How did ghosting make you feel?

Organ Vida, MSU, 2022
This piece is here to try and transform an unpleasant interpersonal phenomenon from an intimate bruise into a discourse that can empower us.

Share your own experience. It can be anything. How did it make you feel? Is there anything you’ve learned from it? Did it change you, and how?

My experience

Right now, I am thirty-one. I had spent almost my entire twenties in a relationship. In my late twenties, I got out of that relationship, started dating again and meeting different men, potential partners for a new romantic relationship. Shortly after the breakup, I started texting a guy and we arranged a date. As this was my first date after spending eight years with one person, I was very excited about it. I even bought new clothes and new boots for the occasion. We met at the city centre and then went to my place to make dinner. He made mushroom risotto. We spent a fun evening together. The next day, I had it in my head that he would become my new boyfriend, even though I had only seen him once. The thing was, I was still emotionally indulging in the habit of looking for a relationship, even though on a rational level I knew that that was neither realistic nor good for me. A person needs to spend some time alone after a breakup; everyone says that it takes time to process your emotions, and I would have to agree. 

He contacted me the day after and we were supposed to meet, but he allegedly fell asleep at the agreed time. The next day he called to apologise, and we were supposed to meet again, but during the day he texted and said he had received some bad news and that he would not be able to meet, but that he owed me dinner. He was supposed to cook fish. I replied that I understood, certain that he would contact me again in a few days. That was two years ago, he never responded to my last message and never called me again. That was the time when people started talking about ghosting, a term we use today to describe an unannounced and sudden termination of a relationship by stopping the communication with no explanation, which is made much easier with social media, and I realized that I had been ghosted by my date. 

I quickly bond with people romantically, especially if I have spent a nice time with them. So, the fact that that guy ghosted me, even though we only saw each other once, hit me hard. I was confused and didn’t know what exactly happened. I contacted him again, but there was no answer. I think I was in some sort of shock caused by this experience, and it had nothing to do with the actual person that caused it. Let’s be realistic, I didn’t know him, so there were very few things I could truly miss about him. As time went on, I became more and more angry and disappointed.

After that, I met some more potential partners and dated them. Some of them disappeared without explanation, without replying to my last message. In other cases, I was the one who ended the relationship, but never without explanation. Sometimes, however, I would feel the need to ghost them, because it is much simpler, and our means of communication allows us to do it. But given the experience I had, and the sense of abandonment and rejection I felt, I couldn’t treat people like that, even though we may not have been a good match. At this point, I’ve somehow come to a point where I’m no longer that affected by it and I don’t blame myself so much for other people’s actions. I try to understand that these are all people with different lives and different reasons for their behaviour, which sometimes may include ghosting. 

But it seems wrong to me that simply disappearing with no explanation is becoming normalised and is even considered acceptable behaviour. Even though "everyone does it", I realized that people do not dare to talk about their experience with ghosting, mostly because they are ashamed of it and think that they should suppress their feelings about it or "cover up" their actions towards others when they know are not being fair. In this piece, I completely emotionally expose myself because I believe that we should talk more about the dynamics of relationships. I strive to open a space where individuals can share their experiences and go through the process of being ghosted more easily. Likewise, people who ghost someone, whether they are aware of it or not, may think about the impact their actions have on other people. And we may even begin to question the social and political conditions in which our emotional connections are created and broken.