I agree that ghosting can be very painful to experience but I wonder how much of that is instinctual and how much is trained into us. I had a friend ghost me and it hurt like hell but I healed as I realized that the pain I was experiencing had more to do with unmet expectations and insecurities on my part. Does ghosting hurt because we actually need closure or because we've been trained to expect it? I think the answer is important because if its really built into us to be harmed by this type of behavior then it would be important to make sure we aren't doing it but otherwise, we might be better off just allowing the other person to work through it.

Ironically, the only two people I've ghosted were people I was closer to. It's fairly easy to tell someone you don't know very well that you aren't interested in building new relationships at the moment or on a dating site, that they aren't really what you're looking for. But when it's someone you know fairly well it seems like it requires an explanation and that can be difficult.

I ghosted a friend who for perhaps two years only reached out to me when she'd started a new MLM and wanted to try to sell me the new product. I asked her a few times to meet up for lunch and catch up but she never did. A few months ago she reached out asking how I was doing and I didn't respond. She began asking me if there was something wrong and I meant to respond but I could just never get it into words. Same thing with an annoying cousin of mine who would call all the time and was unpleasant to talk to. I stopped accepting his calls. I wanted to send a text message to explain but, what do you say? I couldn't ever find a comfortable way to explain so I ended up saying nothing.

Happens all the time on dating sites. What are you going to do? Toughens you up. A person comes to expect it. If you aren't commitment phobic before, you soon become that way. Then, you think nothing of doing it yourself. Welcome to the world of Internet dating. Its unfortunate.

I didn't realize what this was until it happened to me recently. Before my husband past away this past June, I had met a woman thru another friend of mine who was in the same boat with her husband that I was. We are both close in age, she is one year older than me. I helped her out with her mother before they decided to put her in assisted living. I thought we were developing a nice friendship. Her husband was also very ill and was going thru chemo. We both seemed to have so much in common, like our views on children, music, dog rescue etc. We both truly thought her husband would go before mine due to the fact that he chose to stop his chemo treatments. Well, my husband past away before hers. Her husband past away just 3 weeks later. I went to the funeral and did my best to support her thru the sad time. She is a much more extroverted person than I am, and I noticed at the funeral she seemed much more accepting of her husbands passing than I was about mine. I was still very tearful at times and not able to go out dancing with friends like she did. I know that everyone experiences a death very differently so I did not make any judgements about her seeming ease with moving forward with her life. We both continued getting together for lunch or coffee and I thought I had made a new friend who could understand what I was going thru. I haven't heard from her for almost 2 months now. The last time we communicated was thru text message, her telling me she would call me when she got back into town from a trip. So I'm supposing this is ghosting.

You're talking about Faceberg, right?

I can relate.

I experienced ghosting only once, and it was so painful. He broke my heart with no explanation, just ceased communication. It was on the very day my divorce was final and I was hoping to celebrate with him. But he suddenly severed all connection with me. I needed to know why, but he wouldn't answer. He later related that he was more turned on when I was still legally married - and had lost interest when I became "available" to him. Not sure if that was totally true, but that's what he said.

We eventually re-connected several months later, but I vowed he would never hurt me like that again, so I simply could not fully commit my heart to him, taking it one day at a time, enjoying the fun times, and ignoring the bad. When we finally broke up for good, after 8 years, I'm sure I was less hurt than he was, not because I wanted to hurt him, I didn't, but I was already insulated against the hurt due to the previous heartbreak of him ghosting me at the height of our romance, never could reach that level again.

Fascinating article. Thank you for sharing!

I really doubt that many people who callously ghost others online have been thru what you have, so I will continue to condemn the practice. What you describe doing nowadays as you protect yourself does not seem to fit the definition of ghosting according to the article or my understanding of the term. So I'm fine with what you are doing for yourself these days to be safe. My beef is with people who do it simply because it's easy for them and they have no conscience, heart, or empathy.

And I think the latter group would include the vast majority of those who ghost.