The rise of 'ghosting': When someone suddenly falls off the face of the earth

Posted on 23 May 2016 | 644 views | 0 comments

This post was brought to you by LunchClick.

By Cherie Foo

Imagine this. It’s 2006, and you’ve been dating someone for a few months now. It’s been fun going out with this person, but after getting to know them better, you just don’t see a future with them.

What do you do? You steel yourself up for an unpleasant but necessary conversation, complete with as few or as many It’s Not You, It’s Mes as required.

Now fast forward ten years later. It’s 2016, and you’re in the same situation. What do you do?

For many people, the answer to that question is nothing. You stop replying texts, stop picking up phone calls, and pray that you fall off that person’s radar. You ghost.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of things before, you’ll know how much it can hurt.

You’re going out on dates, getting along just fine (or so you thought), and all of a sudden, you’re slammed in the face with complete and utter silence. You have no idea what you did wrong. You have no idea how to fix things.

And worst of all? You have no closure.

This is the era of hanging out, of Netflix and chilling, and of not putting a label on things.

Maybe it’s an unfortunate by-product of having technology (yes, we’re talking about dating apps) too readily available at our fingertips, but it seems like even as we’re going on dates we’re incapable of being vulnerable, and being fully present.

We don’t want to commit. We continue swiping whilst our dates are in the bathroom. We make sure we’re not too invested.

And one, two or three months down the road when we decide that we don’t want to do this anymore, we neglect to communicate this sentiment face-to- face, if at all.

LunchClick surveyed 200 of its users on their thoughts on ghosting, as well as if they’ve ever ghosted or been ghosted. Below are the results.