Originally published June 2023.
Dating culture has a bad habit. Okay, it has fifty, but today we’re going to learn about this one: cute little names. You can’t skip a YouTube ad for a mattress that comes in a box without seeing a new term for new bullshit people are doing to each other in the dating space. We take a trend or practice that’s abhorrent and we give it a fun moniker to hashtag, like a new color of nail polish at 1990s mall. But this charming hobby started somewhere, didn’t it? It started with the earliest, most pervasive of behaviors: We started getting cute when we started getting ghosted, and I’m sick to death of this shit.
What is ghosting? Well, it’s got range, I’ll give it that. Ghosting can be anything from opening your dating app to find that the person you’ve been exchanging messages with has disappeared and probably blocked you for reasons entirely unknown, or you can be in an actual relationship with someone for three months, have plans to meet at the flag football league you joined together, and instead you just never hear from them again. (This is true, and it was the worst ghost story I’d ever heard until I saw a woman on TikTok get ghosted by a man who married her six weeks prior. Literally he just left the house, never came back, and was so deeply hidden it was nearly impossible for her lawyer to serve him with divorce papers.) For those wondering, in the situation mentioned above, he didn’t die. They worked in the same building and she saw him in the elevator a few months later. For the record though, I hope he’s died since.
Ghosting is suddenly and without notice ending all communication with someone who expects to be communicated with based on behavior you yourself have displayed in order to get someone to communicate with you. Feel insane yet? I sure used to. But then I deleted my dating apps four and a half years ago and now I feel light as a fucking boxed mattress. We gave it the name “ghosting” because it mimics the behavior of someone dying. That’s how quick, confusing, and permanent ghosting feels. Y’all, that’s morbid.
I’m baffled by our own acceptance of things like ghosting. Somehow we’re cool with assigning these behaviors little names and shrugging our shoulders when they happen because we’re so used to bad hashtaggy situations in dating that to name them has become synonymous with forgiving the act. Whelp, I just got snowglobed, breadcrumbed, or windowshopped, guess that’s dating for ya!
But there’s one name that encompasses every single dating behavior, and we ignore it because we think if we bring it to light, that will “lower our chances” of finding someone. We don’t do anything to actually stop these behaviors because we’re afraid that if we reference an absence of sportsmanship, we’ll get kicked out of the game. We’re afraid to insult the institution that’s insulting us. That’s how scared we are of being single. We think it’s such a horrific state of being that we’ll put up with endless amounts of what’s really happening: Bad Manners.
It’s not ghosting. You’re being ignored. It’s no more cute or complicated than that. Someone doesn’t give enough of a shit about you to say something as simple as goodbye. Instead, they care far more for their own comfort and convenience, no matter how much confusion, bewilderment, concern, or wasted time they cause someone. It is the most honest measure of someone’s respect for you, and the clearest indicator of how much more time you should spend thinking about someone capable of such a thing, which is no time at all. And please, I beg you, spend zero time wondering what it was you did “wrong.”
Ghosting is basically someone who is unable to deal with their own regret. Modern dating means we can meet literally endless amounts of people. There’s no way all of those pairings of people are going to work out. We’re not meant to be compatible with everyone, it’s okay — that’s why you didn’t do anything wrong. Wrong comes later, when someone realizes they thought they were going to be into you, as it turns out they’re not, but they don’t give enough of a shit about you to do anything mannerly about it. If they don’t actually feel anything for you, apparently you’re not worth them lifting a literal finger. You didn’t do anything wrong by being yourself. They did something wrong by being a dick.
I’ve yet to see a dating app implement anything resembling actual consequences for bad manners in dating, and as much as I’d love us all to be able to confront our ghosters and let them know how much we didn’t appreciate what they did, I don’t really feel like that’s safe, much less possible—we’re all just digital entities at this point. Personally, I solved this problem by leaving the online dating world entirely, and I haven’t been ghosted since. It’s been nice. But it’s your decision to make, really. In a space where anything goes, consequence-free, you have to decide if it’s a space you want be in at all. You don’t have to make yourself available to a disgusting dating dictionary if you don’t want to, and you’re still just as worthy and able to meet a partner in real life, too.
These behaviors aren’t okay, there’s never a name so catchy or witty that it absolves someone from hurting your feelings. I worry that by giving bad manners better branding, we’re giving them more space to exist. Treating someone like a disposable, worthless object is never okay, and shame on modern dating for making it so effortless to do so.
You don’t have to be haunted by the horrors of the dating world if they’re making you unhappy. Making yourself available to be treated however someone feels like treating you in the hopes that one person, one day, will treat you well is a sad way to live, one that I allowed for over a decade. In leaving the dating apps, I know I’ve made the right decision, because no one treats me like shit anymore. It’s not ghosting. You’re being ignored. And I think we all have a lot of happiness and self worth to gain by refusing to ignore the truth any longer.