by Priya Malhotra
Cruelty, at least the old-fashioned kind, has a shape. It announces itself. It arrives with words you can quote later, replay, contest, reject. Even when it stings, it offers a surface against which the self can brace. Ghosting, by contrast, has no edges. It leaves no fingerprints. It is not an act so much as a disappearance, and it wounds precisely because it refuses to declare itself as one.
To be ghosted is not merely to be rejected. It is to be rendered uncertain about the status of reality itself—about what happened, what was meant, whether the past you shared was ever mutually understood. The pain does not come only from loss, but from ambiguity. And ambiguity, it turns out, can be more violent than an explicit no.
There is a reason direct cruelty, however unpleasant, often feels cleaner. A rejection, an insult, even a harsh goodbye acknowledges a shared frame. It says: We are in the same room. I see you. This is my position. Ghosting refuses that acknowledgment. It leaves you alone in a room you didn’t know you were exiting, wondering whether the lights will come back on.
At its core, ghosting is an injury to recognition.
Philosophers have long argued that being recognized—seen, addressed, responded to—is not a luxury but a basic human need. Recognition confers reality. To be recognized is to be confirmed as someone whose presence registers, whose existence calls for response. Ghosting withdraws that confirmation retroactively. It doesn’t just end the relationship; it quietly calls into question whether the relationship existed in the way you thought it did.
This is why ghosting can feel like erasure rather than rejection. Rejection says, I choose not to be with you. Ghosting says nothing at all, and in doing so, suggests something more corrosive: You do not require an answer.
Silence has always had moral weight. In earlier social orders, silence often functioned as punishment—ostracism, exile, shunning. What is new is how frictionless silence has become. Technology has not invented ghosting, but it has optimized it. It has made disappearance instantaneous, deniable, and socially legible. The unread message, the “seen” receipt, the indefinitely postponed reply—all allow someone to withdraw without ever having to occupy the uncomfortable role of the one who ends things.
That discomfort matters more than we like to admit. Ending a relationship, even a casual one, requires a willingness to be momentarily cast as the villain in someone else’s story. It requires naming desire—or the lack of it—and bearing the moral weight of that naming. Ghosting offers a way out. It allows people to preserve an image of themselves as kind, conflict-averse, non-harmful. Nothing was said; therefore, nothing was done.
But harm does not require spectacle. It requires effect.
One reason ambiguity cuts so deeply is that the human mind is a meaning-making organ. When faced with a clear ending, the psyche can begin the slow work of integration: grief, anger, acceptance, repair. Ambiguity blocks that process. It keeps the nervous system in a state of suspended alert, scanning for resolution that never arrives. The unanswered question—What happened?—becomes a loop rather than a door.
This is not a small thing. Studies of trauma have long shown that unpredictability intensifies stress. Pain with a cause, however brutal, is easier to metabolize than pain without explanation. Ghosting weaponizes uncertainty. It hands the injured party an unsolvable riddle and then leaves them alone with it.
What makes this feel violent is not just the absence of words, but the absence of timing. Ghosting often occurs after intimacy has already been established—after a rhythm of responsiveness has been set. The sudden withdrawal violates an implicit contract. It is not merely silence; it is silence where speech was promised.
And then there is the power dimension.
Ghosting is rarely symmetrical. It tends to flow in predictable directions: from those with more options to those with fewer, from those less invested to those more so, from those buffered by social capital to those exposed without it. Silence, in this sense, functions as a form of dominance. To ghost is to control the terms of exit while refusing responsibility for its consequences.
This is why ghosting can feel humiliating in a way direct cruelty often does not. Humiliation arises not from being disliked, but from being treated as negligible. Cruelty says, I reject you. Ghosting says, I don’t need to respond to you. One asserts power openly; the other exercises it invisibly.
There is also a temporal cruelty to ghosting that is easy to miss. Direct refusals happen in time. They mark a moment. Ghosting stretches harm indefinitely. Each day without response reopens the question. Each silence extends the injury. The wound does not bleed; it seeps.
Defenders of ghosting often appeal to self-protection. No one owes anyone an explanation, they argue. People have a right to disengage. This is true, in the narrowest sense. Autonomy matters. Boundaries matter. But autonomy does not absolve us from considering how exits are enacted. There is a difference between privacy and withholding, between protecting oneself and offloading discomfort onto another person’s psyche.
The ethical problem with ghosting is not that it prioritizes the self. It is that it does so by refusing to acknowledge the other as someone to whom something is owed—not intimacy, not continued presence, but clarity.
Clarity is not kindness, but it is a form of respect.
Part of what makes ghosting culturally pervasive is our collective discomfort with endings. We are trained to initiate—to swipe, to match, to begin—but not to conclude. There is no widely shared script for disengagement that is neither cruel nor evasive. In the absence of such scripts, disappearance becomes the default.
But disappearance is not neutral. It externalizes emotional labor. It forces the person left behind to do all the interpretive work: to construct a narrative that explains the silence, to manage the fallout, to decide when to stop waiting. The ghosted person becomes both plaintiff and judge in a case where the other party has vanished.
This is why ghosting often produces a peculiar form of self-doubt. The mind turns inward, searching for the misstep that must have justified the silence. Direct cruelty can be rejected as unjust; ghosting invites self-indictment. If they didn’t even say goodbye, the logic goes, perhaps I wasn’t worth the effort.
That thought is not incidental. It is the psychic residue of being treated as unanswerable.
What would it mean to take endings seriously again?
Not to dramatize them. Not to overexplain. But to recognize that closure is not a sentimental courtesy; it is a cognitive necessity. A sentence as simple as I don’t feel this continuing does not solve heartbreak, but it gives heartbreak a shape. It allows the mind to stop scanning the horizon for a reply that will never come.
In a culture that prizes optionality and ease, ghosting masquerades as efficiency. In truth, it is a form of displacement. It transfers the discomfort of ending onto the person least equipped to carry it.
Cruelty, at least, stands in the open. Ghosting hides. And what hides is harder to confront, harder to grieve, and harder to forgive.
The violence of ghosting lies not in what is said, but in what is withheld: recognition, finality, the dignity of an ending. We underestimate how much those things matter until they are gone—until we find ourselves speaking into silence, waiting for weather that never changes, unsure whether the storm has passed or whether we were simply abandoned in it.
Silence can be merciful. But when it replaces speech where speech is owed, it becomes something else entirely. Not an absence. A shattering force.
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