Kaitlyn Hart
Life Editor
As Valentine’s Day rolls around, lots of people are left to wonder how to show their affection for their loved ones on this strange semi-holiday which, when thought about for too long, starts to seem like a marketing scam created by greeting card companies to obligate us to spend money on overpriced chocolate hearts and teddy bears the size of a middle school student.
While all of the lovebirds are out buying candy hearts and rose bouquets, some are left at home to stare at their phones and wonder, “Did the person I was talking to fall off the face of the earth?” It’s a phenomenon called ghosting.
Before the invention of the internet, ghosting wasn’t really a viable option. If you wanted to cut all ties with someone, you most likely had to tell them that to their face, in person. And you even had to give an explanation.
Ghosting gives you the ease of breaking contact without the stress of confrontation. It is a trend (using the word trend loosely, though it’s more of an epidemic), in which one party cuts all ties with another person who may be interested in them romantically, often without obvious reason.
This means refraining from responding to any and all messages, unadding them on social media, or, to be very clear in your ghostly ways, going so far as to block them.
Maybe you’ve been dating this person for a couple of weeks, and you just don’t think it’s going to work out. So instead of telling them that you are no longer interested, you unadd them on Snapchat, unfollow them on Twitter and Instagram and essentially pretend that the whole thing never happened.
What is even worse is that people can even end long relationships by ghosting. Sound harsh? That’s because it is.
“People don’t expect as much when you’re just barely talking,” says ISU junior Emma Banks. “But when you’ve been dating someone for a while, I think that’s when ghosting is terrible.”
Social media gives us the ability to pop in and out of people’s lives whenever we choose, which can intentionally or not cause people a great deal of emotional distress.
If you’ve ever been ghosted and you feel like it is the end of the world, do not fear. You’re not crazy. According to Psychology Today, social rejection activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain.
So when that perfect person that you’ve been dating for a few weeks seems to just pop out of your life without warning, leaving you to feel abandoned and helpless, you’re not going insane.
According to research by Plenty of Fish, a dating website, over 78 percent of millennials have been ghosted. That means more millennials have been ghosted than the total number of people who live in California and and New York combined.
Let’s break this down even further. According to the US Census, there are 83.1 million millennials.
78 percent of 83.1 million people is 64,818,000 people. That means that at the very least, almost 65 million people have been ghosted at one point or another.
See what I mean by an epidemic?
The fear that many people seem to have when they are put in a situation where they are not longer interested in someone is that the other person will become upset and it will become a bigger issue. Many people avoid being upfront because they are afraid of confrontation and don’t want to cause any trouble.
To add to that fear, some people have tried being upfront and it has completely backfired.
“I went out on a couple dates with this guy and I was like, you know, I’m not really interested in him,” Banks said. “So I told him, ‘Hey man, I’m not really interested,’ and we had a good conversation about it. But because I was so honest, he felt like it was okay to keep asking me out, to try and change my mind or something because I was being polite enough to respond.” Ghosting someone is often seen as the easiest way to avoid upsetting someone or avoid someone not taking you seriously. No contact means no emotions.
“It’s like because everyone ghosts now, if you respond to people, that makes them think you’re interested,” Banks said. “It is wrong that we think that a response means interest.”
