You’ve Been Ghosted

Sometimes, when ghosting happens to you, it can feel as though you are the only person experiencing it. But then you talk to a friend and realise they have stories of their own. Sophia and I discovered this during one of our conversations. What began as a comparison of experiences quickly became a shared attempt to understand what ghosting does to the people left behind.

From there, we found ourselves moving between trying to understand the people who ghost and questioning the act itself. At times, we’ve wondered whether it might be justified; at others, we’ve gone so far as to call it an abusive act. Most often, we find ourselves somewhere in between. Ghosting is something that happens in almost any space, professional or social.

Professionally, those who have been looking for jobs have probably experienced some version of it, especially in these days of ATS scanning, automated recruitment systems, multiple rounds of interviews, and hiring processes where you can have what feels like a genuinely promising conversation and then… nothing.

Socially, it can feel even more disorienting. Many of us have experienced long friendships that come to an abrupt and unexplained end, boyfriends or girlfriends who simply disappear and go silent, or even a two-week whatever-that-was with someone you were just beginning to explore. There is no formal process, no rejection email, no clear ending.

Just silence. A silence so loud, it is almost deafening. It is often that lack of closure that makes ghosting so difficult to understand: you are left not only with the absence of the person, but with the unanswered question of what, exactly, happened.

Relationships have become even more complicated since social media entered the scene where we now have endless ways to communicate, observe, interpret and speculate on pretty much every post, every story, every like and emoji. What does it mean you ask?  

Modern love, platonic or otherwise have become harder to read because social media gives us so many different ways to stay connected and just as many ways to disappear. A message can go unanswered while the same person watches your story. They may stop replying on WhatsApp but continue posting on Instagram. They can leave you waiting for days while liking other people’s posts, stop responding without unfollowing you, or remove you from one platform while keeping you on another. The person may be gone from your actual life, yet still remain visible on your screen. Then there are the less obvious versions: replies that become slower and shorter, warmth that gradually disappears, the familiar “I’ve just been so busy,” or a relationship that is never formally ended but is quietly abandoned. Social media has made ghosting more confusing not simply because people can vanish more easily, but because we are often left with a digital trail that invites us to keep analysing what their silence means. What started as a personal attempt to make sense of ghosting quickly led us down a much bigger rabbit hole. Apparently, researchers have been trying to understand it too. We were genuinely surprised by just how much ghosting has been studied, particularly in psychology and relationship research. Imagine that! We Across the literature, ghosting is generally understood as the unilateral ending of a relationship through the withdrawal of communication and the ignoring of another person’s attempts to reconnect.

Although definitions and boundaries around what exactly constitutes ghosting remain somewhat contested, there is considerable agreement on one crucial feature: one person makes the decision to end communication without negotiating that ending with the other person (Park and Klein, 2024).

The literature also suggests that ghosting is not confined to romantic relationships. It occurs across romantic, platonic and other interpersonal relationships, and its emotional consequences can differ depending on which side of the silence you occupy.

For the person being ghosted, studies identify experiences such as hurt, confusion, uncertainty and difficulty making sense of what happened. For the person doing the ghosting, the experience may involve guilt but also relief (Freedman and Powell, 2024). What particularly interests us is the ambiguity. Ghosting rarely offers a clean explanation, leaving the person on the receiving end to fill in the silence with their own interpretations.

Compared with other ways of ending relationships, ghosting can produce extraordinary levels of uncertainty because there is no mutually recognized ending and often no explanation around which the person being ghosted can organize their understanding of what happened (Leckfor et al., 2023; LeFebvre & Fan, 2020; Pancani et al., 2021, 2022). The literature sometimes refers to the person initiating the disappearance as the ghoster and the person experiencing it as the ghostee (Mehta, 2019).

Existing relationship-dissolution frameworks, including Baxter’s relationship dissolution model (1985), have also attempted to describe stages through which relationships end (Janneke et al., 2025).

But here is where we became curious.

What happens when there is no clear ending to process? And what happens when ghosters resurface, as they so often seem to do, whether months later or years later? Sometimes they return to clear their own conscience. Sometimes they want to reconnect, apologize, or explain themselves. In professional contexts, they may even resurface with another opportunity, another email, or another job offer. So, if the ending itself is ambiguous, can our emotional response to it really be organized into clean, sequential stages? Probably not. And that is where our very unscientific contribution to the literature begins.

A very unscientific method

Given all of this, we want to share the candid, relational “stages” of ghosting that we have personally moved through. Your girls have been ghosted several times, so yes, call us experts, theorists, participant-observers… whatever. Jokes aside, it did, at some point, mess us up. The silence does not stay empty for very long. You fill it with explanations, alternative explanations, evidence, counter-evidence, anger, empathy, self-blame, acceptance, and then, naturally, anger again. Rather than pretending there is a neat chronology to all of this, we want to explore these “stages” through the emotional responses that ghosting can produce.

We are calling this method Scenario–Text Emotional Mapping. It is a simple way of tracing how different ghosting scenarios can trigger different emotional interpretations, reactions and assumptions in the person on the receiving end. The idea is   we use 2 short scenarios to establish the context in which ghosting happens, followed by imagined texts from the ghostee to the ghoster, or sometimes messages the ghostee writes and keeps for themselves. Most of these texts are fictional, although some are very close to messages we would have loved to send. Together, the scenarios and messages become a way of mapping the emotional terrain of being ghosted. Importantly, these are not stages in a linear sense. You may move from anger to empathy, from empathy to self-blame, from self-blame back to anger, and somehow arrive at acceptance, only to wake up three days later with another question. Perhaps that is precisely what ghosting produces an ambiguous ending, followed by an equally ambiguous process of making sense of it.

The Loop

The Loop

You are back at anger. Or curiosity. Or, surprisingly, nothing at all. Perhaps that is the more honest version of acceptance. Not exactly closure, but reduced attachment to the unanswered question. The silence does not suddenly become understandable, and the hurt does not disappear immediately. What changes is the amount of power the uncertainty holds. At some point, you take your power back and the energy shifts from the need to know, to letting it go. Letting go so that the silence no longer has a hold on you, so that it is no longer something you carry in your body. You may never get the explanation, but eventually, you no longer need one in order to continue.

Perhaps that is why we are increasingly uncomfortable calling these stages at all. Stages suggest there is a linear progression. First this then that then eventually closure. But ghosting does not necessarily give us closure, and perhaps our emotional processing of it reflects the same ambiguity as the act itself. Anger can coexist with empathy. Understanding does not necessarily erase disappointment. Acceptance can sit beside unanswered questions. And you can reclaim your agency without ever knowing why someone disappeared. Maybe the experience is less like climbing a staircase and more like learning to move through a room in the dark. You recognise certain places. You revisit some of them. You occasionally bump into the furniture. And just like that you learn how to move through the room without needing every light switched on. One person leaves with certainty; the other is left to manufacture an ambiguous ending from silence. And perhaps that is what makes ghosting so difficult to categorise neatly as cruel, avoidant, protective, justified or abusive. Context matters. Power matters. History matters. Silence is never neutral when another person is left to interpret it. It creates a vacuum, and people are remarkably good at filling vacuums with explanations, self-doubt, anger, hope, imagined conversations and, eventually, sometimes, acceptance.

What we are beginning to understand is that closure may not come from finally decoding the person who disappeared. It may come from deciding that their silence is no longer a question you are required to answer. The unanswered message can remain unanswered. The story can remain incomplete, and you can still leave it behind.