How old am I? This old: I never heard the term ghosting before I read “Cat Person,” the New Yorker story that went viral in early December.
(Let us pause a moment here, to appreciate the latter part of that sentence. A piece of literary fiction published in the lone temple of literary fiction has gone viral, with people noting that perhaps fiction alone can begin to comprehend the morass we find ourselves in when it comes to dysfunctional sexual relationships. As we literary-fiction writers like to say, You’re welcome.)
Ghosting, for those of you who have been even more out of it than I, does not refer in this context to writing someone else’s book, or to reappearing in ectoplasmic form after death. It refers to the habit of people in the dating world, especially those who find their potential mates on dating apps, to begin a relationship and then disappear from their hopeful partner’s virtual world. Ghosters don’t answer texts, emails, or voicemails. (You know, voicemails, those funny oral messages we used to leave on answering machines for no one to listen to.) Ghosts are breaking up with you, only it doesn’t really count as a breakup, because it implies that the relationship was never real enough to warrant an ending. This disappearance used to be known as “the slow fade,” but there’s nothing slow about it, really — the responses stop coming, as if the ghost has erased himself.
Much has been written (all of it in venues that I apparently paid zero attention to before this month) about the effects of ghosting. Some on the trauma of staring, over and over, at a blank screen, torturing yourself on the question of what you did wrong. Some, by contrast, on the relative clarity of the message sent by ghosting. No one in the dating world seems to think it’s a particularly nice thing to do; everyone seems to admit having ghosted on at least one occasion.
What I don’t find, in these discussions of ghosting, has to do with the connotations of the word. Broadly speaking, I find three ways in which the term is disturbingly apt.
First, ghosts are dead people. A thousand years ago, I was traveling with a boy through Europe. I ran out of money and returned to Paris to stay with a cousin who lived there, while the boy journeyed on through Prague. The idea was for me to babysit my cousin’s kids for a week, and when I was paid, the boy and I would meet up in Amsterdam. I never heard from him. For months, until he showed up back at the university I was attending, I thought he might be dead. I also thought he might not like me anymore. My feelings swung wildly between these two poles. I had been ghosted, in an old-fashioned way, and vertigo hit whenever I tipped from outrage at his rudeness to horror at my own failure to sound the alarm of his disappearance. Even now, in an age where Tinder matches may not know each other’s address, family, workplace, mutual friends, or other identifiers that would enable them to seek each other out, the possibility lingers that this person with whom you have been intimate could have met with catastrophe. To be ghosted, in this sense, means there are moments when you consider that the lack of response is due to the impossibility of communicating from the beyond.
Second, there are no ghosts. People who believe in ghosts are like people who believe in unicorns; they inhabit a fantasy world, albeit one to which we are all, from time to time, susceptible. (I used to sleep in the former viewing room of a former funeral home, and sometimes reminded the spirits of the place that I was a friendly presence whom they had no reason to harm.) When you are ghosted, whether in a platonic friendship or a sexual relationship, it’s easy to feel as though what you thought happened never really happened: that the warm, easy intimacy was a chimera of your own wishful thinking. In this sense, ghosting serves to gaslight the ghostee into thinking there was no relationship to end, that not just the absent person but the connection itself was a ghost.
Finally, of course, what ghosts do is to haunt. Why they haunt whom they haunt has been the subject of many a theory, but the basic question of haunting is the same question you apply to a breakup: Is it about her, or is it about me? “Hauntings happen for a reason, and if the haunting is being caused by a disembodied soul, that ‘ghost’ has some personal motivation behind its actions,” writes one self-styled medium. “Every ghost is different [but] it is very difficult to get a ghost to move on.” Relationship ghosts, in this sense, don’t go away so much as they linger, disembodied and unsatisfied, and perhaps having little to do with any real person’s action or nonaction. Another expert in the paranormal suggests various methods for ridding oneself of ghosts, including salting and smudging and reciting certain phrases, but in the end her advice rings true — perhaps not for the ectoplasmic beings, but for the ghosts of Tinder:
So whichever method you use to rid your home of ghosts, you must believe that it will work. Know in your heart that you are powerful and more powerful than these negative energies, and that when you say they need to leave they will indeed leave. Nothing and no one has any power over you and your environment except you.
Namaste.
Namaste, indeed.
