotional consequences on both sides,” Freedman says.
____________________________________________________________________
Trying to suss out a rationale for
a missing person's behavior
is an impossible task.
____________________________________________________________________
Friends can ghost you too. In her research, Freedman found that about 23 percent of people say they’ve been ghosted by a romantic partner, and 39 percent say they’ve been ghosted by a friend. When you feel rejected or ostracized, it helps to seek connection elsewhere. “Find an opportunity to experience inclusion. and you’ll feel better,” she says. Call your sister. Take your dog to the park. Go salsa dancing. Do something that gives you that feeling of acceptance.
If you’re hurting or feeling unmoored by someone’s sudden disappearance, take heart that the emotional sting will almost certainly fade with time. In fact, humans seem particularly resilient to ghosting; researchers in one study were surprised to find that people who had been ghosted in the previous 12 months reported the same levels of loneliness, helplessness and life satisfaction as those who had not been ghosted. “There are a lot of different ways to increase your sense of belonging and inclusion,” Freedman says. “Being ghosted isn’t going to cause those to plummet and never recover.”
Let go of your desire for an explanation. It helps to seek connection elsewhere.
By Malia Wollan
July 13, 2022
“You don’t have the control in this situation,” says Gili Freedman, an assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College in Maryland who studies social rejection. In the past few years she has become particularly interested in “ghosting,” a method of ending a relationship by ceasing all forms of communication and simply vanishing — like a ghost. Humans, of course, have always been rejecting one another; ghosting is just a newfangled form facilitated by technology, particularly online dating apps.
You can never truly know what is happening in another human’s mind, so don’t try. A person’s reason for disappearing might not have anything to do with you; trying to suss out a rationale for their behavior is an impossible task. Let go of your desire for an explanation. “One of the things that characterizes ghosting is uncertainty,” Freedman says. Still, you might find it reassuring to know that the person not replying to your texts and calls isn’t having a good time either. In one study, Freedman and her colleagues found that ghosters often were filled with guilt. “There are emotional consequences on both sides,” Freedman says.
____________________________________________________________________
Trying to suss out a rationale for
a missing person's behavior
is an impossible task.
____________________________________________________________________
Friends can ghost you too. In her research, Freedman found that about 23 percent of people say they’ve been ghosted by a romantic partner, and 39 percent say they’ve been ghosted by a friend. When you feel rejected or ostracized, it helps to seek connection elsewhere. “Find an opportunity to experience inclusion. and you’ll feel better,” she says. Call your sister. Take your dog to the park. Go salsa dancing. Do something that gives you that feeling of acceptance.
If you’re hurting or feeling unmoored by someone’s sudden disappearance, take heart that the emotional sting will almost certainly fade with time. In fact, humans seem particularly resilient to ghosting; researchers in one study were surprised to find that people who had been ghosted in the previous 12 months reported the same levels of loneliness, helplessness and life satisfaction as those who had not been ghosted. “There are a lot of different ways to increase your sense of belonging and inclusion,” Freedman says. “Being ghosted isn’t going to cause those to plummet and never recover.”
2 years ago
If she had received a heaping helping of that sobering, centering, searing-hot 'C-minus' tough-love tonic, she would have had the lesson and known to approach her subject with the requisite respect, comprehension and perspective needed to do more than to turn our once warm, cozy and vibrant feathered nest of many colors into a forsaken, suddenly abandoned howling gray tumbleweed ghost town at a cold, strange and haunted tombstone crossroads emitting only the sizzling unmapped menace of mocking white-noise indifference.
Or words to that effect.
Okay, here it is, simple.
Dear Olla:
I've thought long and hard lately about my life at this juncture, what I need and how best to proceed as I enter my middle-30s in an uncertain and quickly shifting landscape.
I've made some difficult decisions, life-path adjustments in my daily routine, overdue and needed changes to better position myself for what I anticipate lies ahead for me in the future I envision for myself.
And, while none of this is happening because of you, I know my new choices will surely effect and impact you in ways likely to cause pain, as necessary change so often does, both to you and to me, and most centrally, for us, along the lengthy path we've shared together to bring us to this point.
I'm going to break clean and get on with it. I suspect you'll look at things anew and arrive at similar conclusions in your own life.
I have nothing but the warmest feelings and most beautiful memories of all we have shared together, Olla, through these many valuable, enriching years we have had together in this place.
You've helped shape me from what I was when I first came here 4,172 days ago into someone larger and better than I was, with greater understanding of many new things and broader vistas than I ever would have otherwise had if we'd not met and grown so beautifully close.
I've learned about more from you than I can even say; things about America, about politics, movies, art, writing, photography and many ways to express and create a vision, and so much more.
I'll never be able to hear Keith Jarrett or Jaco Pastorius, Joni Mitchell, Maureen Dowd or the name John Fowles, or hear the intro to Babylon Sisters without thinking of you, and I can only thank you for all of it.
And I hope that, in my way, I've given similar things to you.
Because of all we've shared, we're not leaving each other here, but each carrying the other forward in our lives, inside our hearts.
Have a beautiful, wondrous life, Olla, and always know that you've made a profound mark on me. I will carry you wherever life takes me, forever.
I truly love you.
Always,
Your Lucie, Lulu, Lucindarella
I get intimations of this phenomenon reading "Dear Abby" from time to time. I couldn't stand her once upon a time, but the succeeding generations running the feature are actually fairly well informed and mostly on the money with their advice.
That said, this brave and strange new world of social media works upon an almost expected notion of instant gratification. . . and not just on a sex site like Hamster. I do view these message threads as valuable communication. . . sometimes just snarky, sometimes pretty profound. All I can say is thanks a lot to all of you for keeping things somewhat real.
What a load of hooey.
Is Lulu also part of a phenomenon, a spreading tendency just to disappear into the ether at a restaurant, *after* the meal is consumed but *before* the check arrives...???
This 'ghosting' nonsense is a shabby tactic used by lazy, selfish people totally without the social graces or skills to properly conclude a longterm, very intimate personal relationship encompassing literally thousands upon thousands of precious hours spanning nearly a decade of time, a sizable chunk of my life, freely given to her, now gone forever.
I gave her more credit than to even remotely consider the possibility that she would just ditch out without a single word, like she was just shutting off some tedious old movie on the television on her way out the door. Had I sensed this kind of non-conclusion coming from her, I'd have changed things between us many years ago. And this from someone who purports to be a *teacher.*
In college, I had to turn in a paper that had interfered with other things I was doing, and basically, I hadn't put in the time and effort to master the subject matter to the degree the details required. I cobbled together the intro and body of the paper as best I could, and as time was rapidly running out, I realized that I didn't have a blessed clue what it all meant. I had a paper without a hint of a summary conclusion tying it all together. It just got to the end of laying everything out and then...nothing; it just stopped without saying anything about what it had all been for or about. I wrote some idiotic bullshit trying to finesse my way through it with empty rhetoric, highfalutin double-talk and vapid vapors alone. After about a page of convoluted drivel, I ended with a few more final grand platitudes a propos of nothing. Then I read it over, laughing and wincing my way through it, shaking my head, and then I turned that baby in!
When I got it back, the professor had put a huge red 'X' over my entire finale and wrote, not in the margins or top or bottom of the page, but actually right ON TOP OF my feeble text in angry red marker:
"*NOTHING* (underscored) precludes writing a proper cogent conclusion to your subject !!!
C-minus." ...and he had circled the 'C-minus' about five times
Clearly, Lucie never had a professor even remotely like mine when she was at Uni. And too bad for her and for me and for everyone else that she didn't. It's a lesson she desperately needed to learn somewhere along the line, and, sadly, never did.
Alas, 'the ghost of cartoons past,' sadly, as Charlie the Dick might say, with dearly departed Lucie, our 'ghost of honoUr' being now fully 'one sheet to the wind' and adding only the haunting sound of 'one sheet flapping'... a rousing cacophony of thundering quietude-and-a-half or so.
I mean, at least Cosmo Topper had debonaire George and Marion Kerby to help pick up the dead beats. : ))P