One day, however, I just stopped hearing from him. He went from texting me several times per week to just not talking to me. He didn’t respond to my texts and I never got an explanation of what happened. We’d been regularly hooking up for years and then he was just gone.
At that point, even casual sex stops being entirely casual. Someone you’ve slept with many times like that becomes a part of your life, and a completely unexplained disappearance isn’t only jarring, it’s downright cruel. As the days turn into weeks turn into months, you wrack your brain for some reason they’ve decided to end things.
In my case, I considered showing up to his house in the middle of the night and demanding an answer, but thankfully common sense won out and I never did.
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At the time, I didn’t have an term for what he’d done to me, besides “Wow, that guy’s a jerk.” Now I know I was ghosted.
Ghosting is the dating term used to describe a breakup that never actually happens. It’s when two people are in a relationship and then one person just vanishes without a trace — no call, no text, no explanation.
It’s being dumped without actually being told you’re being dumped, leaving you to get the hint (and hope that you’re actually being dumped and something horrible didn’t just happen to the person). Perhaps it’s apt, because without any means of getting closure, you can feel like you’re being haunted.
Ghosting isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, though the term quickly caught on and became part of our shared cultural lexicon in the mid-2010s — and gave rise to an era of other terms to describe new dating trends.
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Generally, ghosting is a crappy thing to do to someone. If a person has dedicated any amount of their time to being in a relationship with you, the respectful thing to do is to let them know you’re not interested anymore, even if it feels awkward to say so.
When I was ghosted, it was confusing, humiliating, and enraging. If you’re mature enough to enter into a relationship with someone, you should be mature enough to end that relationship when you no longer want to be in it.
It’s cowardly to exit stage left without so much as a goodbye. No one likes having hard conversations or hurting anyone’s feelings. Breaking up with someone sucks, regardless of the circumstances. But being an adult means doing the right thing, even if that thing is hard.
For instance, when someone experiences radio silence from a person they had been dating, they might be worried that something bad might have happened to them. It’s an unfair burden to put on someone, especially since it can be easily rectified with a simple text message saying, “Hey, I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
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However, there are times when ghosting someone might be an appropriate or necessary thing to do. Abusive behavior, for instance, can escalate when a person leaves a relationship, and ghosting might be a way of trying to protect oneself from that violence.
If someone demonstrated behavior during the relationship that was concerning, like being jealous, possessive, or controlling, ghosting might feel like the safest option. If you ever find yourself on the receiving end of a ghosting, that unequivocally sucks. But the person doing the ghosting might very well have a valid reason for doing it.
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If someone does disappear on you, harassing them is not the right answer. If you care about someone, do like the old adage says and let them go. Incessantly calling and texting someone who has stopped responding to you is not OK — it demonstrates controlling behavior and a lack of boundaries. It can also be frightening for the person on the receiving end. Hard though it might be, the best response is to try to move on.
Relationships are never simple and breakups suck, no matter how you slice it. But in the digital age, where connecting with someone is as easy as pushing a button, there’s never really a good excuse to just disappear on them. Unless, of course, there is.
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