Did Social Distancing End the Practice of Ghosting?

Ghosting is nothing new, but in this digital age-on-crack where the vast majority of our interpersonal interactions exist on technology, we’ve been more susceptible than ever to losing our human touch.

Historically we seemed to agree on when ghosting is OK — after receiving nasty Tinder messages or the first dinner when your date is rude to the wait staff and won’t leave a proper tip. Go, run, don’t look back! The “Dear John” letter had its day when people used writing implements and paper to communicate; I suppose “Dear John” texts are far more common now when casual dating fizzles out. Breaking up after you’ve had sex? Gotta at least call. Dumping someone after saying “I Love you”? Do it in person, you chicken-shit.

Yet we don’t have a protocol or even common language for rejecting friends, and often ghost each other — even passively — as a way out. Friends drift apart, people come in and out of our lives, sometimes with a higher purpose we can cherish, sometimes as our shared experiences shift. The friends we chat with in a Mommy and Me class aren’t always the same friends we call to commiserate with when the teen totals the SUV, and it’s understandable. We can shrug off much drifting and get past it.

But now friendship is more deliberate: we can’t expect to run into so-and-so at the same PTA meeting or popular happy hour in town.

How do we get past friendship changes that are abrupt and mysterious, like a string of unanswered texts? Or when it simply feels personal deep down in the pit of the stomach where the truth resides? We don’t know how much to try, which steps to take; Move closer, move back, move on? How do we proceed without knowing where we stand? That’s what ghosting steals: solid ground underneath us so we know where to put our feet to keep moving.

I think of friends who disappeared from my life with indifference at best and, at worst, disdain or hostility. I think about when I texted “Happy Birthday” to a childhood friend, who responded, “How did you get this number?” These painful memories are compounded by not knowing what happened, why things went so bad. Did I do or say something specific? Is there something I could have done differently, should do differently next time? Would I ever get a chance to make things right? I’ll never know. I could have used a “Dear Kate” text.

Then I think of people I have ghosted, and I feel bad in a whole different way. There’s the casual friend whose name I seemed to have blocked out, although I remember her daughter’s name. We started to become friendly when I was pregnant with my first child, I made the effort to visit her regularly at their apartment (she never came to me). Increasingly her behavior and comments left me feeling less like one-half of a friendship and more like a prop in her life. When I visited her with my newborn and she stepped over him in his car seat to hand me a photo album of her toddler’s birth, I knew our friendship had no future. I never returned her calls after that. Had I sent a form rejection letter, her husband might not have given me the confused stink-eye at the children’s museum later that year.

I think of a once-best friend who called me out of the blue more than a year after my first cancer diagnosis, expressing sympathy and wondering aloud what happened to our friendship. I had been ghosting her in the months before I got sick, simply not returning phone calls that got increasingly infrequent, then stopped. When she reached out again after hearing of my illness, I was shocked and cold and got off the phone as fast as I could. I never answered her question. She is likely still confused about what happened to us. I think about what might have been if I had found the courage to say that I didn’t trust her. Would I feel less haunted if I had actually explained why I was leaving our friendship? Might it have given us a chance to grow and heal, and maybe even salvage it?

I fear my rejection letter campaign won’t work. Once upon a time, I wrote what I thought was a heartfelt letter to a friend instead of ghosting her. I explored some of the reasons I felt so far away from her, and suggested getting together to discuss them. Maybe we could get back what we had lost if we put some effort into it. She started telling mutual friends that I was sending her hate mail.

It’s possible I just didn’t write the letter correctly. Perhaps with the right tone, timing and language, you can have better results than I did. I wish you every success pursuing your relationships elsewhere.