Why can't we let go of ghosting?
The psychology of ghosting, and how we cope with lingering feelings.
The psychology behind ghosting.
This is an updated blog that was initially posted in November 2021 on my website, this current article includes references to recent research on ghosting and orbiting.
Ghosting through social media is a psychological melting pot, defined as unilaterally ending a relationship by ceasing communication, it can upset and frustrate in equal measures. To add a neurological layer, it also hurts because social rejection uses the same brain pathways that process physical pain to give us a similar response. Why do we experience social rejection though?
We all need our autonomy, it’s one of our basic needs, and the essence of what makes us unique and authentic is having the autonomy to be who we want to be, but maintaining authenticity and living with our values requires more effort in some situations and relationships than others, and perhaps this is why it's sometimes the situation not the person that leads to ghosting. The person can become an extension of an exhausting situation.
Image credit: Thalia Ruiz
A basic coping mechanism
Healthy attachments are formed through available and responsive caregivers from an early age, and so into our adulthood the theory extends that we respond in anxiety and avoidance led ways. It’s a big theory, the interaction between people social connections and environments makes our attachments highly complex, and it’s why we might seek proximity to some people whilst avoiding others, and usually we do this as a way to remove ourselves from threat.
Social media enables people to ghost with relative ease, in the short term the ghoster is able to use social media to send relationship ending signals without verbalising. It is the ultimate avoidant exit, but what feels abrupt to one person might be part of a longer more thought out process to another. We are also starting to see a new behaviour and strategy emerge, orbiting is when the ghoster still follows the person they have disengaged from on social networking sites, this behaviour can add to the confusion and difficulty in gaining closure after a relationshop breakup.
The one that got away
To the person who is being ghosted it is anything other than a clean break, it feels like unfinished business, and the Ziegarnik effect, a phenomenon and bias might help us understand why the loss of connection is kept at the forefront of our mind. In ghosting this shows up as an uncomfortable linger, and because of the unique way in which we are virtually connected on the peripheries of smaller networks in social media, that lingering feeling can be ‘nudged’ or ‘reminded’. Facebook memories is just one example where ‘unfriending’ doesn’t stop you being reminded of the time you and your friend went for that amazing meal, shared stories on IG are another way in which linger moments are created, wheras with orbiting the person who has distanced themselves may still like posts or show up as having viewed stories.
Is ghosting harmful?
There's a growing body of psychological research on ghosting, however what we do see centres on dating or recruitment, there’s very little research on friendship ghosting for example. In earlier research psychologists thought that if we have unmet psychological needs we might attend in different ways to social media, that our attachment style drives ghosting behaviour, or that specific personality traits might predict our behaviour and likelihood to ghost or be ghosted on social media. Current research is helping us to understand how these areas interact with the ghosting phenomenon.
Here are a few studies that have looked at ghosting, the first study (Navarro et al 2020) examines the link between psychological discomfort and digital tactics to end or maintain intimate relationships, the researchers found that participants who had experienced ghosting in the past 12 months reported similar satisfaction with life, loneliness, and helplessness scores than those who had not experienced ghosting. These results did not support the study hypothesis that people who had experienced ghosting would suffer more, and they concluded that perhaps recovery had taken place. There is a larger body of research around ostracism and cyberostracism, that helps us understand severity and impact, however there are some conceptual differences between being ostracised and how it effects our social needs compared to an abrupt relationship ending.
The findings from these studies are useful because they can help us understand resilience in the face of ghosting, how long will the pain last? and how and when do people bounce back from the emotional impact?
An alternative and interesting angle on what motivates people to ghost has been suggested by Gregory Nah, and Ang Luong (2022), their research suggests that people are ‘bored’ by textual exchanges in dating apps, blaming algorithms for creating unequal engagement, this study is interesting because most research has assumed that ghosting happens because it is easy or digitially mediated by the features of whatever platform is being used.
Astelitner, Bains and Hormann (2022) have explored the relationships between fear of missing out, being a victim of ghosting, and vaguebooking (where limited information is posted to elicit concern/response from others), their research supports earlier research that being a victim of ghosting is related to negative mental health-related feelings. Importantly this research suggests that social personality traits in combination with social media experiences are significantly related to mental health.
Finally, one study that did look at friendship endings found that friends that initiated ghosting experienced regret and hesitation, interestingly the idea that ghosting can be used as a temporary avoidance mechanism is intriguing given that an exhausting emotional sitauation might have caused the ghosting in the first place. There was mixed views by the participants as to whether romantic or friendship ghosting was more harmful.
However we look at ghosting, and from whose perspective, social media is an extension of the way we interact and form relationships with other humans, and if we look at only social media behaviour, we might think these causes and effects exist only in online spaces, but ghosting exists wherever we have friendships, in online and offline spaces.
The uniqueness of social media to ghosting is that it brings people together with different world views and lived experiences, and pairs them with the technology that promises a clean or fuzzy exit when it’s entire design is one of connection. Want to beat the Zeigarnik effect? A simple reframe may help build in closure to shake off the lingering feeling
I’m Leila, an accredited psychologist who thinks and wonders about a lot of things.