Ghosted

Ghosting means you are a piece of sheet

NOT A HAUNTING BUT A HOLLOWING

There’s the movie from early 2023 no one probably saw with Ana de Armas having a fling with a regular looking guy and then abruptly going dark, unresponsive to his long solitary string of increasingly desperate blue blocks of texts. Of course in grand cinematic fashion, getting Ghosted in a movie of this title means the scorned lover flies across the planet to discover she’s CIA and at the center of exciting shenanigans in kick-ass outfits.

In the real world, “ghosted” is a misnomer. Getting abruptly discarded like trash or dropped like a hot potato in medias res of what you thought was a budding or established romance feels more like the ghoster just died rather than got turned into an apparition. Unless your kind of ghost makes no noises, isn’t visible, and doesn’t exist, this ghosted phenomenon that seems to have become so regular it’s almost an expected/accepted part of dating app culture, offers not a haunting but a hollowing. Or perhaps the term could refer to what you become as the recipient. While the ghoster drops dead and your inbox goes woefully dark and silent, the victim becomes the ghost, ineffectively knocking at closed doors and trying to pry windows.

Pencil sketch: Exitmanned, CC BY-SA 4.0

This cruel slap just happened to me. After this summer’s fresh-off-50 break up, I bandaided myself, read a meaty self-help book (How to Be an Adult in Relationships, recommend), and threw myself back into the murky waters of the midlife dating pool. If you’re wearing rose-colored glasses like I tend to (romantic hopefulness and nervous adrenaline has a tendency to rosy), then all the rows of red flags might start just looking like…flags. The seeds of the future fatal problems are likely there from the first contact, but like me, you may choose to push past all that because: chemistry, convenience on the travel map, and why not try. (Buyer beware: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” said Maya Angelou). Or, you don’t get to see who they really are until their head pops off and their nasty neck cavity is revealed. In my case, I challenged my fledgling suitor to express more care and curiosity about me after a month of nonstop communication and two intensive dates that even (red flag!) included meeting his daughter. My somewhat snarky, if innocent, request was met by suddenly getting ghosted. Poof! Pop! Pfft! Or that farting noise when your unknotted balloon flies and falls.

But you don’t immediately know you’re being ghosted, which is the trauma of it—the not knowing. Shock and confusion combine with unlimited maybe scenarios, the dreadful mine of rumination. Maybe he’s in the hospital and the full-body cast prohibits his bound fingers from texting; maybe a car ran over his phone; maybe the most recent ex resurfaced; maybe, more likely, he’s just a cowardly piece of sheet who was never in this to begin with and couldn’t handle any little demand. When met with abrupt silence, my anxious attachment tendencies unfortunately filled the void with embarrassingly pleading texts to get answers I’d never get. After a few torturous days of scratching a brick barricade, I finally slumped off. Ultimately grateful that this harsh reveal of his true self happened sooner than later.

I come off watching the Hill House series (after a fun run with the House of Usher by the same director), and that massive manse is so full of spirits, they spill over into every character’s future homes, cars, funeral parlors, streets. Those ghosts are relentless, pervasive, and surprisingly well-heeled (making cross-country appearances). They don’t “ghost”—rather they won’t stop being ghosts.

App dating in our dark times introduces you to all kinds of lingo you never wanted to learn (like every flavor of -sexual from sapio- to pan-), and contemporary antisocial behaviors that seem to have sprung from the age of smartphones and need to go away so the few civilized people still left standing can resume playing nicely by the rules of polite society. According to the Seven Signs of the Romantic Apocalypse, after the ghosts come the zombies. Zombieing, which I can supposedly brace myself for now, is when the ghost inevitably comes back from the dead and tries to resurrect something.

A whole primer on this crap comes from Sex and Psychology:

Ghosting is when you develop a relationship with someone (online, in person, or both) and then totally disappear and cut off all contact—no explanation given.

Icing is when you put a romantic prospect on ice—you convey your interest, tell them you can’t be with them now, but leave open the possibility of getting together in the future.

Simmering is when you express your interest in someone, but string them along at a comfortable distance.

What all of these trends have in common is that they make our relationships with others unclear. They create what sex therapist Esther Perel refers to as states of “stable ambiguity” where we leave someone else in a holding pattern. They allow us to keep our options open without committing fully to a course of action.

Esther Perel is my favorite expert in the field, and this is great little video with a cute cartoon:

Esther says, “rejection is always part of the landscape of dating,” but now the intensity of the interactions (so many rapid-fire texts, for instance) preceding it is at a whole different level than ever possible before. In this culture of so many options, many subsist by taking only what they need, while never giving enough to jeopardize their freedom. From this video:

Icing, ghosting, simmering are three manifestations of the decline of empathy in our society. They promote selfishness and they relieve us of the responsibility of the consequences that our behavior has on others.

You see, we live in a society that is competitive and evaluative. We are constantly measuring ourselves, checking ourselves, improving ourselves, and love is basically the proof that the contest has ended. We no longer need to compete. Because never before has love been such a referendum on our sense of self-worth. But when we get thwarted love, thwarted messages, thwarted relationships, it really saps our sense of confidence and our sense of self-worth.

I encourage you to end your relationships with more respect and conclusivity, even if they’re short ones. Show kindness, show compassion, show respect. Because at the end of the text is another human being.

At the least, you could be a Casper. “Friendly” or “soft” ghosting is when you just slowly drop off, taking longer and longer to respond to texts. Do that instead so the other person, fingers crossed, can eventually take the hint and have the opportunity to ghost you first.

GHOSTS, IRL?

I sometimes speak of the end of “magical girlhood,” the way I did in my guest interview with Mothers Who Make, but I also wonder how much ghosts and not guys had to do with this moment at a certain age when I dropped into self-consciousness. Everything we watched in our household was on PBS or the handful of free networks that came free via antenna. PBS offered me up Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions and billions” of stars to help me feel infinitesimal, and then one momentous time there was the documentary showing real ghost footage gathered from around the globe that turned me into a skittish fool. We had a long raised ranch on a quiet cul de sac street. There was an endless hall from the kitchen end of the house to the bedrooms that passed many doors and looming living room windows at night. Of course my parents left us kids home alone a good amount (1970s!), and the difficulty of me getting at bedtime from the illuminated part of the house to the dark part through that terrain was horrific after that documentary had opened a new shadow portal in my mind where spirits existed. They showed a ghost queen on a medieval castle balcony, a ghost in the gloaming of an apple orchard, and now something was surely lurking in every dusty corner of my bloated house. Heart-racing, I would run from the kitchen to turn on the hallway lights. Run back and turn off kitchen lights. Run through again and turn on bedroom light. Run back to turn off hall. Final small sprint at last into the bright refuge of my room and slam the door, safe. (I guess at least my parents had me trained to turn off lights; my kids would just be leaving them all on). This one documentary truly changed me, since it was PBS and I trusted their proof. Enter the age of fear.

Image of a ghost, produced by double exposure in 1899

One of my dates of late has spent over a decade on the team filming and editing a reality ghost show. Of course this alone was enough to inspire my excitement to meet him. He said in all his years immersed in collecting these stories from earnest families in small towns across the country, he never once saw anything remotely like a ghost. Except one time when he was just staying in a place that was supposed to be haunted, leading up to filming an episode, and he indeed felt like he experienced something, right there in his bed in a crazy room at the bottom of a mine. (I would like to ask him more about the details of this place for this piece, but I can’t because I kindly broke it off with him when I first met my future ghoster). At the end of the hallway in my childhood was my bedroom and under the covers was the only place I imagined as a sanctuary ghosts would never breach. So talk of ghosts anywhere near beds is just too much for me to bear. I have nightmares if my toes escape the sheet.

You’d assume there must be some good ghost stories from a place as legendarily eerie as Sleepy Hollow, and indeed there are. From the local pub to a cat haunting, I was honored to capture these candid interviews in a ghost-themed oral history I once recorded from a handful of locals.

Honestly, until I encounter one—and I hope I never do—I don’t know what I believe about ghosts. I remain decidedly spooked by the idea of them and find haunted horrors scarier than bloody murders. The mystery of the unknown fascinates. But because I am a fan of logic and data (and PBS documentaries), I would like to balance my open mind with a practical question: since there are many more dead humans in our planetary history than currently living, if there really were ghosts, wouldn’t they just be all over the place, like in Hill House, seeping into everything at increasingly greater density? Giving me wet willies at my desk at Town Hall, peeking at me under toilet stalls, loitering around the air pump at gas stations, lurking between trees on hikes, and just skeeving us out everywhere like this summer’s lantern flies?

Instead, we have these terrible app-induced ghosts who are afraid of being fully-fleshed humans, or being with one.