Girl sees funny NSFW tweet retweeted unto her timeline, girl looks up profile; bearded, dark and handsome, follower to following ratio looks right, more than a couple of followers in common, 0 signs of catfish activity, girl follows.
Boy follows back, Boy dms. conversations start to flow, ebb then rise again, their flirtation facetious at times then raunchy other times with a tentative friendship and before too long vague plans to meet up become concrete, they settle on a date, chose a location and meet, laying the groundwork for a relationship of their choosing.
After Girl tries to call boy, unreachable. Girl tries to send a dm, no trace of account, girl panics, girl asks around, nobody seems to know where boy is. They haven’t spent a lot of time together so girl doesn’t know boy’s family or friends, girl is worried, thinking of the worst possible outcomes to make boy disappear. Girl’s friends suggest Boy has ghost, she refuses to believe that, they had a connection.
As days run into weeks, Girl slowly starts to accept that she has been ghosted.
As Segun replies his potential customer, he allows himself sigh in relief, when this sale goes through he can pay for last month’s service charge, his landlord had been patient but he hated owing him.
An hour and no reply, later Segun enquires from the customer if he is still interested in the purchase, no reply. Crestfallen Segun considers which of his friend’s he can get a small loan from.
Oxford describes ghosting as “the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication”.
From the two examples above, one can see that ghosting happens not just in personal relationships but business too and it’s effects are just as painful across the board.
There are quite a number of reasons why people would ghost but it basically is an avoidance tactic, a person feels some pressure of whatever type and instead of having a discussion about it, they prefer to just avoid the issue by avoiding the person.
This is sort of redundant because sometimes the ghosted person insists on closure and track down their ghost and they have to confront and even bigger issue on top of whatever they were avoiding anyway.
The social clime currently allows for people with no prior ties such as friends, family, coworkers or acquaintances meet up and start relationships.
These kind of relationships don’t have that layer of accountability that is present when you have people in common, these kind of people find it easy to become ghosts, becoming unattached from a person is easy if you know you won’t meet people that will carry information back to them.
Apparently, people that have been ghosted before find it easier to ghost too, they excuse their behavior as some cosmic karma and show no feelings of guilt.
Individuals that hold the belief that relationships are meant to be worked on are less likely than people who believe in fate to ghost you.
There are no rules, no signs to help avoid people who will ghost us, matter of fact, every one of us micro ghost our way out of situations we’d rather not be in. We are the ghosts we speak of.
The best thing is to work with empathy, basically treat others how we want to be treated, and hope we attract the same for ourselves. After all, life and love are a gamble.
