Ghosting: why silence hurts more than rejection

For three weeks you wrote to each other every day. Good morning, a photo of lunch, long conversations in the evening, two dates, a third arranged for Saturday. On Thursday evening you ask what time you should come. The message is read. On Friday there is no reply. None on Saturday either. On Sunday you check once more whether it was really delivered, and on Monday you notice that you are no longer among his followers.

Nobody said anything unkind to you. Nobody said anything at all. And yet people often describe this feeling as worse than open rejection: “If only he had written that he wasn’t interested.” When someone cuts off all contact without explanation, we call it ghosting, because the person vanishes like a ghost.

In this post I would like to explain why silence hurts so much, why your thoughts return to it for longer than to a clear “no”, how you can close the story yourself when the other person will not do it for you, and what is happening on the other side, in the person who disappears. Because that, too, can be either of us.

What ghosting is and how common it is

We speak of ghosting when someone unilaterally and without explanation stops responding to a person with whom they had an established connection, and that person does not know whether it is over, why, or whether to keep waiting. Two parts are essential: contact already existed, and there is no explanation. If someone does not reply after one message on an app, that is unpleasant, but it is not the same as silence after three months of weekends together.

It is not rare. In 2019 Gili Freedman and colleagues published a study in which they asked adults in the United States about their experience of ghosting in romantic relationships: roughly a quarter said it had happened to them, and roughly a fifth said they had left someone that way themselves. These figures should not be taken as a measure for all people and all countries, since samples in this research are online and mostly American. But they do tell us two things. First, if this has happened to you, you are not an exception. And second, the two groups overlap: many people know both sides.

Ghosting is not limited to dating. It happens between friends, in families, and in job hunting, when no message arrives after three rounds of interviews. Here I will stay mainly with romantic relationships and friendships, though much of what follows applies elsewhere too.

Why exclusion hurts: what the research has shown

The psychologist Kipling Williams has spent decades studying what happens to a person when others ignore them. For this he developed a simple computer game in which three players throw a ball to one another. The participant believes they are playing with two people, but in fact they are playing with a programme that, after a few throws, stops passing them the ball. These are strangers, the game is trivial, and it lasts two or three minutes. Even so, participants reliably report feeling worse afterwards, with a lower sense of belonging and a weaker sense of control.

In 2003 Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman and Williams took this game into an MRI scanner. When participants were excluded, brain regions responded that are also involved in the unpleasantness of physical pain. Hence the term social pain. This finding calls for caution: later research has shown that the overlap is not as literal as newspaper headlines made it sound, and the brain does not treat physical and social pain as one and the same thing. The basic message, however, has held up: exclusion is not “all in your head” in the sense of something you are making up. It is a signal the nervous system takes seriously, because for human beings belonging to a group has always been a matter of survival.

Even more telling is an experiment published in 2004 by Lisa Zadro, Williams and Rick Richardson. Participants were told in advance that it was a computer excluding them from the game, not people. It hurt anyway. The first response to exclusion, then, is fast and does not wait for an explanation. Only afterwards comes the reflection with which we try to make sense of what happened. And this is exactly where silence begins to differ from rejection.

In his 2007 review article, Williams describes how being ignored threatens four basic needs: for belonging, for self-esteem, for control, and for the sense that your existence means something. In an open argument or rejection, it is mainly the first two that are hit. A person who argues with you still sees you. A person who stays silent also takes away your chance to say anything, and the sense that you were worth a reply at all.

Why silence hurts differently from “no”

A rejection in words is painful, but it is an event. It has a date, it has content, you can tell a friend about it: “She said she didn’t feel enough.” You are sad, perhaps angry, but your mind knows what it is dealing with. Silence has no event. You do not know when the ending happened and, for the first few days, not even whether it did. Perhaps he fell ill. Perhaps he lost his phone. Perhaps he has a demanding week. Each of these explanations is plausible for a few hours, and each keeps you waiting.

The family therapist Pauline Boss introduced the term ambiguous loss for losses in which it is unclear whether the person has gone or not. She was describing far harder circumstances than the end of a relationship, such as families of the missing and relatives of people with dementia, so I would not equate ghosting with them. Her central idea is useful, though: grieving is hard to begin until it is clear whether anything has been lost at all. Ambiguity freezes grief. How this unfolds in serious losses of that kind I have described in the post Grieving someone who is still alive: dementia, addiction, estrangement.

The mind dislikes unfinished stories. When an explanation is missing, it starts producing one itself, and since the only person it has available to investigate is you, it investigates you. You go through the last messages looking for the sentence that was too much. You assemble versions: I wrote too much, I wrote too little, I shouldn’t have mentioned my ex. This circling is called rumination, and ghosting gives it ideal conditions, since the question has no answer you could reach by thinking. The answer is in another person’s head, and that person is not picking up.

There is one more feature particular to our time. Silence today is not complete. You can see that the message has been read. You can see that he was online ten minutes ago. You can see his new photo. These scraps of information say nothing about the reason, yet they wake the waiting every time. Why the brain searches so persistently for someone who is no longer there after a relationship ends, I explained in the post Why we think about an ex for so long after a break-up — the neuroscience of attachment.

What silence says about you — and what it doesn’t

The biggest trap of ghosting is the conclusion the mind reaches fastest: “I wasn’t worth even one sentence.” The conclusion sounds logical, but it confuses two things. The fact that someone decided to leave says something about how they felt in the relationship with you. How they left says something almost exclusively about them: how they handle uncomfortable conversations, what they learned at home about conflict, and how much discomfort they can bear.

In 2019 Leah LeFebvre and colleagues asked young adults why they had left someone without a word. The answers were fairly ordinary: because it was easier, because interest had faded, because something about the other person had put them off, because the relationship did not yet seem serious enough to “owe” an explanation, and, in a smaller share, because they had felt unsafe. Most of these reasons have nothing to do with how much the person left behind was worth. They have a great deal to do with avoidance.

How hard silence hits you also depends on your history. Someone who grew up around people whose attention was unpredictable has a more sensitive alarm for silence; I write about this in the post Anxious attachment: why a partner’s silence sets off the alarm. This does not mean you are overreacting. It means the present silence echoes in an older one, and that part of the pain you feel is older than this relationship. The knowledge base has an entry on this under anxious attachment.

A conversation that often happens between friends

(composed, not a real person)
“It’s been ten days and I still look at my phone first thing every morning.”
“What are you hoping it will say?”
“Anything. Even if she wrote that I got on her nerves. Just so I’d know.”
“And if it never says anything?”
“Then I don’t know when I’m allowed to stop waiting.”
“Maybe that’s a question you can answer. Not her.”

That last sentence holds the heart of everything that follows. In a clear break-up, the ending is set by the other person, or by the two of you together. With ghosting, you have to set it yourself. This is unfair, because you are doing work someone else should have done, but it is the only path that is in your hands.

How to close it yourself when the other person won’t

The word “closure” is misleading if you picture a conversation after which everything is clear. Such a conversation often brings no relief even when it does take place, since people who left without a word are rarely able to say why. The closure I mean is a decision to stop waiting for information you are not going to get, and to give the story an ending you can say in one sentence: “He left without explanation. I don’t know why. For me, that is the end of it.”

Before you get there, one single clear message makes sense, if you have not sent it already. Short, without reproach, and without a question that would put you back into waiting: “Since I haven’t heard from you, I take it you don’t want to continue. I wish you all the best.” A message like this does not ask for a reply, so your peace no longer depends on whether one arrives. A second, third and fourth message, as a rule, bring nothing but fresh waiting.

For those days when everything is still raw and you do not know what to do with your hands and your phone, much of what I gathered in the post The first thirty days after a breakup: what helps and what prolongs the pain applies. Here I add an exercise made specifically for an ending without explanation.

Exercise: a date, a letter and one sentence

You need twenty minutes, a sheet of paper and a calendar. The exercise does not remove sadness. It does something silence cannot: it draws a line between waiting and grieving.

1. Set a date. Choose a day until which you still allow for the possibility of a reply. If more than a week or two has passed since the last message, that day can be today. Write it in your calendar with the words “the waiting ends”.
2. Write a letter you will not send. By hand, without correcting. Everything you would say if they were sitting opposite you: what hurt, what you expected, what you don’t understand. More detailed instructions are in the knowledge base under the exercise The letter you don’t send.
3. Separate what you know from what you are guessing. On a new sheet, make two columns. In the first, only facts (“didn’t reply to three messages”); in the second, explanations (“he got tired of me”, “he found someone else”). Look at how short the first column is and how long the second.
4. Write your ending sentence. One sentence containing only the first column and your decision. For example: “He stopped replying, I don’t know the reason, and from today I am no longer waiting.” Say it out loud to one person you trust.
5. Reduce the scraps. Mute or hide their profile, archive the conversation so that you don’t see it every time you open the app. You are not punishing anyone by doing this. You are simply no longer feeding the waiting.

If in a few days you catch yourself checking again, it does not mean the exercise failed. The habit of checking fades slowly, with each day you do not feed it.

When you are the one who disappears

If, while reading, you thought of someone you yourself never wrote back to, you are not the only one. As the figures above show, many people have both experiences. We can talk about this without judgement, because it is understandable why silence is so tempting: at the moment when you would have to write an uncomfortable sentence, disappearing spares you the discomfort. The cost is simply passed on to the other person, and part of it stays with you too, as a quiet sense of guilt or as unease when you run into them in the street.

Freedman and colleagues found something else of interest. People who believe more strongly that a relationship is either “meant to be” or not were more likely to rate ghosting as an acceptable way to end things. The logic is understandable: if this is not the one, why explain. People who believe that relationships grow through the effort invested were more reserved about it. Silence, then, is often also the result of a belief that a conversation cannot change anything. What we overlook is that a conversation at the end is not meant to save the relationship. It is meant to avoid leaving the other person with an open question.

Often there is a pattern behind disappearing that is not new. Someone who quickly feels hemmed in by closeness or by another person’s expectations withdraws before they are able to put it into words; more on this in the post Avoidant attachment: why closeness tires and retreat calms and in the post Fear of commitment: when closeness is both a wish and a threat. The environment plays its part too, one in which every contact is a swipe away and seems replaceable, which I describe in the post Dating app fatigue.

If you want to act differently, you do not need a long letter. Two sentences are enough, ones that leave no door open if you do not mean to leave it open: “It was lovely to meet you, but I don’t feel I want to continue. I wish you all the best.” You do not need to analyse the reason, and you do not need to defend yourself. Nor is it always too late in retrospect. A short message to someone you have owed a reply for months is often received better than you expect. Just consider whether you are writing it for their sake or to ease your own conscience; if it would reopen a wound that has already closed, leaving things be is sometimes the more considerate choice.

When cutting contact without explanation is justified

So far I have written as though silence were always the worse choice. It is not. There are circumstances in which you owe no one an explanation and in which cutting contact without a word is the safest path.

If someone has intimidated you, humiliated you, controlled you, threatened you or failed to respect your “no”, you do not owe them a conversation about the ending. In such relationships an explanation is often just a new opening for pressure. The same applies when you have clearly said that you do not want to continue and the other person does not accept it: after a spoken “no”, your silence is no longer ghosting, it is a boundary. If you fear for your safety, in Slovenia call the police on 113 or the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55.

The second limit concerns the title of this post. The claim that silence hurts more than rejection matches what many people describe, and it fits the research on exclusion. But it is not a law. Studies that directly compare ghosting with an open break-up are still few, and they rely on self-report and on mostly young, online samples. For some people silence is actually easier, because it spares them sentences they would remember for ever. And a laboratory ball game that lasts three minutes is not the same as the end of a relationship, so we should not conclude too much from it.

The third limit: not every silence is ghosting. People fall ill, sink into depression, suffer a loss, are swamped by work. Someone who withdraws from everyone has not necessarily left you. Before you finish the story for yourself, it is fair to allow for that possibility. This is exactly why the date from the exercise is useful: you make room for an explanation that is not about you, and you still give the waiting an end.

When it is worth seeking help

Most people get over ghosting without professional help, with time and with friends. I would pay attention in three cases. First, if after several weeks your thoughts are still circling the same question and costing you sleep or concentration. Second, if this silence has opened something older and larger than this relationship, such as a sense that people always leave you sooner or later. And third, if the pattern repeats, whether it is others who keep disappearing or you who keep disappearing, and you do not know why.

In therapy at that point we are concerned less with the person who left than with what their leaving awakens in you and where you know it from. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, this is often the starting point: present pain is a doorway into an older story about how you learned closeness and what you learned to expect from the people who matter to you. When those around you do not take the end of a relationship seriously (“you barely knew each other”), grieving becomes more tangled still; more on this in the post The grief nobody acknowledges: miscarriage, divorce, losing a job. I work in person in Ljubljana, and sessions can also be held in English.

If rejection leaves you feeling hopeless or thinking that you no longer want to live, do not wait for it to pass on its own. In Slovenia, call the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day) or the mental distress line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (between 7 pm and 7 am), and in an emergency call 112.

What to remember

• Exclusion triggers a fast and real response in the nervous system. The fact that silence hurts you is not an overreaction.
• Silence hurts differently from “no” because it has neither a date nor a reason. So the mind writes the rest of the story itself and most often finds the culprit in you.
• The way someone left says more about how they handle uncomfortable conversations than about your worth.
• You do not wait for closure from the other person. You set a date, write your ending sentence and stop feeding the waiting.
• If you are the one who disappears: two clear, kind sentences are enough. The exception is relationships in which you felt unsafe. There you owe no one an explanation.