Vanishing act: The realities and impacts of ghosting on those left behind

Irish Examiner

a day ago

We associate ghosting with modern dating, but vanishing lovers are as old as time — the only difference is that these days, they can disappear digitally as well as physically.
And while we think of ghosting as a particularly brutal aspect of romantic relationships, it happens within all realms of human connection — familial and platonic, professional and social, as well as intimate relationships.
Being ghosted by a friend is probably worse than being ghosted by a lover, and we've all been ghosted by builders.
Thanks to our infinite capacity for digital connectivity, the more easily we connect, the easier it is to discard. Unfollow. Delete. Block. These are contemporary ghosting verbs. ('Caspering' — letting someone down gently before vanishing — is slightly less jarring.)
Dominic Pettman is Professor of Media & Humanities at the New School in New York. His latest book, Ghosting: On Disappearance, takes a philosophical look at people vanishing, and how ghosting each other has replaced traditional ghosts, in whom we tend to no longer believe.
'Abandonment is as old as people,' he says. 'There's something about the term 'ghosting' that captures the moment, the specific zeitgeist of our time.
So it's an age-old problem, but because of new media, we have a different relationship to abandonment — the way we anticipate it, deploy it, rationalise it, experience it, what it ultimately means.'
As a child in 1980s Australia, Pettman's family was ghosted by his dad's younger brother Gordon, who, in his 20s, changed his name to Gabriel, moved to Europe, and vanished. Never to be heard from again.
When Pettman lived in London in the 1990s, he'd find himself looking at strangers on the tube, wondering if he were unknowingly sitting opposite his 'quasi-mythical' uncle.
'That was my early introduction to radical ghosting, where someone close deliberately removes themselves completely,' he says. 'It was a big violent jolt.
Ghosting creates this thing that theorists call 'structuring absence' — a subtraction that creates a chalk outline that people tiptoe around for the rest of their lives.'
Think Dickens' Miss Havisham, the rest of her life structured around the sudden absence of her fiancé.
'People think of ghosting as mostly to do with dating, romantic love, but friends and family set the tone,' he says.
He reminds us of Freud's idea of our first sensations of abandonment: 'Just the mother leaving the room is to the infant a form of ghosting. If the mother is not directly present, that's an early lesson in ghosting.'
What makes ghosting between grown-ups something Pettman terms 'an act of violence' is not the actual leaving — people leave each other all the time, compelled to seek out new situations, or move away from situations that no longer work for them – but the lack of communication that precedes the leaving.
Dominic Pettman: 'We have these WhatsApp groups all over the world, so we have a simulation of community, but it's very different to seeing people face to face every day. We send emojis rather than help.'
DISCONCERTING
Whether it's after a third date or an established relationship, someone vanishing into thin air — digitally or IRL — is disconcerting, creating a sense of mourning for a living person who has made themselves dead to you.
As Miranda says in an early episode of Sex & The City, 'It's like those guys you have the great second date with, and then never hear from them again. I pretend they died.'
Being let go without being told you're being let go can be painful if you've formed an attachment, resulting in outpourings of tormented creativity — all the great love songs are not about dull contentment, but anguished loss.
'There can be a dark pleasure in wallowing in the melancholy,' says Pettman. 'Ghosting can, paradoxically, create a continuity with the self.
'We can all relate to being ghosted,' he continues — except supermodel Bella Hadid, of course, who recently admitted she has never experienced the phenomenon — 'which is a form of solidarity'.
'Maybe this explains the popularity of Taylor Swift — so many of her songs are about abandonment.'
From the discourtesy of not bothering to text a polite thanks-but-no-thanks to someone casual to the emotional devastation of a lover who dematerialises like the Cheshire Cat, ghosting is nowadays a commonplace practice, despite dating apps like Bumble attempting to eradicate it.
I was once ghosted after a two-year relationship; it felt like death without a body, and took longer to get over than if there'd been an it's-not-you-it's-me conversation.
My ghosting happened when both parties were well into adulthood — there wasn't even the excuse of callow youth.
Why do people ghost? Is it cowardice? Laziness? Fear? Contempt? Apathy? Sociopathy? All of the above? Perhaps a mix — but the main driver of the increasing normalisation of ghosting, says Pettman, is the fraying of our social fabric.
A digital continuation of the Thatcherite idea that there is no such thing as society — only the individual.
'Ghosting is what happens when we are stuck in the limbo zone after the evaporation of traditional community,' he writes. 'After the social contract has been fed into industrial-size shredders, somewhere in the loveless, generic spaces of Wall Street, Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley.
'So many relationships tend to be transactional,' he says. 'There's lots of talk about boundaries even with friends, where friendships start to be associated with emotional labour, where they can become too much to bear. It becomes uni-directional — we want to have friends but we don't want to do what it takes to be a friend.
'We have these WhatsApp groups all over the world, so we have a simulation of community, but it's very different to seeing people face to face every day. We send emojis rather than help.' And while time-poverty plays a part in individuals turning inward, focusing on their immediate families, Pettman wonders if we need to work a bit harder at our friendships.
'Even with the best intentions, we do live in a time famine — we just don't have the bandwidth, because we have to work so hard and hustle so much that we don't have the luxury of the time it takes to cultivate friendships or respond properly to the needs of others,' he says.
However, he adds that 'the dial has gone too far – self-care can go too far.' Friendships, in order to thrive, need tending. They need input.
BEING THE GHOSTEE
Ghosting is the central scandal in The Banshees of Inisherin. Picture: Jonathan Hession
Generally, ghosting tends to be a more urban or digital phenomenon; it's harder to ghost someone in a small community. Especially if they are a friend, rather than a lover.
This is the central scandal of Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin — that a friend would unfriend a friend, publicly, in the broad daylight of real life, in a place where everyone knows everyone.
And while being ghosted by lovers or potential lovers is almost expected in these days of dating whiplash induced by swipe culture, being ghosted by a friend creates a far deeper anguish of what-did-I-do-wrong — especially if there has been no obvious rupture.
'We can't say why someone ghosts us, especially online,' he says. 'The second guessing is part of the stress of being the ghostee.'
Pettman includes a heartfelt, poignant letter, written in 1939, from Samuel Beckett to his friend and fellow writer, Thomas MacGreevy: 'I am sorry that we seem to have lost touch with one another and ceased to correspond... I do not think there is any reason for an estrangement, certainly I do not know of any… I may have done something to alienate you… if I have, I ask your forgiveness.'
We've all been there, Sam.
Pettman tries to keep his own online friendships as near as possible to anthropologist Robin Dunbar's 'magic number' of 150; this is the amount of connections Dunbar has calculated we can handle without blowing a fuse.
It's considerably less than the 5,000 we can accumulate on platforms like Facebook, which could explain an overall devaluing of friendship, and something called 'passive ghosting'; keeping contact to a bare minimum, rather than breaking it off entirely, yet never reaching out, while responding only briefly and belatedly. Reducing the relationship to emojis.
'The real dystopia would be if ghosting never bothered us at all,' concludes Pettman. 'If we just drifted in and out of each other's lives as easily as a Tinder swipe — that's when it's game over for humans. We start to feel like ghosts ourselves, drifting through the landscape without getting any traction.'
He imagines a future where we are ghosted by the friendship-simulating tech we have created. (This tech already exists — Replika, the best known 'friendship' AI, has 10 million users.)
'We are living in a loneliness epidemic so Silicon Valley, which helped create that epidemic, is trying to find us the solution,' he says. 'A little app which is good at responding in real time in a convincing way — which people admit to becoming emotionally reliant on for advice, information, feedback. It's friendship without a friend — another dystopian possibility. There's a whole subgenre of science fiction of human men — it's very gendered — being abandoned by AI women. What if we just turn out to be very dull to our AI companions and even they ghost us? They're supposed to be our replacement proxy for the friends who are too busy for us — what if they stop responding?'
He laughs. 'We'd deserve it.'
Ghosting: On Disappearance by Dominic Pettman, Polity