What I Learned from Being Ghosted

This is a personal essay, about personal issues. Please be respectful of this and, if possible, compassionate in reading it. I believe that illness, whether physical or mental, should be normalized, because we are all human beings who struggle from time to time. I wish more people would speak openly about their struggles. By writing this, I am trying to be the change that I would like to see in the world.[1]

If you look at the psychology literature on ghosting, you’ll find that it’s unequivocal: ghosting is a form of “emotional cruelty” or “emotional abuse” that can cause serious psychological harm to the ghostee — as well as the ghoster. Some describe ghosting as the ultimate form of the “silent treatment,” and studies have linked ghosting behaviors to the Dark Triad traits, especially narcissism and psychopathy.

Ghosting can also cause long-lasting harm to the ghostee’s self-esteem and ability to trust others. This has been expressed by numerous people I’ve spoken to about their own experiences with being ghosted. For example, one told me: “I don’t think you can ever go back to that world before you knew someone you trust could be capable of something like this.”

That is consistent with my own experience: being ghosted by my long-term partner has changed me. It’s changed my worldview. And it’s changed the way I see other people. I was ghosted in the first half of 2022, after I struggled with sickness (an episode of bad depression[2]) for about a week. My partner, who I had previously lived with for years and who I loved dearly and unconditionally, vanished overnight. The last conversation we had was about whether love should be conditional or not upon someone having a personal (e.g., health) crisis: I said “Of course not!” But they said: “Yes.” They hung up the phone and that was the last time I ever had contact with them.

Worst of all is that, after they left, I ended up in the hospital for two weeks and nearly died. This happened while I was in Germany, a country that I moved to for my partner. I was completely alone, and had to go through two weeks at the hospital with no one to support me. When the hospital released me, my partner did not once reach out to say, “Hey, are you okay?” Not a single email, text message, or phone call to check on my wellbeing and express some concern. As you can imagine, this completely changed me. It was a transformative experience, in Laurie Paul’s sense — or as the person above put it, I realized that I would never again live in the same world that I occupied before this heartbreaking event.

What did I learn from this? How did it change me? Given that ghosting is becoming increasingly common, I thought I’d share some of my experience. To be sure, most ghosting happens in the context of short-term dating — it’s quite rare in long-term relationships like my own, in part because ghosting someone you’ve known, lived with, and “loved” for years is far more extreme than refusing to return a phone call from someone you met last week.

(1) I am not able to stop caring about someone overnight. Even if I were to break up with my partner, if I were to hear that they ended up in the hospital and nearly died, I would do everything I possibly could to help them. I simply cannot imagine abandoning someone who’s suffering, much less abandoning them via ghosting. There is literally no personal crisis that any friend or partner could go through that would lead me to cut off ties with them. For me, love that’s conditional upon whether someone is struggling isn’t love. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect that it has something to do with the way that capitalism has infected nearly every aspect of our world, including our interpersonal relationships. On a capitalistic model, such relationships become merely transactional, and hence conditional, as my partner explained to me the very last time we spoke. I reject this transactional model, and in fact the more a friend or partner is suffering, the more likely I am to rush to their side and show them love, kindness, compassion, and care.

What I learned is that some people are able to stop caring about someone overnight. Some people are able to abandon their best friend and, even upon hearing that this person nearly died, refuse to express any inkling of compassion for their plight. I did not know this. I have since (radically) “updated” my view of humanity in the direction of “some people, perhaps many people, can be cold-hearted precisely when warmth and compassion are most needed.” I did not know that ghosting someone in a long-term relationship was possible. The way I thought about it in the months after it happened was as follows: Imagine that you’re on a plane that’s in a nosedive toward the ground. You think, “Oh my god, I’m about to die. I never thought that it would end this way. Oh my god!” Now imagine a parallel situation in which you think something rather different: “Oh my god, I had no idea that planes could crash. I didn’t know that this was something that could possibly happen. I didn’t know that plane crashes were a thing! Oh my god!”

The second scenario is a double-trauma: not only are you suddenly aware that you’re about to die, but a long-held belief that planes can’t crash has been demolished. You might say that this example is rather silly: “Who doesn’t know that planes can crash? Everyone knows that!!” But one could say the exact same thing about ghosting. In fact, roughly 15 years ago, I knew a man who I’ll call “Trevor,” who told his wife and family in New York that he was invited to be a judge at a science fair in Chicago. So, he boarded a plane, flew to Chicago, and then vanished. For more than one week, those of us who knew Trevor were freaking out: apparently nearly all of his belongings were left in the hotel, so many of us suspected that he might have been abducted or murdered. The police announced that they had found an unidentified male body in a river, which caused many of us to cry. But it turned out not to be Trevor. After a week of searching, the police then notified the public that they had evidence that Trevor had crossed the Canadian border to, apparently, start a new life. That was the only information we were given: Trevor is alive, and has moved to Canada on his own volition.

In other words, Trevor ghosted his family in the most heart-wrenching way. He lied to them, left his suitcase and belongings in his hotel room, and traveled north to start anew. I did not know his wife, but I’m sure she was devastated. Being ghosted by a long-term partner feels a lot like your long-term partner suddenly dying. In fact, what helped me the most over the 18 months following my own experience with ghosting was reading the literature on how people deal with the sudden death of their partners. It’s a trauma: one day, your partner is there; the next, they are gone forever.

The point is that I knew that ghosting happens in long-term relationships. I just never, ever thought that it could happen to me. I surround myself with morally good people, I thought, and ghosting is one of the most terrible ways that one person could treat another. As the psychology literature explores, it evinces a marked lack of empathy for others, as well as a high degree of selfishness, callousness, and narcissism. If you are in a “loving” relationship and think that there’s no way your partner could ever ghost you if, say, you were to become ill, then you’d be making the very same mistake that I made. In fact, if you had asked me one week before I was ghosted what the probability of my partner suddenly vanishing forever was, I would have emphatically said, “Zero!” I would have bet my entire life savings on my partner not disappearing overnight. I truly believed that I had made a best friend for life — even if we were to break up for some reason. So, perhaps you’d say the same thing about your partner, and perhaps you’d be proven wrong. This leads to the second lesson:

(2) Realizing that some people are capable of flipping a switch that enables them to stop caring about you quite literally overnight has been a revelation for me. It has significantly altered my understanding of humanity. But it has also — and this is the second lesson — severely wounded my ability to trust others. This is a common response to ghosting, as the psychology literature notes: many ghostees struggle with trust issues for weeks, months, or even years after the ghosting incident. For me, it’s been two years since I was ghosted, and I feel more strongly than ever that I should never trust anyone again.

When I was around 20 years old, a close family member sat me down and said: “Émile, do not ever trust anyone. Do not trust your partner with your personal finances, and do not trust your friends to be there for you when you need them. People will use and abuse you — they will take what they can from you, and laugh when you end up in the gutter. If you want to protect yourself from the awfulness of other people, the best heuristic is to never, ever trust them.”

I remember my reaction to hearing this: “That is batshit crazy,” I thought. “What kind of a life is that, never trusting anyone? That sounds so lonely, bleak, and stressful. I absolutely refuse to live my life like that!” And so I didn’t live like that: I put my trust in nearly everyone. I commonly share personal information with people, I’ve always shared finances with my partners, and give them all of my passwords for email, my phone and computer, and so on. I want to trust and to be trusted — more than anything, I want and need to believe that people are, on the whole, very good.

At the age of 41, I now look back at the advice I was given 22 years ago and think, “That was the best advice I ever got, and I would pass it on to the next generation if they were to ask.” I hate that I now believe this. I cannot begin to express how upset, disappointed, and appalled I am that this now appears to be good advice.[3] I trusted my former partner. The only reason I moved to Germany was for them — I did get my PhD there, but I wanted to get my PhD in the US, at the University of Maryland, which had just accepted me. But my partner convinced me to move to Germany with them instead.

In the week leading up to my illness, I knew that I was collapsing into a bad episode of depression. I’m very proactive about such things, so I contacted every doctor in my area and called every hotline on the Internet. I wanted help, and became increasingly desperate as I fell into a state of loneliness and despair. I even sent a follow-up email to one doctor with “Help help help help help.” I received no reply: despite the German healthcare system being overall very good, it is not good — in my experience — with responding to pleas for assistance in a timely manner. (Are any healthcare systems, though?)

But then I remembered something that a psychologist had told me a few months earlier: “The next time you fall into an episode of depression, tell your partner.” She then said — and I will never forget these words — “You’d be surprised by how much love they will have for you.”

So, I reached out to my partner, and just days later they ghosted me. That was probably the first time in my entire life that I’ve actually asked for help from someone. I am normally the person — in both friendships and romantic relationships — who people rely on when times are tough. I am not the person who takes, but the person who gives, and to be honest I like this role. I like being there for others. When someone is sick, stressed out, anxious, or depressed, it provides a special — though unfortunate — opportunity to show just how much one cares about them. It reinforces trust: Yes, I am here for you, no matter what; we’re going to get through this together. When I stumble, though, I usually don’t tell anyone, because I don’t want to cause others to worry about me. There’s enough misery in the world, I liked to say. I shouldn’t be adding to it by complaining about something I’m going through! Since high school, I have used the phrase “I must not multiply the misery” to express this idea. I want others to tell me when they need a shoulder to cry on — and still very much do! — but never wanted to burden others with requests for their shoulders when I need a good cry.

It’s hard to express how angry I was at the psychologist after my partner ghosted me. I have received a lot of bad advice from psychologists over the years, and this was another example to add to the list. If I had remained quiet, I probably would not have been ghosted. You might say, in response, that surely I wouldn’t want to be with someone who’s capable of ghosting their long-term partner. But I disagree, because I now suspect that many, maybe even most, people embrace a transactional view of relationships such that, if they deem the costs of supporting their friend or partner to be greater than the benefits, they will “rationally” decide to abandon those friends or partners. I don’t think most people are very different from my former partner: look around the world — people are selfish, callous, narcissistic, and transactional. That’s just the way it is. Plus, the year I spent with my partner in Germany was the happiest of my life (even if it was built upon false illusions about who I was with). Sometimes “bad” is the “best” one can get.

Here I am reminded of studies showing that a certain nontrivial percentage of men abandon their wives after a cancer diagnosis, and various anecdotes of friends and acquaintances who were abandoned by friends and partners during an illness or struggle of some sort. When I mentioned this issue on Twitter a while back, one person responded to me with this: “I got diagnosed with cancer a while back and entering that world made me see just how many people get abandoned during medical crises. … My spouse was dependable, but I lost several lifelong friendships because of it.” This is humanity, I have come to realize. As Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “for the world is Hell, and [people] are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

The lesson here is that one shouldn’t be too trusting. Most people really are, it seems to me, just out for themselves, looking for the best deal they can get, and if a friend or partner requests support during an illness or personal crisis, that can easily spoil the deal. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine in late 2023, they responded with some exasperation: “You’re only realizing this now? Yes, in a very profound sense, we are all alone in the world. People care about each other until they don’t, and they often decide to stop caring when it’s most needed. That’s just the way the world is.” I was a bit shocked by this, but it now seems rather accurate to me.

(3) If I had known that I was moving to Germany for someone who might ghost me, I obviously wouldn’t have done that. I consider this decision to be one of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in my 42 years on Earth. But, of course, how could I have known that this would happen? How could I have predicted it? I have never once abandoned a friend or partner in need — as alluded to above, I’m very much like a firefighter who, when they see a fire, runs full-speed toward the flames. That’s a silly metaphor, but it’s true. When friends need money, I give it to them (and ask nothing in return). When they need to talk, I stop what I’m doing and pick up the phone. A friend of mine had a suicidal episode a few years back, and I offered to get in a plane and fly to their country if that would be helpful. Another friend is dealing with cancer, and I’ve been sending them — because they asked — at least one joke per day. The problem is that I tend to project my own inclinations and impulses on others: if I can’t imagine ghosting a long-term partner, I assume that no one else is capable of this, either.

The “lesson” that I shouldn’t have moved to Germany is, of course, pointless. I can’t undo that decision. But this lesson does have implications for the future: because some people are capable of flipping the switch of “I care about you” overnight (lesson #1), and because one should not be too trusting of others (lesson #2), I have vowed to myself that I will never make any major life decisions based on what’s best for my partner in the future. I have, in fact, done precisely this repeatedly throughout my life — I gave up numerous PhD opportunities in the late 2000s and early 2010s to support my ex-wife’s (a different person) academic ambitions. One such opportunity was at an Ivy League university. How did that turn out? The relationship became abusive 7 years into our 14-year-long relationship, resulting in a diagnosis of PTSD because of her in 2015. I then divorced her in 2018. I regret not having matriculated at the Ivy League school that I was accepted at. What a missed opportunity.

I referenced “future partners” above, but after the experiences in an abusive relationship and the subsequent relationship ending in ghosting, I have no interest in being partnered up again. I cannot see what the point is: to build one’s life around another person, perhaps moving to a foreign country for them, calling them your “soul mate,” only for that to end suddenly, with almost no explanation, overnight due to a temporary illness. The trauma of that experience is so great that being coupled up with someone simply appears much too risky. I realized that I could be alone by myself, or alone with someone — because I can’t trust anyone again like I once did — so I might as well be alone by myself. At least being alone by myself provides more time for writing.

These experiences also made me wonder what the phrase “I love you” actually means. What useful information does it convey? Any? I know for a fact — from my own personal experiences — that it does not mean “I won’t abuse you,” “I won’t cause you PTSD,” “I won’t cheat on you,” “I won’t abandon you,” or “I won’t ghost you if you get sick.”[4]

So, what information does it convey? It’s very nice to hear, and very nice to say, but it now strikes me as a thoroughly meaningless phrase. If someone were to ever say “I love you” to me again, my response would be: “Okay, but will you be around tomorrow?” They might say: “What? I just told you that I love you!” To which I would rejoin: “I know, but I’m trying to plan my week — and my life — so it would be nice to know if you’ll still be with me tomorrow. ‘I love you’ does not mean ‘I won’t vanish overnight.’”

To be clear, when I say “I love you,” I very much mean that I will never abuse, harm, cheat on, abandon, ghost, and so on, my partner or friend (if I mean “love” in the friendly rather than romantic sense). That is my promise. I have never and would never do any of these things, because I need to sleep at night, and I cannot sleep knowing that I’ve done something terrible like ditching a friend or partner in a time of need.[5]

But I’ve come to realize that this is not what most people, at least in my experience, mean by the phrase. They rather mean something like, “I currently find you useful or convenient, and if that changes I will reconsider.” This is a lonely world full of little atoms that occasionally link up to each other, but the social forces that link these atoms can break at any point. That’s just the way it is — if you don’t believe me, then I dare you to get sick and see who exactly stays by your side (I say this sarcastically, of course, as I don’t want anyone to get sick!).

So, these are the three lessons that I have learned from my experience with ghosting. I wish I hadn’t learned them. I wish ghosting was some rare phenomenon that only the rarest and most callous people, perhaps like Trevor, were capable of. In fact, for several months after I was ghosted, I wasn’t even aware of the word “ghosting,” and so had no precise vocabulary to describe or explain what had happened. Unfortunately, ghosting is on the rise, and I’ve been meeting more and more people who have had awful, traumatic experiences with people they care about suddenly vanishing from their lives — as if those people had suddenly died. My ghosting experience has made me far more pessimistic about the world and humanity, and a great irony of my time in Germany is that I entered the country not being a pessimist, but left very much being one. Germany gave us the first systematic philosophies of pessimism, and so in a sense I’m walking in the footsteps of Schopenhauer, Mainländer, von Hartmann, and the others.

That’s my story. I hope you’ve found something of interest in it. Please feel free to share your own experiences in the comments section below.

Footnotes:

[1] I feel okay about discussing this in public partly because no one knows who my former partner is, nor do I want anyone to know — because this article is really about my experience, not about them. In fact, before I published my Truthdig article about ghosting, I asked numerous people who might have known who my partner is whether they actually knew, and all of them said “no.” If even one person had said “yes,” then I probably wouldn’t have published that because, again, this is not about them — it’s about the deeply disheartening, even soul-crushing experience that I went through.

[2] This was largely triggered by the stress of coming out as nonbinary, plus missing my partner (who was not in Germany at the time) and world affairs, most notably the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[3] Though thinking this is good advice doesn’t mean that I’m succeeding at following it! Old habits dying hard, and all of that.

[4] I mention cheating because my ex-wife cheated on me circa 2010 or 2011.

[5] To this day, despite what happened, if I were to hear that something bad has happened to my former partner, I would be devastated. I can’t just stop caring about someone — so, I still care about this person, even if they don’t care about me, about whether I live or die.