Credit: Getty Images
2 min read
We all know that ghosting can be seriously hurtful, whether it’s in a friendship or a romantic relationship, but now a new study has delved into how this behaviour might also affect the person doing the digital disappearing act.
If you’ve ever been ghosted by a potential date, you’ll know it can seriously sting – even if you’ve never met the person in question. But what if the ghoster is someone you considered to be a friend? Someone who you’d known for years and has suddenly stopped answering your messages.
It’s a form of rejection that’s arguably made more painful by the lack of closure; the ghoster just disappears from our lives, rather than giving us proper answers about what went wrong. And yet, despite the fact that we’re all too aware of just how dispiriting ghosting can be, many of us dish out the same behaviour to others: in a 2019 study, 44.2% of respondents said that they had been on both sides.
As ghosting is a relatively modern phenomenon, encouraged by the rise of dating apps and messaging platforms, there’s not currently much psychological research out there that delves into this behaviour. A new study from researchers at the University of Vienna has now sought to change that, by digging into how romantic ghosting might differ from its platonic counterpart, and exploring the impact of ghosting on the ghoster themselves.
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The researchers conducted two sets of surveys, four months apart, on young adults aged between 16 and 21, with a total of 978 taking part in the first and 415 completing the second. Participants were asked about how often they had ghosted dates and friends, but the questions didn’t use the word ‘ghosting’. Instead, they referred to similar behaviours, like cutting off contact online without telling them why.
The participants also rated how overwhelmed they felt by social media communications and their self-esteem and depressive tendencies.
The results showed some major differences between ghosting romantic prospects and ghosting our friends, both in terms of the causes and the potential after-effects.
They found that a bombardment of communication tended to predict romantic ghosting, but the same thing didn’t happen with friendships. Meanwhile, respondents who reported greater self-esteem were more likely to ghost their friends but not their dates. “As one’s number of friends typically surpasses the number of current romantic partners, it may be easier for individuals with high self-esteem… to ghost friends they do not want to stay in contact with and turn to others compared to people with low self-esteem,” the researchers wrote.
Even more interesting is their discovery that the participants who confessed to ghosting their pals in the first part of the survey were more likely to report greater depressive tendencies in the second part, but the same thing didn’t happen for romantic ghosters (contradicting their initial predictions).
By cutting off their friendships, the researchers explained that those doing the ghosting might “rob themselves of (to some extent unforeseen) benefits of these interactions. In other words, ghosting friends might predict depressive tendencies by self-induced unfulfilled relational needs.”
It’s certainly food for thought. Ghosting might often seem like the easy way out, but it can have consequences – whichever side you’re on.
Images: Getty
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