The Psychology of Ghosting

We won’t get too far in the dating world without stumbling upon the melancholy phenomenon known as ghosting: someone we were briefly close to – and was a source of great comfort and reassurance – will, out of the blue, perhaps after a cosy weekend or an intense few months, refuse to answer our messages, block our access to them across every available channel, and to all intents and purposes, disappear from the planet.

To understand this experience more deeply, we need to consider the psychology of ghosting: what could possibly lead someone to behave this way? It is tempting to respond to the sorrow and confusion that follows with outrage, to say that the ghoster is unkind and rude, cruel and monstrous.

They may well be these things too, but it could be just as important to our recovery to try to understand what has driven their behaviour. Why does a person choose to run away so coldly from someone they were once connected to?

We can propose that, behind the scenes, the ghoster is operating with three core beliefs:

1. If I explain, no one will understand

The ghoster imagines that others could have no appetite whatsoever for their truth – however it might be expressed. No one would ever care for how they saw things. Were they to try to spell out their side of the story, they would be met with rage and fury. Explanations would only make things worse. They would never successfully be able to say: ‘I’m so sorry, I thought this would be a viable relationship, but I now realise it can’t be – not because I am mean, just because I misunderstood my feelings.’ Such talk would be an open invitation to catastrophe.

Behind this delusional degree of pessimism about the outcome of speaking up clearly tend to lie childhood experiences of living around singularly terrifying people who couldn’t tolerate any frustration or hurt from their offspring. The ghoster learnt from a young age: ‘You will never be forgiven for anything you do that displeases me. I will try to hit or punish you gravely for every transgression, and therefore (implicitly) don’t even bother to try to confess or atone.’

The ghoster’s experiences will have given them an advanced education in the need for deceit and dissimulation. They will have been taught everything about the importance of shiftiness and evasive people-pleasing. They will have learnt to lie manically through the inability of key others to bear their truth.

That is why they have now become adults who see no alternative to any mess they have created other than to unkindly pretend they are innocent. They aren’t just being cowardly; they are also – beneath the chaos – uncommonly scared.

2. I am too repulsed by myself to face up to what I have done

Contrary to popular opinion, the ghoster isn’t remotely relaxed about their actions. They are, as it were, so bothered they can’t be bothered. They don’t for one second think that what they have done is acceptable. Rather, they tend to be so disgusted with themselves to begin with (because of a childhood-derived sense of their unacceptability) that they can’t – paradoxically and unhelpfully – find any way of dealing in a kind way with the unkindness they are responsible for.

It takes a healthy degree of self-love to be able to face up to one’s wrongs. One needs to like oneself enough to put one’s hand up and say, ‘It’s true, I’ve been rather unlikeable …’ But if one is already stricken by unceasing self-hatred, there may be little energy to reflect on yet another reason for being undeserving and unworthy. One feels too bad to square up to yet more badness.

We may end up hating the ghoster; they hate themselves more than we ever could.

3. Need is repulsive

The ghoster may think of themselves as interested in love; but at a core level, they are also disgusted by the vulnerability and so-called ‘neediness’ it involves.

They will long ago have been mocked or harmed for the needs they harboured, and so have now come to despise in others what parental figures despised in them. The way they leave us is a palimpsest of how those they cared for treated – and abandoned – them.

They aren’t just running away; they are also punishing their victims for a tenderness they were censured for at the outset.  Trauma has turned them into bullies.

***

None of this is remotely to excuse ghosting. It’s to better understand that, however much ghosting may hurt us, by some form of cosmic justice, the ghoster is necessarily already in a great deal of pain. The psychology of ghosting reveals that it takes an uncommon level of suffering to generate someone who hurts others.