Fear of ghosting: assaulting someone with the piracy of silence

In the age of social media this cowardly practice is becoming far too effortless.

TWAM-20150411 EMBARGO FOR TWAM Nikki Gemmell Dinkus wide pic : TWAM

Blanking, blocking, disappearing, vanishing – in other words, ghosting.

The pusillanimous practice that’s rapidly becoming par for the course in this Tinder age. It’s just too flippantly easy to drift away in social media and texting discourse now, to ignore. Charlize Theron recently admitted to the questionable practice when it came to her former paramour, Sean Penn, despite them going out for 18 months and talking at one point of marriage. To her it’s not even a social death knell to be breezily admitting it; to me it’s just plain rude.

My definition of ghosting: to assault someone with the piracy of silence. If you’ve been on the receiving end of one of those cavernous and cruel electronic silences, it’s deeply destabilising. Highly effective. You do not forget it, nor the person who’s done it. Uncertainty, in any context, is profoundly stressful. Ghosting is the domain of the soulless, the selfish and the narcissistic. To those not used to the practice, it can scar a life with tumbleweeds of bewilderment and self-doubt. But for those used to swiping left, perhaps it’s just par for the course.

The cowardly vanishing act has always been around. It’s just that ghosting’s most often been associated with younger people; the self-obsessed whose edges haven’t been softened by sorrow; the closed-minded who aren’t versed in stepping into someone else’s shoes. Ophelia’s addled laments over her wayward, distracted Hamlet are symptomatic of the maddened sufferer: “How should I your true-love know;” “And will he not come again? And will he not come again?” So sayeth the millennial ghostee until late into the glary night.

In this day and age the practice is far more common, and it’s spread way beyond the callow immature. The mores of social media are making it far too effortless, for all of us. We on the receiving end of it just have to man – or woman – up. No explanation, no compassion, sayonara baby, that’s the way of it now. Silence = I do. Not. Want. You. In. My. Life.

Yet the older I get the more I respect that humble little word kindness, perhaps because so much of the internet seems bereft of it. Ghosting is the polar opposite of kindness, which is about lowering ourselves, being interested in someone, asking them questions, enaging; “Vivacity is surrender,” Les Murray wrote – and why should that seem so demeaning? Ghosting is deeply telling, personality wise. It absolves you from all the messiness of life, but dumps the victim into the thick of it. It’s about control on one hand – the upper hand – and loss of control on the other. We all want the gift of attention.

Defenders argue that it’s perfectly appropriate in this Tinder age of ephemerality. But ghosting should never involve anyone with the whiff of an enduring relationship to them. That means family most of all. You should never ghost a parent – but adult children tragically do, as do parents with their adult children. I’ve seen parents and children living in horror of each other’s potency, of the pain both sides can inflict.

You can’t be hurt by someone you don’t care about. And perhaps that’s the point of the modern ghosting epidemic. Tinder and its ilk absolve us of care, which makes it easier to blank and ignore. But attention withheld can lock up a life; can leach it of confidence and esteem and strength.

How to survive a ghosting? Know your own worth. It’s more about them – their selfishness, their lack of manners. It’s an action devoid of civility and courage and grace. So if you’re ever ghosted, well then, busy yourself, move on, dive into elsewhere. Just think of it as the gods saving you for someone else, who you really deserve. Because there’s love, and indifference, and the two cannot co-exist. In a relationship we all need the gift of security – not that rock upon which we will break, and break, and break. The ghoster just isn’t worth it. Bullet dodged.

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