From Ghosters and Ghoulies...

 

A few weeks ago, I read a New Scientist article on ‘Why Ghosting Hurts So Much’.  Until then, I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘ghosting’ to describe cutting off contact with a person without warning or explanation, but I had experienced it three times that I know of. 

At other times, friendships had drifted apart or friends had suddenly stopped returning my calls, but I couldn’t be sure that they were deliberately shunning me.  Some of them might have died, and others may simply have changed their address or phone number and forgotten to give me their new details. 

But equally, sometimes friends are just going through a bad time and don’t feel up to communicating for a while – perhaps months or years at a time – and then the friendship recovers.  As I am sometimes appallingly bad at keeping in touch myself, I can hardly complain if other members of my friends and family group sometimes do the same.

What I was surprised by, though, was the assertion in the New Scientist article that ghosting is so painful that it amounts to physical pain.  In my experience, what I mainly felt was not hurt or anger, but guilt at having hurt or intimidated someone else so much that they couldn’t face communicating with me again.

Jennice Vilhauer’s article ‘When Is It Okay to Ghost Someone?’ advises that this can sometimes be a necessary protective tactic, if you are in a relationship with someone who abuses you or makes you feel unsafe, or with someone who violates your boundaries.  And quite possibly, I have been the person who has done that.

On the three occasions that I have definitely been ghosted, none were in a romantic relationship.  One was by a friend, and the other two were by driving instructors.

The first driving instructor had seemed quite a friendly, relaxed person, who chatted happily with me as we drove around.  However, after a while he stopped answering any of my phone calls or texts about booking driving lessons, and when I finally managed to get in touch with him, months later, he told me that he had decided to give up teaching driving.

The second wasn’t someone I felt that I clicked with.  I felt nervous around her, sometimes because I wasn’t clear about what she actually wanted – for example, if she told me to go into a parking space, and I did so in a way that wasn’t wrong but wasn’t the way that she had expected, she would exclaim, ‘No, do it properly!’  And being nervous, I started to make worse mistakes – sometimes to the point where other drivers would shout at my instructor, ‘She shouldn’t be on the road!’ or even where I damaged the vehicle.

This instructor had suggested to me a few times that I might do better with a different instructor, or in an automatic car.  But she hadn’t said outright, ‘I don’t feel safe giving you any more lessons.’  So, when she stopped turning up for lessons that I had booked and paid for in advance, I just assumed that I must have failed to spot her arriving and she must have given up waiting for me and left. 

So I would phone the driving school and apologise, and (since she hadn’t told them that she didn’t want to give me any more lessons), they would re-schedule my lesson for next week.  I stayed home from a number of activities I had wanted to go to because I was waiting for the instructor, before she finally admitted to her driving school that she wasn’t teaching me, and I finally managed to recover the money. 

At this point, I decided that if I was such a terrifyingly bad driver that two instructors not only couldn’t face giving me any more lessons, but couldn’t face even telling me that they weren’t going to give me any more lessons, then perhaps I was called to be a pedestrian.  After all, by now it was 2019 and Extinction Rebellion were urging us to make significant lifestyle changes to save life on Earth.  PDB11 and I decided that two of ours could be avoiding unnecessary car use, and making our next holiday a walking tour.

Then 2020 brought lockdown, and my third experience of ghosting.  In 2019, I had started to make friends with a young man who came into the bookshop where I worked, whom I will call Brony (without meaning any offence to bronies and pegasisters in general; it's just that this particular man happened to identify as a brony).  Brony and used to go out for coffee, which mainly consisted of his holding forth about how he didn’t like the plot changes to his favourite film and television series.  I read his fanfiction and commented on it.  Once, PDB11, Brony and I went to see a film together.  Once, we invited Brony to come with us to a writing group.

Then lockdown came, and Brony and I couldn’t meet in person.  Instead, we phoned and emailed each other, which gave us the chance to talk about more personal matters because we weren’t in a public place and didn’t have to worry that people overhearing us might think we were weird.  I had thought we were becoming better friends than ever.  As I wrote in a post at the time, I thought this was one of the blessings of lockdown.

Then I went too far, when I said something in an email which he found offensive.  After that, he didn’t reply to any of my phone calls or emails for a month.  I assumed that he must be starting to have more of a social life now that lockdown was easing.  I felt glad for him, because, while I liked him and was happy to be his friend, I wanted him to have more friends than just me.

Finally, about a month after contact had ceased, I had one final email from Brony:

 

I  appreciate you phoning and E-mailing. But as you still have not realised.  I will tell you straight out. You hurt me in that last E-mail you did  on the 31th of May. So please. Can you just stop calling me thank you.

 

I felt deeply sorry, firstly, that I had hurt my friend; secondly, that I had made him feel so unsafe that he hadn’t even been able to bring himself to email to say, ‘Please stop calling,’ until then; and thirdly, that I had been so insensitive as not to guess that his not-answering meant, ‘Please stop emailing.’  I hadn’t meant to, but by something I had said, I had violated his boundaries.  I wrote one final email to him, to apologise and say goodbye.  Perhaps I violated his boundaries still further by sending that email.  I don’t know.

New Scientist’s article quoted a researcher who suggested that people who ghost are likely to have psychopathic, Machiavellian and narcissistic traits.  However, I would suggest that the modern trend of labelling other people as psychopathic (when we are not qualified psychologists) is part of the problem. 

Increasingly, when an encounter with someone doesn’t go well, instead of thinking, ‘We’ve had a bit of a tiff – I wonder what I can do to repair our friendship?’ it has become more popular to think, ‘She hurt my feelings, therefore she either didn’t understand or didn’t care that her behaviour would hurt me, therefore she lacks empathy, therefore she’s a psychopath, therefore I need to protect myself by avoiding her.’

It is easier to feel justts to iified in shunning people whom we feel frustrated with – perhaps because they are socially inept and say something insensitive, or perhaps because they are lonely and want more of our time and attention than we can conveniently give – if we label them ‘toxic’ or ‘emotional vampires’.  This way, we can avoid thinking of them as people with genuine needs.

In terms of Transactional Analysis, most people’s response to conflict is to assume: ‘I’m okay, you’re not okay.’  For a few of us, it is easier to assume: ‘I’m not okay, you’re okay.’  Transactional analysis teaches that the healthy position is: ‘I’m okay, you’re okay,’ – which is probably true in the sense in which Eric Berne meant it: that everyone has value, everyone is worthy of love, and most people have the capacity to think and to make positive changes to their lives.

However, it is clearly not true if we interpret it as saying that we and the people around us are all reasonable, well-adjusted individuals.  So I find it more helpful (if less of a snappy catchphrase) to think along these lines: ‘I’m a person, you’re a person.  The majority of people aren’t psychopaths, so it is reasonable to presume that you are not a psychopath.  Lots of people have emotional problems, so if I do, it’s reasonable to accept that you may have problems, too.  Let’s see where we go from here.’

So if a friend hasn’t written for a few weeks, or even a few years, they might be ghosting you, or they might just be going through a bad time.  It’s probably still worth dropping them the odd message.  If they really don’t want to hear from you, then, like Brony, they’ll eventually message you to ask you to stop.