Have I been ghosted? You asked Google – here’s the answer
Of all the ways to end a relationship, ghosting tends to leave the deepest scars. At least everyone knows where they are with a big blow-out shouting match, especially one that crosses the Rubicon to encompass all the deepest, darkest, most unsaid, most unretractable truths you’ve both spent years carefully dancing around. To go out screaming is to douse yourself in cleansing fire. I highly recommend it.
Ghosting, though, is much more nefarious. Because ghosting – if you haven’t read the trillion trend pieces that have been published about it in the last couple of years – is an unexplained abandonment. It’s a complete disappearing act. No answered phone calls. No returned messages. It’s as if they’ve vanished entirely. And this means that you, the ghostee, have to process the disappearance before you can adequately find closure.
The worst thing about ghosting, at least from personal experience, is that it can turn you into an absolute clown. To my knowledge, I’ve been ghosted only once before, a decade and a half ago, back when it was simply called “being a twat”, and there’s a good chance it represents the all-time pinnacle of my neediness. I think I know why things ended – her best friend was my boss, and we’d had a colossal workplace falling out full of cleansing fire, and she found herself placed in an unwinnable position as a result – but a simple conversation explaining that would have saved a lot of trouble. It would have saved the sleepless nights, and all the self-examination and the call after call after call that went straight to voicemail. But it’s fine. It’s fine now. Everything’s better. I only wake up wailing the word “WHY?” into a pillow two or three times a week now.
The good thing about ghosting is that, if you suspect that you’ve been ghosted, there are only really two possible explanations. These are:
1) You have been ghosted.
Or ...
2) They’re dead.
Both explanations have exactly the same signifiers. They’re disappeared, you can’t get through to them and you’re left to grapple with your unresolved questions alone. The absence of a definitive answer will probably make all your worst instincts burble up from the pit of your stomach, so “What did I do wrong?” will blossom into “I must have done something terrible to deserve this” to “I am worthless”, and then before you know it you’re trapped in a spiral that ends with you eating tuna straight from the tin and not brushing your teeth for four days.
But being ghosted doesn’t have to be the all-encompassing punctuation mark you might think it is. In fact, if you’ll grant me permission to sound like a sadistic 1950s PE teacher for a moment, it can actually build character. All ghosting is, really, is a rejection. And how you deal with rejection – romantic, personal, professional, it doesn’t matter – is one of your defining traits. Every hit you take is a lesson in how to get back up again. With ghosting, the hit can be so huge that getting back up can take all your strength. But you’ll do it. If Britain can get up after Brexit (and it will) then you can certainly get up because a boy or girl stopped messaging you on Tinder.
And then, just like that, you’ll come out of it a little bit wiser and a little bit more resilient. You’ll soon see that life is only a series of hellos and goodbyes, and that everything will always come to an end at some point. You’ll see how unhealthy it can be to define yourself by the actions of others. You’ll move on, you’ll find a new avenue, you’ll get a sense of how indomitable you really are. Strong, flexible and self-reliant, that’s you. Best of all, in time I guarantee you’ll see that they really weren’t worth all the bother. You might have been ghosted, but it’s OK. It’ll be OK.
Of course, the alternative is that they’re dead. In which case, good. The ghosting arsehole probably had it coming anyway.
• Stuart Heritage writes about film, TV and music for the Guardian
