To ghost, or not to ghost, that is (not) the question

A rejoinder of "Ghosting is not the problem"

Hi Worthy Lovers. Holy shit. People liked the article.

Let’s just jump into some of the questions that I get from the article.

Why write about it?

If you try to find an article about ghosting, more often than not, it’s going to talk about “signs that you’ve been ghosted”, or “ghosting tells more about the other person than about you”. I don’t find these articles interesting to read, cause it assumes that the problem is that people can’t take a hint, or people need constant validation.

First, most people can take a hint; they just deny it. Let me try to use an analogy described by Bruce Tift in his book Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy On The Path of Liberation.

“If someone is angry, it’s now a common idea that perhaps under that anger that person is feeling hurt or scared. He is using the anger as a way of “pretending” to not be aware of the deeper vulnerability. But he has to really be aware of these deeper feelings to have the impulse to defend against them. He is consciously “not aware” while unconsciously “aware.” He is actively ignoring what he is actually aware of feeling.”

My intuition tells me that it’s the same with ghosting. Denying the signs is a form of actively ignoring what the person is already aware of. In some ways, being honest with ourselves is “consciously participating in what is already true but currently out of our awareness.” As Maslow pointed out, Papa Freud is right all along.

Second, when it comes to ghosting, like most things, there is an objective element and a subjective element to it. The objective element is the behavior that I’ve tried to describe in my latest article. The subjective elements are the meaning or the story that we tell ourselves about the behavior. By definition, a story is never a complete description of our experience; it’s a map of a territory. It’s reducing reality to something digestible for us.

This is why I write “ghosting is one of those behaviors that when others do to us, we feel unjust, yet when we do it to others, we will have justifications for it”. Because the stories that we tell to ourselves when we do it to others and when others do it to us are different. Yet, both result in us not being bad people. After all, we want to protect ourselves, no?

And when it comes to making people feel good when they’re being ghosted by telling them “Oh, it’s not you; it’s them”, might not be helpful. It deprives them of reflecting on their own behaviors prior to the ghosting itself. Because even if you don’t do anything wrong that deserves to be ghosted—let’s say you’re perfect—you can still learn to attract someone better in the first place. Predicting people that will not ghost you is a good skill to learn. And just in case you’re not perfect, reflection allows you to have a sense of humility in your love life. It reminds you to not be quick to make moral judgments about the other person because you might just do the same thing.

That’s why I write the article.

Describing ≠ Justifying

Another intermezzo. One of my followers pointed out that “Ghosting is evil and wrong in some cases. Cause what if someone leads you on and then ghosts you?”. Then, I respond with “Yup, when a cancer researcher explains the conditions in which cancer can emerge in a human body means that they are pro-cancer :)”

I tend to observe, that human beings have this moral reflex when we try to describe a phenomenon, we’re quick to point out that we’re not justifying them, especially on contentious/controversial topics. When an economist explains the origins of poverty, they’re not recommending that people need to stay poor, or even that systematic changes are required.

Henri Tajfel has been able to explain the general mechanism for bigotry. It doesn’t mean that he’s trying to justify them. In fact, as pointed out by Rupert Brown in a commentary article, “Even if it turned out to be true (i.e. that some form of intergroup differentiation follows inescapably from the operation of categorization processes), then as social scientists, we had at least better be aware of the problem rather than to decry and deny its possibility.” By equipping ourselves with the knowledge of how those kinds of behavior might arise, we can be better at dealing with them.

It’s the same with the discussions on privileges. In an article, I talked about how someone writes in a comment that there’s a privilege being in a broken home. Does that mean that person wishes everyone’s family becomes one? Of course not.

Back to talking about ghosting, I’m well aware that in some cases, ghosting can be really unjust, and the person that does it is potentially an asshole. Yet, it doesn’t mean that we can’t try to understand the underlying phenomenon. Or any phenomenon really. We can describe a lot of things without justifying them.

This is why being a psychologist is hard.

Someone gets it

In the comment section, a person pointed out:

Our culture is so ingrained in not rocking the boat, hence we don’t know how to handle a difficult convos, with anyone, let alone a stranger.

But I would also like to add on the point that we often complain when we are being ghosted when we’ve done that to other people. I found myself not complained or whined to my friends when im being ghosted, because i feel like it’s such a price i have to pay because i have ghosted so many people. Hence leading to my next question, should we always tell them that they’re not the one we’re looking for?

Yup, it is a price. Thank you for getting it. Because all of us can forget about that simple notion. Your question about “should we always tell them that they’re not the one we’re looking for?” reminds me of a story by Nassim Taleb in his book Skin in The Game.

“The question “Is it ethical to sell something to someone knowing the price will eventually drop?” is an ancient one—but its solution is no less straightforward. The debate goes back to a disagreement between two stoic philosophers, Diogenes of Babylon and his student Antipater of Tarsus, who took the higher moral ground on asymmetric information and seems to match the ethics endorsed by this author. Not a piece from both authors is extant, but we know quite a bit from secondary sources, or, in the case of Cicero, tertiary. The question was presented as follows, retailed by Cicero in De Officiis. Assume a man brought a large shipment of corn from Alexandria to Rhodes, at a time when corn was expensive in Rhodes because of shortage and famine. Suppose that he also knew that many boats had set sail from Alexandria on their way to Rhodes with similar merchandise. Does he have to inform the Rhodians? How can one act honorably or dishonorably in these circumstances?

We traders had a straightforward answer. Again, “stuffing”—selling quantities to people without informing them that there are large inventories waiting to be sold. An upright trader will not do that to other professional traders; it was a no-no. The penalty was ostracism. But it was sort of permissible to do it to the anonymous market and the faceless nontraders, or those we called “the Swiss,” some random suckers far away. There were people with whom we had a relational rapport, others with whom we had a transactional one. The two were separated by an ethical wall, much like the case with domestic animals that cannot be harmed, while rules on cruelty are lifted when it comes to cockroaches.

Diogenes held that the seller ought to disclose as much as civil law requires. As for Antipater, he believed that everything ought to be disclosed—beyond the law—so that there was nothing that the seller knew that the buyer didn’t know.”

There’s a technical problem in ghosting that most people don’t see: an asymmetry of information between the “ghost” and the “ghosted”. The ghosted might never know why they’re being ghosted, hence they might demand an explanation. The commenter continues:

I think we don’t always have to communicate that, because if the emotional connection and expectation that is shared is some kind of low, the other person would understand and we could carry on. Communicating that we decide to leave them (I think) should only be conducted when the emotional connection is super strong & we have high expectations of each other. What do you think?

Yup. So, it’s not about ghosting others or not ghosting them, because all of us have personal reasons to do so that other people might not understand. The real question is “Should we reveal the reasons? When and how much?” Now, we’ve reached the normative part of the discussions and there’s an ethical element to it.

I definitely agree with the commenter. Cause observing my behavior on dating apps, I will unmatch or ghost people that I know have not invested in me. I don’t feel that I owe them an explanation. Yet, when it comes to people that I’ve come to notice that take an interest in me, I feel that I owe them an explanation. Although, deciding the person who “has an emotional connection with us and has a high expectations of each other” might be tricky. Cause sometimes we misjudge the people that owe our explanations, we ended up not giving any to them. Or vice versa.

For that reason, a bias to always reveal might just be more ethical. Just like Antipater to his buyers. After all, eliminating the “asymmetry of information” might not be fun, especially when you know the other person might not accept your explanation. Or might even be mad about it, so why not save yourself from the hassle of being honest?

Because as much as we don’t like it, we can’t help to be impressed by those who do it. It takes some guts to explain ourselves to strangers, instead of taking the “easy route”. It might be one of the costliest signals in ending a conversation. Courage is the only virtue that can’t be fake.

Back to the question, should we always reveal our reason to other people? I don’t think so. But do I think that the people that do have some sorts of moxie that I do not possess? Yeah, I do. Because those people are the ones that keep the dating market more ethical and in a way, help us reflect on our behavior. That we’re also capable of doing the hard things.

Hope that answers your question.