You can chalk it up to cellphones or internets if you need to. Call it another uniquely 21st century malady that speaks to societal collapse or moral decay. But ghosting has a long history. It might seem ignoble or inglorious, but that’s only because maybe you’re speaking from a place of hurt. We don’t blame you. Ghosting isn’t perfect or without problems despite how long folks have been practicing it. It’s an informal and improvisational act. No one teaches you how to do it or even gives you clear instructions on why you might, sometimes, need to.
Not only is the act a little vague, but what the term that describes it isn’t altogether clear. Who, when ghosting happens, becomes the ghost? Seems like it could go either way. A ghost could equally be the one trying to call out or the one refusing to respond. It doesn’t, though, really matter. The important part is the imbalance, the asymmetry. Ghosting means one talks and the other doesn’t, but what kind of not-talking is ghosting?
Does ghosting have to be intentional like a lying? Or can you do it accidentally? If you leave a message unresponded to for long enough (but keep meaning to respond), are you ghosting? Or is that something else? Does ghosting have to be forever to qualify? Or is any prolonged silence eventually considered ghosting? Seems like you can’t be a temporary ghost - unless you’re Casper and friendly (and played by Devon Sawa?) - but who knows. Ghosting is, like ghosts themselves, a little blurry and nebulous. But, regardless - like a judge with pornography - you know ghosting when you see it or, rather, when you don’t.
Doubtless the first folks to ghost lived in caves. Some day someone - call them Ur - took a nice stroll into the forest or jungle or whatever they called the dense thicket of trees over yonder and decided, for reasons maybe even unclear to themselves, not to go back to their home cave to explain that they wouldn’t be going back to their home cave anymore. Ur just kept on keeping on and left their former cave buddies or partners or whomever to figure out their absence for themselves. Ghosting, though, isn’t an act of vanishing. Ur couldn’t just leave, but had to have left in such a way that folks knew they were still around and able to return.
To be ghosted means to lack a response, but to remain aware that a response could arrive. The cave people that Ur left, then, must have heard from others that Ur was doing just fine. Ur’s just doing Ur things. Taking care of ur-self for once. Hard to say how those ghosted by Ur dealt with their absence. Seems cave people only know how to draw and how, really, do you draw a disappearance that isn’t exactly a disappearance? You might need words to process what it means when someone withholds words.
If that’s the case, then the Judeo-Christian god might be the OG ghoster. He makes ghosting something of a habit. The most infamous example (other than that time he forsook his own son while dude was dying obvi) is probably when he got into a petty fight with the devil about the faith of a man named Job. The devil, as he’s wont to do, was saying that Job didn’t really love God for the right reasons, only loved God a certain type of way. God was having none of it, so - capricious as he is - he decided to take away everything Job loved, to test his faith, and ghost him. If Job didn’t love God at his worst, he didn’t deserve God at his best (toxic). And how does this canonical ghosting play out? Not great.
Job nearly loses his mind. “I have said to corruption, thou art my father; to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister.” He, in brief, copes poorly. Job’s in his feelings for a good while and, as a result, says some beautiful, heartbreaking things - but to no avail. Three dudes listen to him whine and complain and spur on his sadness and rage, but Job just can’t move on. He gets nostalgic for a time “when the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me” - but can’t recapture that time when he and God were thick as thieves. God keeps ghosting and Job finds himself “brother to dragons” and “companion to owls.” Besides being driven low-key crazy, Job is forced to find a new community as a result of ghosting. He can’t commune with the one he wants, but gets a new corruption/dragon/worm family and some nice owl friends. He doesn’t, though, see this as a blessing.
He keeps harping on at his ghosting God and God, tired of the endless voice mails and desperate texts, eventually answers Job’s pathetic pleas for attention and, well, Job kinda maybe wishes he hadn’t. God shames him, makes him abhor himself and repent. God condescends to explain that he has his own damn burdens to bear. He can’t be available 24/7 for Job. Job, of course, wouldn’t understand. To get Job off his back (and, in a manner of speaking, reward him for being a lovestruck pest), God replaces the family he took away from Job with a whole new family (?!) and Job lives a very long life without (apparently) ever trying to contact God directly again.
Is there a lesson in this story? Other than that God entertains the devil’s wagers? It’s hard to say. Seems, maybe, like both Job and God may have been better off if they never met in the first place?
But you can’t see ghosting coming. No one enters into a relationship - no matter how slight or situational - thinking that, in the end, you’re going to have to or want to end things by way of a negative act. We don’t, hopefully, enter into voluntary relationships at all unless we imagine them somehow lasting. It’s only after a little while that you maybe realize that this conversation, this situationship, this whatever, can’t but end in silence. This isn’t always because you don’t want to reply or respond, but because you just can’t.
Around the same time some scribe was writing up Job’s suffering, Sappho in one of her few still extant (almost) complete poems (“31”) tells us about what it’s like to end up ghosted and ghosting. The woman she loves sits laughing with a man, evidently ignoring her, and she can’t take it. “[W]hen I look at you, even a moment, no speaking / is left in me,” she writes. Her whole body - tongue, skin, eyes, ears - is rendered haywire by a desire she can’t seem to enact. She wants to do something, be closer, but is made to ghost. “I am and dead - or almost I seem to me.” She has been ghosted and ghosts, she goes unacknowledged and can’t acknowledge in turn. Having lost touch with the one she loves or lusts after, she loses touch with herself.
The whole poem is an ode to wanting, but being unable, to talk, to converse, to be or get close. We don’t know why the woman Sappho loved wasn’t responsive to Sappho’s love or what, in the end, Sappho did with her unresponsiveness. We don’t know how the poem ends. The last existing line suggests action - “all is to be dared…” - but breaks off before any detail about what’s going to be dared or why. Other poems, though, suggest that Sappho struggled often with the present absence of some ghost or another. All that remains of Fragment 36, for example, is:
Ghosting might be the cessation of communication, but it doesn’t sever or really even interrupt connection. It isn’t an end of anything exactly. The ghoster and ghostee, despite no longer exchanging words, are still caught up together. Like energy, you can’t destroy a relationship - only alter its specifics. This, then, might be one of the things that messes people up about ghosting. It seems as if one party is pretending that you can turn a relationship into nothing, that you can unrelate somehow through sheer inaction. If you don’t want hard enough, you can undo.
And why might you want to undo a connection, cancel it out altogether through sheer refusal? Why not explain why you can’t or don’t want to talk anymore? Why not elaborate why something couldn’t keep being that same something? Because the alternative, using words to tell someone you no longer want to use words with them, creates a vicious problem. We could call this The Ghosting Dilemma. It goes like this:
The person who doesn’t want to talk doesn’t want to talk about why they don’t want to talk to the person who wants to talk. The person who wants to talk wants to talk about why the person who doesn’t want to talk doesn’t want to talk.
The dilemma is reflexive and, worse, forces a choice between two options. Either talk or not. There’s no compromise, no middle ground. You either ghost or you don’t. Ain’t no such thing as halfway-spooks (as Mobb Deep can be imagined to say). You could argue that there’s an alternative, that one could enlist a go-between to communicate that communication has ceased and why - but that, as L. P. Hartley once showed, just tangles more people up in the knot everyone is trying to unknit and creates further and different problems. It also, of course, would mean explaining to a third-party something that you can’t or don’t want to explain to the second-party in the first place. Sadly, you can’t dodge the problem of noncommunication by way of communicating.
Faced with The Ghosting Dilemma, it’s best to just make an explicit and clear choice. Trying to talk about not talking leads to trouble. Look, for instance, at what happened when Cordelia tried to avoid ghosting her dad.
Cordelia’s dad, Lear, wanted to retire - “shake all cares and business” from his age - and offer up his kingdom to Cordelia and her sisters, Goneril and Regan. But he didn’t want to just bequeath land. He wanted his daughters to perform their love for him and would give “the largest bounty” to the one who loved him most or at least expressed it best.
Goneril expounded on her love immediately, but Cordelia didn’t like the request. “What shall Cordelia do?,” she asks herself, “Love, and be silent.” Regan echoed Goneril, talked about loving her dad so much that she had become “an enemy to all other joys.” (yikes.) And Cordelia? She really didn’t like the game. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father, but that she believed her “love’s / More richer” than her words - meaning both that she shouldn’t be made to perform it (it ought to have been obvious already) but also that she couldn’t be made to perform it. Her love wasn’t a matter of sentences and to treat it as though it were is, well, something of an insult or injury. So? She said “Nothing.” She didn’t stay silent, didn’t ghost, but tried to explain her reticence to speak. “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth.” The exchange between the two got ugly. Both parties ended up hurt and both, in different ways, lived and died as exiles.
Ghosting, in its own way, might be an act of mercy. Giving an account of why you can’t or won’t give an account of yourself or your feelings can make a mess intractable. It is sometimes better to say nothing even if, when nothing’s said, the possibilities seem naught but awful. We rarely think of ghosting as a compassionate act - but there’s always a chance it is. It is, maybe, a way of saving oneself from expressing unpleasant things and saving the other party from hearing them. It is an indication that something is over even if it isn’t altogether done. But this is never clear or certain. Nothing is. Ghosting is a way of saying a lot of things without saying anything.
The act of ghosting might be a request for some time and space. It might be an act of contempt or the result of embarrassment. It might be a mean-spirited attack or a loving gesture. You can ghost for all sorts of reasons, but also for none you know readily at all. You might ghost someone you like most, but only because right then you don’t know what to say or how to say it. The situation, rather than the person, may have spun you into silence.
You, likewise, might be ghosted for any number of reasons, but maybe also for nothing specific. You could be culpable for your ghosting or not. You could be the problem or not. Given that you will (likely) never get an answer regarding why you got ghosted, you’re truly welcome to make up your own version of events. We sometimes imagine that people who’ve ghosted us have been shipwrecked somehow and live in rags off unripe coconuts on small single treed islands. Other times we think that they ghosted us because they didn’t know how to countenance our greatness. They don’t yet like themselves, so how could they like someone as great as us? Sometimes self-pity asserts itself and we wallow. The explanatory gap is a bitter opportunity for DIY emotional labor and how those DIY projects turn out varies.
The most vexing part of ghosting is that it can sometimes be unclear if ghosting is even happening. People have different tempos, different rhythms, by which they communicate. Some answer in seconds, others in days. Some answer bit by bit, others all at once. With any luck, you come to know a person’s beat and they yours and quiet gets interpreted rightly - but even then there’s no telling how things might end if they end at all.
The complexity of The Ghosting Dilemma is probably why it occurs and recurs across history in so many guises. There is something about ghosting - about the sudden, unexplained breaking off of contact - that encapsulates the necessarily imbalanced, precarious, and inscrutable nature of all relationships. Some people want or need to keep talking and others want or need that talking to stop. Some people want or need explanations and others don’t want to or feel the need to or can’t provide them. Some people confront by confronting and other confront by avoiding. Different people are different, it turns out, and when different people connect with different people all sorts of different things for different reasons tend to follow.
We could keep tracking ghosting across the centuries and see all the different ways that people have dealt with or enacted non-communicative communication. The history of poetry is rich with instances of ghosting and being ghosted. Movies and novels tarry with the trouble a fair amount. Popular music, of course (and especially now), returns again and again to the theme of being met with silence and left to wonder what happened or why it happened. Ironically (?), some of the most beautiful communicative acts center on how communicative acts fall apart.
While a cultural history of ghosting might show different sides of the phenomenon, it doesn’t seem like something that can be stopped or solved. It also doesn’t seem, further, like something that ought to be stopped or solved. Being ghosted sucks, but so does ghosting. The epistemic shock of ghosting - coming to recognize that your knowledge of a communicative scenario was wrong - is upsetting. Likewise, the act of inflicting that shock on someone else.
We’d prefer (ourselves) not to be guilty of ghosting, but we’d also prefer to have a constitution such that we can explain the unexplainable fact that we sometimes just need a moment (without needed to request a moment explicitly). The world’s sometimes too noisy and we’re not in the mood. We’re not sorry about this, but we are sorry we can’t see through to a different solution. And to those ghosting us? We get it (even if the it we get isn’t the one you intended). You need some quiet or at least some not-us time. Makes sense. Us, too, sometimes.
For all that we don’t know about ghosting, we know that no one (with a heart worth having) is reveling in the fact that non-action is the only or best action. Ghosting is almost always lamentable. But, on the dimmest bright side, at least it’s honest. There’s no opportunity for lies or half-truths when one party is refusing to speak at all. Better maybe, then, to let whatever is unspoken stay unspoken and take it just as a sign that you two, whoever you two are, no longer share the same side of this mortal coil. One of you, unknown which, is a ghost and the other is, very much, still living.
Montaigne somewhere wrote that to philosophize is to learn how to die, but ghosting seems to go even further. To ghost is to learn both how to die and deal with the dead. In the end, we all end up ghosts of some kind or another - so why not practice now? At least for a little while? Or, less melodramatically, maybe it’s ok to be quiet without explaining your quiet and have others be unaccountably quiet in turn.
P.S. If the dynamics and complications of ghosting are something you’re into, watch Personal Shopper. It’s far smarter and more interesting than anything we can offer. Hell, even if you’re not interested in ghosting you should still watch it. It’s so good.
LOL "The most infamous example (other than that time he forsook his own son while dude was dying obvi)" obvi. I like the proposal that ghosting can maybe be a sort of compassion, maybe i've always perceived it as a form of cowardice, and maybe i've always been a little wrong. Some times and some spaces require distance and reflection and a kind that is maybe immediate, and total, not a moment to explain not a sentence at all to express the need for space and time.