Dating, always fun at first, often starts with a flurry of romantic text messages, frequent pinging of sweet sentiments, followed by in-person meetings. But more and more, it ends in silence — when one person disappears.
The modern phenomenon known as “ghosting” continues to grow, yet research on this breakup trend and how will it influence people’s future relationships is scant.
In a study published this year, Dr. Royette Dubar, assistant professor of psychology at Wesleyan University, and Jhanelle Oneika Thomas investigated the definition, motivation and psychological impact of ghosting in the age of social media and hypervisibility.
The qualitative study, titled “Disappearing in the Age of Hypervisibility: Definition, Context, and Perceived Psychological Consequences of Social Media Ghosting,” followed 76 college students, primarily female, in focus group discussions.
From this research, social media ghosting is defined as a dissolution strategy in a platonic or romantic relationship captured by a sudden or gradual decision to cut off all online and/or in-person communication with someone without a clear explanation.
While social media is not a requirement in ghosting, it does play an integral role as it maximizes the communication within the relationship through different outlets.
Dubar and Thomas found that both the ghostee — the person being ghosted — and the ghoster experience negative consequences from ghosting that result in internalized emotional conflict.
For ghostees, the impact primarily has come from the lack of closure in the relationship, leading them to “spiral” into internalized self-deprecation and paranoia, Dubar says.
“It becomes a lot of self-doubt at first. I think a lot of personal insecurity comes out when you don’t have the answers, so you question yourself and you blame yourself,” a 19-year-old female participant in the study said.
While the ghostee faces theses negative consequences, Dubar says “it is possible for the ghostee to come out on the other side feeling more positive, more resilient and even more confident over time.”
After the experience, ghostees can use the opportunity to self-reflect, not “self-blame,” and grow in terms of communication in a subsequent relationship.
Ghosters also experience negative consequences from the act, but with less positive long-term influences, the study found. After ghosting a partner, 65% of ghosters feel anxiety, awkwardness and guilt. This may vary from concerns of running into the ghostee in the future to simply hurting someone’s feelings.
“From the ghoster’s perspective, choosing to ghost was a little bit nicer than a more blatant rejection approach,” Dubar said. “Individuals may choose to ghost out of concern for the ghostee — that is, to shield them from hurt feelings.”
The study found that emerging adults often ghosted in relationships due to a lack of interest, which has become common in hook-up culture and social media. Additionally, ghosters may be looking to avoid emotional intimacy that they may not be prepared for, like defining the relationship.
Reasoning aside, ghosters often believed the act “gets the message across without having to send a message at all,” Dubar said. She warned that this behavior can lead ghosters to miss opportunities to develop intimacy and trust through healthy conflict, skills that will benefit them later in life.
A 20-year-old male participant speculated that ghosting could become a habitual method of ending relationships. “They’re so afraid of confrontation, like feeling like bad people. And I don’t think that’s healthy for them because they’re going to hurt a lot of people and it’s going to mess up their relationships.”
According to Dubar, the likelihood of ghosting among adolescents and young adults is concerning as they are in a time where “establishing relationships are very critical for predicting long-term overall adjustments and wellbeing.”
“When individuals engage in ghosting, they’re almost robbing themselves, and the ghostee, of opportunities to grow, to mature and to have the hard, maybe messy, very important interpersonal labor that will ultimately reveal healthy communication and healthy relationships,” Dubar said.
Throughout the study, Dubar and Thomas were hoping to discover the common persona of a ghoster, yet the two researchers discovered the opposite.
“Participants generally reported experiences from both perspectives. So, this suggests to us that this might not be very easy to come up with a clear profile of who will ghost and who will be a victim,” Dubar said. “It’s important to think about the context of a relationship more so than ghosting being limited to one particular type of person.”
While ghosters do not exhibit any easily identifiable traits, Dubar recommends establishing healthy boundaries and building relationships face to face to avoid ghosting.
“I think with the combination of slowly getting out of the pandemic and things going back to ‘normal,’ one thing that individuals can think about is the value of interpersonal relationships and what it means to development of a healthy relationship where both parties’ interpersonal needs are being met,” she said.
