Psychology, electronic lifestyle: ghosting

Self-tutoring about psychology: the tutor begins about ghosting.

The following is according to my understanding.

When I was a kid, it was the 70s and 80s. Life was simple: nobody had a mobile phone, social media, or anything like that.

Ghosting did happen back then, though I don’t think it was called ghosting. Person A just stopped talking to Person B, with whom they’d apparently been close before. Person B often wondered why, although sometimes they probably knew but didn’t want to face it.

We lived in a face-to-face world back then, so abruptly cutting ties with someone wasn’t cheap like it is today, in the age of mobile phones and social media.

Back then, one idea seemed to be that Person B got ghosted because being their friend had a social cost: even if Person A liked Person B, Person A’s other friends didn’t like Person B. Person A lacked the stomach to stand up for their friendship with Person B, but ghosting was the easy other option.

Sometimes, though, Person B had a huge amount of baggage which they expected Person A to take on. Person A found the situation too embarrassing to explain, so ghosting seemed the practical option.

Yet, the reverse could also happen, and sometimes did: that is, Person B knew they had a lot of baggage, and they definitely expected someone else to shoulder it. When Person B sensed that Person A liked them, but wouldn’t carry their baggage, they ghosted Person A.

Another motivation for ghosting seems to be fear of the unknown. Person A likes Person B, but can’t figure out how a relationship with them could work. Perhaps they’ve just met, or else they have known each other for awhile but a fresh obstacle has surfaced. Person A can’t imagine how the relationship can survive the obstacle; the whole situation is too complex for them to process. They don’t want to go down a rabbit hole just to discover, in the end, the relationship was never possible in the first place. In response, they ghost Person B as damage control.

I’ve known people who were very popular, and certainly would ghost others. Such people often ended up on one of two paths. One path was that they became superficial to the point that they resembled an empty glass of water. The other path saw them completely change virtually everything about themselves, so as to become unrecognizable over the course of a year.

It seems to me that being ghosted is just as often a blessing in disguise.

Source:

msn.com