Ghosting practices and emotional reactions

[cimorene]

I think I read somewhere something like “Everyone has ghosted someone, even if it was only by accident”, but do we think that’s really true? HAS everyone ghosted someone?

And if so, does that mean everyone has been ghosted by someone?

Is it something that occurs in both directions with equal frequency, or does the ratio correlate to personality traits or other features? Would it make interesting patterns if we graphed it, or just average out to a 1:1 ratio?

I wonder how you would go about graphing the emotional reactions with which people regard ghosting-events in their past, outgoing vs incoming. Like are there people who regard people they ghosted with fondness/nostalgia and people who ghosted them with the same emotion? Guilt, regret, confusion?

My hypothesis would be that nostalgia, largely positive, with a minor undertone of guilt, would probably dominate the majority of people’s emotions when considering people they had ghosted in the past, while resentment or confusion would probably dominate the majority of people’s emotions considering people who ghosted them. (Considering virtual-only, mutually romance-free relationships exclusively.) But this is just my impression based on things I've heard and read, so it’s an unscientific sample and those could also just be the ones people are likely to talk about.

Another imaginary post-it for the imaginary file of studies I’d like to read about if someone else does them.

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Comments

[krait]

I swear I have an invisible GHOST ME sign on my back, because this has happened to me throughout my life. I'm some kind of incommunicatable object hovering around people's lives. (Like, seriously. If there was one person who didn't get the info about the Girl Scout troop meeting, it was me. If one person somehow got missed when the class was discussing groups, it was me. If a group of acquaintances kept in touch after breaking up, I was the one who gradually fell out of the group. I genuinely suspect that if you went back to any of my old classmates and asked about me by name, they wouldn't know who you were talking about. "The girl who was always reading" might spark a few vague nods, but aside from my, like, two bestest friends, I'm pretty sure I was a ghost even while I was present.)

The upside is that I could "turn invisible" at will. I remember being able to walk past people I knew in the school halls and they wouldn't see me if I didn't want to, nine times out of ten. I've just always had a knack for fading into the background, I guess!

[cimorene]

Wow, that is both weird and really interesting and like... thought-provoking!

I assume you're an outlier, but I wonder how much of one! Have you talked about it with other people who claimed the same phenomenon? I can't think of anyone I know of who fits, but if your theory is right, I probably wouldn't remember them...

[krait]

Nope, it's just one of those things in the background of my life that sometimes floats into my conscious notice. I've never asked anybody if it's something they have experienced/done, too.

I'm a huge introvert, so being able to pass people in the hall without being sucked into conversations with passing friends was a blessing. Sometimes I'd do it just to see if I could, though! It made me feel like I had done something cool, or gotten away with something, to slip past people in plain sight.

Nobody at all knowing me from childhood is probably hyperbole on my part. I was a weird kid and probably a number of people would know me, at least by description, if asked to think back to their childhood; but of course, I can't prove this any more than I can prove the "nobody remembers me" theorem!

I just thought of this, but: this aspect of me may be why I have such a hard time grasping the attraction of real-name social media - I've often explained my complete disinterest in Facebook, etc. with words to the effect of, 'if I wanted to keep up with people from high school, I would have kept in touch with people from high school.' We ghosted away from each other; there's no connection, so I don't understand having a random urge to seek them out again and find out how many kids they have, or whatever.

[cimorene]

lol. I relate to a lot of this. And I absolutely dread getting close enough to have unavoidable eye contact with an acquaintance from recently enough that they might want to stop and speak to me (of course I could probably avoid these people too by pretending assiduously enough to not notice them, but that always runs a slight risk of making them suspicious).

But I kind of vary between making eye contact and greeting each coworker each day, which is technically courteous and correct in Finland, and not making eye contact with anyone as if I was in a hurry and forgot, and in the latter case, almost everybody lets me slip by as if they didn't see me either. Maybe it's a result of people subconsciously reading body language cues.