IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
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Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? After all, it nearly always hurts when a relationship ends. Is being ghosted any more distressing in the information age than, say, in the Wild West, when your lover hopped on their horse and left you in a trail of dust without so much as a forwarding address? We are now beginning to find out, as well as building a picture of why people ghost, how quirks of the brain can make it feel worse than it ought to and how, counter-intuitively, ghosting may be getting less painful.
Unexpected disappearance
Back in 2015, ghosting hurt so badly because it was completely unexpected, says Vilhauer – it wasn’t something people mentally prepared for when entering a relationship. While disappearing from a relationship without notice has undoubtedly occurred throughout history, technology seems to have increased its frequency. One study by researchers at Wesleyan University in Connecticut noted that social media plays an “integral role in perpetuating ghosting” due to its anonymity and because it allows us to connect – and hence disconnect – with others easily. As
Estimates of the prevalence of ghosting vary. One of more than 700 US adults found that a quarter of them had experienced ghosting, but a between 18 and 33 by the dating site Plenty of Fish put this figure at almost 80 per cent.
Vilhauer stresses that the pain of being ghosted is very real. It is a form of social rejection, which we know manifests similarly in the brain as physical pain – as illustrated in a that gave new meaning to the idea that rejection hurts. This found that when people who had recently experienced an unwanted break-up were shown pictures of their ex-partner and asked to think about being rejected, the same brain regions that respond to physical pain were activated.
Yet this research isn’t specific to ghosting, just rejection in general, and the few studies that have looked specifically at ghosting show conflicting results. A ghosting reported significantly higher levels of anxiety than those who hadn’t. However, , of people who had experienced a break-up in the past five years, found no significant difference in the amount of distress experienced due these break-up methods. Interestingly, this study also found that the average length of relationship before ghosting was six months, illustrating that this practice isn’t just employed to end a short-term, casual partnership.
While the amount of pain a ghosted person experiences might not be unique to this form of rejection, the psychological consequences can be. These effects are perhaps hard to understand if you haven’t experienced them first-hand. When I tell a friend that I am writing about ghosting and mention that (as someone this has never happened to) I don’t think it is “that bad”, she quickly corrects me. She describes the experience as dehumanising and says her mind went into overdrive imagining horrible reasons why she was ghosted: “They found me repulsive, they were embarrassed to be seen with me.” This friend estimates that she has been on around 70 dates with strangers from dating apps. She has no real memory of the people who told her directly they didn’t want to see her again, “but I can remember each time someone ghosted very clearly”, she says.
This painful fallout can perhaps be explained by inbuilt quirks of our brain. A “peak-end” memory bias means we assess an experience based on its intense moments and its end. This was best demonstrated by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues in 1993 when they asked people to hold their hand in painfully cold water for 60 seconds and then asked them to do the same for 90 seconds – this time, the water temperature gradually increased during the extra 30 seconds. When asked which trial they wanted to repeat, a . The duration of the pain mattered less to people than the way the pain finished. Endings matter.
For my friend and others, a lack of closure can also make ghosting uniquely difficult. When someone stops communicating with you, it could mean that they have had an accident, that you have unknowingly offended them or that they have fallen for someone else – you just don’t know. A Rotterdam in the Netherlands of 328 daters using mobile apps found that 14 per cent “specifically mentioned they needed closure in order to move on from [their] ghosting experience”.
A need for cognitive closure was first identified in the 1990s by social psychologist , and relates to a desire for definite knowledge about situations we are in. “It is an essential need for us for reaching judgements and undertaking decisions,” he says, and a lack of closure can result in an “upsetting, troubling type of uncertainty”.
The need to know
Uncertainty is unpleasant for many people. For instance, a at University College London and his colleagues found that uncertainty is significantly more stressful than certainty when it comes to impending pain. The researchers monitored 45 volunteers as they played a game in which they were administered small electric shocks. When individuals knew they had a 50 per cent chance of receiving a shock, they experienced more stress than those with a 100 per cent chance. “It turns out that it’s much worse not knowing you are going to get a shock than knowing you definitely will or won’t,” de Berker concluded at the time. The same might be true for the end of relationships.
On top of this, Kruglanski says ghosting can damage our need for significance. “Once somebody ignores you – you’re not even worthy of a response – it’s a huge blow to one’s sense of social worth,” he says. We have a fundamental need for social approval and Kruglanski fears that repeat instances of ghosting could have a cumulative effect on someone’s self-worth. “Everyone seems free to ghost you, and therefore you must not be worth very much,” he says.
Yet Kruglanski also stresses that not everybody has the same need for closure or significance. Some individuals are more tolerant of these factors. Recent research also shows that your beliefs about the world influence your attitude to ghosting. A study led by Gili Freedman at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire found that people with “stronger destiny beliefs”, such as a belief in soulmates, were more likely to think that ghosting was acceptable, due to the idea that “some things just aren’t meant to be”.
Still, now that ghosting is common, it may become easier to deal with. It is impossible to say whether someone on the wrong end of a break-up in the days of the Wild West felt more pain than a ghostee today – and that is partly because people back then didn’t have a neat term that could describe and categorise their experience. Vilhauer believes that ghosting was more painful back when she first started researching it than it is now because people weren’t expecting this behaviour. “It was really damaging to [my clients’] self-esteem because it felt like something they were experiencing that no one else was experiencing,” she says.
Kruglanski says the invention of the term ghosting in itself has helped people cope. It was coined by writer Hannah VanderPoel in 2014, but popularised in 2015 when rumours circulated that actress Charlize Theron broke off her engagement with Sean Penn by simply ignoring his calls and texts. “Labelling it as ghosting provides a solution,” says Kruglanski. “In the past, you didn’t know what to attribute it to. Now you say: ‘Ah, she’s ghosting. Too bad that she’s that kind of person.'”
But what “kind of person”, exactly, is a ghoster? Last year, a study by Peter Jonason at the University of Padua in Italy and his colleagues linked ghosting with the so-called dark triad personality traits of psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism. They showed that people who had ghosted someone in the past were more Machiavellian and psychopathic than those who hadn’t.
Dark triad traits
While it might be comforting to think that everyone who ghosted you has psychopathic traits, the reality isn’t that simple. “Not everyone who ghosts is high in the dark triad,” says Jonason. He also notes that those who are low on these traits are less likely to be drawn to short-term relationships and casual sex, so arguably have less opportunity to ghost.
People also ghost for a variety of reasons, not always self-serving ones. The 2020 survey by Erasmus University Rotterdam researchers found that 16 per cent of people ghosted because they didn’t want to hurt the person they were rejecting, while 8 per cent felt forced to ghost because they feared their date would become abusive if directly rejected. Research has also repeatedly found that ghostees and ghosters aren’t distinct. “When people have been ghosted, they seem to find it easier to ghost somebody else,” says Vilhauer.
If ghostees then go on to ghost, have we entered a vicious downward spiral, where technology is eroding our empathy and ruining our relationships? Vilhauer fears that ghosting can make it harder for people to be vulnerable, which in turn can make it harder to form meaningful relationships. However, at the moment there are no studies linking increased ghosting with a decrease in empathy.
Still, there are consequences to ghosting and it isn’t the case – as some ghosters might tell themselves – that it is an easier, kinder way to end a relationship than direct rejection. “The emotional reaction definitely felt outsized to what I would rationally expect,” my friend says of her ghosting experiences. “I promise you, it’s better for everyone involved to just say: ‘No thanks. See you around.'”
Scaring off ghosts
Ghosting may be an inevitable downside of today’s digital dating scene, but some apps are fighting back. This year, the dating app Snack, aimed at the younger, TikTok-using generation, . Frequent offenders can be reported and the visibility of their profile reduced as a result, with the aim to “bring some basic manners and decency to the dating app game”, according to Snack. And in 2019, Bumble emblazoned with the slogan “NO GHOSTING ON BUMBLE”, as part of a campaign to nudge its users to be more upfront when the spark fizzles out.
