Why Ghosting Hurts So Much |
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Ghosting is amplified and supercharged in the digital era.
Ghosting is a wound to meaning and certainty as much as to attachment.
A certain amount of ghosting is inevitable and perhaps even healthy.
In my clinical practice, many clients speak of their use of ghosting as an interpersonal strategy, or of the pain of being ghosted. In the former, ghosting can be a way of establishing boundaries without the dread of confrontation. In the latter, ghosting can conflates the pain of abandonment with the uncertainties and ambiguities of technology—are their emails just not reaching me?
Ghosting, in other words, may be worse than flat-out rejection because of the lack of relational closure. Our minds can fill the vacuum with all kinds of stories that can plague us because the lack of certainty and the potential fear of misinterpretation. If only they had not read my gesture in that way, they would not have been offended..
Winnicott and the ‘fear of a breakdown’
Winnicott’s idea about anxiety or fear is rooted not in a distortion but in real lived experience. We only fear what has, in some form, already happened. If I fret about security and safety, it is likely because at some point developmentally my safety was severely compromised. Our nervous system thus needs to remain vigilant to some extent to prevent what it knows can happen.
Many of us grow up with enigmatic messages from our caregivers. We fill in the blanks, especially when there is some kind of attachment or caring failure. To give someone the benefit of the doubt is easier for a young psyche than realizing that our caregiver may be incompetent, neglectful, or simply wounded in their own ways. Disappointment from someone we depend on can thus be mixed with a flood of uncertainty and invented narratives as we try to rationalize or make sense of something painful. We are also likely to self-attribute blame, since this is the thing we are most aware and in control of.
This dynamic may be at play in ghosting—that it triggers both the memory of a past attachment failure or neglect, coupled with the frenzy of the unknown. At the worst of it, we may feel like we have again done something to push the “ghoster” away from us. Their lack of communication may even be rationalized by the thought that we do not warrant a response or have aggrieved them so much not to deserve a reason.
The internet and the pressure of presence
The internet and pervasive online connectivity has supercharged the experience of ghosting. In Dominic Pettman’s recent book, Ghosting, he argues that the internet has supercharged our expectations about “presence” with others, as well as having eased the ability to disappear and abandon others online. While “ghosting” preceded the internet (i.e., the cold shoulder), digital life has perhaps perfected this in allowing the “ghosted” to move from total availability to total inaccessibility in an instant. When many of our social ties are now digital and remote, this feeling of totality, or absolute erasure, can be hard to mitigate or mediate. People can now almost literally vanish from others’ lives, and often make it difficult to re-trace.
Even apart from ghosting, digital presence has introduced temporality into our experiences of others in a new way. Think of how expectations of "response rates" have increased in the current age. We assume that people have their phones with them at all times, and also that they receive texts and emails almost instantaneously. Many of us have de facto timers on—a quick response is often rewarded and seen as keen interest, while a delayed response is sometimes worse than no response. Does it indicate low priority or reader indifference?
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A broader lens: Modernity as serial ghosting
In a New Yorker review of Pettman’s book, the author describes ghosting in terms of modernity at large, or modern life as a series of ghosting experiences: “Charles Darwin notified us that we had been ghosted by human nature, Nietzsche that we have been ghosted by God, Jean Baudrillard that we had been ghosted by reality.”
We could extend this further: how many of us are not ghosted by our bodies as we age or develop? (Erectile disfunction as a ghosting by our sexual organs when we may feel we need it most.) Language itself often ghosts us—we do not have the right words to express a feeling, an experience, or our memories or traumas. Psychotherapy, in fact, could be seen as one of the ways that we acknowledge and repair the experience of being ghosted in various ways, by reenacting another kind of presence (with the therapist) that stages and re-describes the feeling of abandonment within a stable “containing environment.”
Even the idea and history of psychology itself is in a way a discovery of self “ghosting.” Our reason or rationality fails, or ghosts, us, and we struggle to come to terms with our multiple selves. Many need some into psychology with a question that resembles one of being ghosted—where did my self go? Why did my reason abandon me in that instance or that relationship? The radical notion of an unconscious, if we take it seriously, is that we are in some ways divided within our selves, or that we are always in some manner ghosting ourselves.
This frequently occurs in dreams. Many patients report that after a great day or week, they have nightmares or dreams that distort or pervert what they thought and felt was a positive achievement in their waking life. It is like they are being ghosted by their own minds—that the whole thing that seemed to matter to them has gone unheard and unnoticed by their unconscious. When this happens, it can feel like the ultimate betrayal or dropped call, a mind apparently indifferent to itself.
Reframing ghosting as necessary disconnection
The likely reality for all of us in a digital age is that we feel “too online” and often too exposed to the appeals and summons of others. Not all withdrawal is cruelty and not all disappearance is intentional or necessarily about “us.” The consequence of the informational silos produced by social media algorithms may be party to blame for the narcissistic injuries we all may experience by emails left un-responded to, or texts left hanging.
The reality is that ghosting is to some extent is a mental health necessity—the ability and privilege to withdraw into our private spheres. Privacy is not inherently a sphere of privation, but a sphere of reflection and repair—to monitor and to be with our thoughts. There is power in saying no and in leaving a temporal pause between conversational threads. Some conversations may require this.
Presence with anyone is never entirely certain, there is always “relational negativity”—gaps, silence, doubts. Ghosting is not the absence of presence but reveals how uncertain presence was to begin with.
Kyle Chayka, “Is Ghosting Inevitable?”, New Yorker, Sept. 2025.
Dominic Pettman, Ghosting: On Disappearance. New York: Polity, 2025.
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