The Ultimate Guide To Ghosting: Why People Do It, How To Respond & More

Your date from last weekend still hasn't texted you back about hanging out again. A promising new lead at work suddenly stopped responding after you shared your rates. The guy on Facebook Marketplace who offered to buy your old television just never came to pick it up, and you never heard from him again.

Ghosting is when someone stops responding to messages and disappears from a relationship without explanation, usually in the context of dating. The term can also be used for any situation where a person abruptly stops communicating or showing up, such as when a friend starts ignoring your texts or when an employee just stops showing up to work without ever formally quitting.

"Ghosting exists on a spectrum and can happen at literally any part of dating, from disappearing from a chat on a dating app and unmatching, to leaving your text messages on 'Read' after a date, to cutting off all communication with you after years of dating," explains sex and dating coach Myisha Battle, M.S. "All of this is ghosting behavior."

Many relationship experts discourage ghosting because of the way it affects the person being ghosted. "It leaves the other person to guess at what they did or didn't do to cause you to ditch them. That guessing is the specter that looms in people's lives after a disappearance," Battle tells mbg.

The phenomenon of ghosting has likely been around since the dawn of time. Consider the cavewomen who had to start getting choosy with their sexual partners because they didn't want to birth a child with someone who could disappear without a trace shortly thereafter, or the lovelorn man in Colonial times pouring his heart out in handwritten letters to some distant lover, only to never hear back. Many a '90s rom-com, too, featured a despondent leading lady hovering over a landline telephone for days on end, waiting hopelessly for the guy who took her out a few days ago to call her up and ask her out again. (He often never did.)

While the behavior itself isn't new, the term "ghosting" itself rose to popularity in the early 2010s. In 2015, after online tabloids ran headlines about how Charlize Theron "ghosted" Sean Penn, the New York Times even wrote an explainer on the term, calling it "the ultimate silent treatment." Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary in 2017.

It makes sense that ghosting would get a lot of people talking around this time: With technology rapidly transforming the speed and ease with which people could communicate with one another, ghosting behavior likely felt even more pronounced than ever. While mailing a letter just to reject someone may have been legitimately too much time and effort back in the day, the fact that people were still disappearing on each other without a trace even now that a kinder closure was literally just a few quick button taps away...harsh!

Dating apps were also just beginning to enter into the cultural mainstream, with Tinder launching in 2012. (Though to be fair, what's often thought of as the world's first online dating site, Match.com, launched in 1995, and we can only imagine people ghosted one another as much then as they do on today's best dating apps.)

In most cases, people ghost because they're no longer interested in pursuing a relationship with the other person. Instead of telling them that upfront, they go for the easiest and most convenient route: just stop responding.

The other most common reason for ghosting? They just have a lot going on in their own life.

"Sometimes when people ghost us, it's because they are focused on other things or may be isolating themselves because they are feeling depressed," marriage and family therapist Patrice N. Douglas, LMFT, previously told mbg. "Everything isn't always about us, so we can't panic right away."

Ghosting can also happen when someone is just anxious about ending the relationship because they struggle with hard conversations in general. According to licensed counselor Shae Ivie-Williams, LPC, BC-TMH, CCTP, people with certain backgrounds may be more likely to ghost: "[They] may not want to have those hard conversations because maybe their family didn't have hard conversations when they were young," she previously told mbg. "And so having those types of conversations involves vulnerability." 

But even though people may find it uncomfortable to reject someone, they may be making it worse by opting to ghost: "It also doesn't feel great to be the ghoster!" Battle points out. "Most people experience some amount of guilt for ghosting."

How you respond to ghosting depends on what you want out of the situation and out of your relationship with this person.

If you're not interested in this person anymore, just leave it be and move on. You really don't need to say anything to them, and the sooner you can get them out of your head, the better.

If this is a person you are still interested in dating or having in your life, just reach out again one more time and ask what's going on. Be direct.

When in doubt, talk it out. If you think someone is ghosting you, reach out one more time and ask them directly about what's going on and whether they're still interested in pursuing things with you. If you don't hear from them, it's time to move on.

And remember: While rejection stings, ghosting is almost always much more about the ghost's issues than it is about issues with the person being ghosted. In fact, getting ghosted says essentially nothing about you.

"Having someone ghost you says infinitely more about them than it does about you," spiritual teacher Monica Berg writes at mbg. "You're getting a firsthand look at how this person, who just days ago was so marvelous, actually handles their emotions, your emotions, and difficult circumstances in general. 'Runs away at any sign of conflict' typically doesn't make anyone's list of dream qualities in a partner, and you got to see that clearly and upfront."