Ghost Story

Recently I got "ghosted."  That is to say, someone with whom I'd acquired a rapport simply disappeared on me.  In this instance, I sent a text and never received a reply.  That has only a tenuous connection with social media.  It's more akin to the old-fashioned experience of not having your phone calls returned, but nowadays it's much easier to do and therefore exponentially more common.  And when it happens on a dating site or on Facebook, we are definitely in the realm of social media.

According to an article in Psychology Today, 50 percent of people on Plenty of Fish, a free dating site, report having been ghosted, and nearly as many have done the ghosting.

Why do people ghost?

People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort and they aren’t thinking about how it makes the other person feel. The lack of social connections to people who are met online also means there are less social consequences to dropping out of someone’s life. The more it happens, either to themselves or their friends, the more people become desensitized to it and the more likely they are to do it to someone else.

 Why does it hurt so much when it happens to you?

For many people ghosting can result in feelings of being disrespected, used and disposable. If you have known the person beyond more than a few dates then it can be even more traumatic. When someone we love and trust disengages from us it feels like a very deep betrayal.

 The article goes into a lot more detail about both these points, but that's the basic picture.

In theological terms, ghosting is an example of turning what Martin Buber termed "I-Thou" relationships to an "I-it" relationship.  In the former case you're treated as a subject with intrinsic value.  In the latter you're treated like an object--a thing to be used and discarded.  That's devastating, even in instances where the relationship is new and there's little at stake.  Being treated as if you don't matter--in a sense, as if you don't even exist enough for someone to tell you what's going on--is inherently painful.

What to do about this?  There is the usual answer (and a very good one):  turn it over to God and let your relationship with Him remind you of how powerfully and unconditionally you are loved and worth loving.  And there is an answer built around educating people to the costs associated with ghosting someone--so that we won't do it ourselves--and understanding why people ghost, which makes being ghosted a little less crazy-making.  If not, you can find yourself haunted by a ghost.