How it feels like to be ghosted

Have you ever met someone and felt an instant connection? You cruised along and it seemed like a fairy tale till one fine day, the “someone” disappears without a trace, leaving you clueless and dejected.

In a job interview, you must have felt you’ve nailed it. The interviewer sounded positive, HR had great things to say and you are patiently waiting to hear back on the next steps.

Days, weeks, and months pass by and you don’t hear back from them. Poof – it’s gone

Instances like these can be referred to as being “ghosted”. A classic definition of ghosting would be that you formed a connection/relationship with somebody and the basic expectation is to receive a response since it started on a positive note. Rather, what happens is you end up not getting a response at all.

Mental health professionals term it as “emotionally cruel”. It leaves you with no opportunity to ask questions and because you are deprived of expressing your emotions and dissent, it affects your self-esteem too.

Why it feels bad on being ghosted

We tend to remember pleasant situations/instances more accurately than unpleasant ones. At a subconscious level, the mind tricks us into focusing more on the optimistic aspect and avoiding the negatives. This is referred to as the Pollyanna principle.

However, this positivity bias goes for a toss when these instances exist beyond our memory lane, in a tangible form. One fine example can be the way we communicate with the world around us now. Computer and smartphone-mediated interactions, despite their convenience, can be extremely unforgiving. They are recorded in real-time in the tangible form of messages and pictures which one can go back and view repeatedly.

Such communications are perceived to be permanent since they traverse across our minds into the tactile form of stored messages and images.

Now with the advent of this superficial communication mode, the social connections masqueraded as “real” have hit the ceiling. The human being’s innate need for love and belongingness isn’t now confined to family and loved ones, it craves to be satiated through the social media family as well.

This net of belongingness is formed to safeguard us from the loss of love from our close ones, and the need for external validation soars. As a result of this ideology,?what others think about us becomes imperative.?

And the biggest irony?is - The relationship/bonding we may have with these connections is inversely proportional to the amount of time we spend analyzing what they think about us.

Since these are our wobbly connections in the first place, we spend more time analyzing our interactions with them because we are not really sure about how they think and feel.

So when we eventually get ghosted by such frail connections (which is a likely outcome mostly), it impacts our desire to know, and our need for a proper closure isn’t met, thus resulting in heartbreak. That’s why people who are ghosted, become desperate and reach out to the ghoster multiple times even when they are ignored, keeping their self-respect at stake.

Why do people ghost each other?

An ideal scenario would be to be upfront with the other person, but of course, that’s the difficult part. The key reason why people ghost is that they find it a lot simpler than rejecting someone straight away. They are more focused on avoiding their emotional discomfort and how the other person feels, bothers them the least.

Moreover, with more and more frail social media connections, the ratio of dropouts is also on the rise which makes the ghoster prone to such behavior. And hence, they are likely to do it more often than not, without feeling guilty about it.

Why it’s best to not care about it

Ghosting isn’t about you, but about the ghoster. They didn’t treat you with integrity and respect which is a reflection of their unworthiness, not yours. They lack the courage to face you upfront hence slipping behind the back was the easy route they chose.

It’s important to keep your head high, hold onto your dignity, and let them go.

If you feel their phones got stolen, or something bad happened with them that they suddenly disappeared, please understand that whoever wants to talk, will find a way.

Don’t stalk them, don’t be over-obsessed about them ever.

Life is short and time is precious, let’s make the most of it.??