There’s a difference between protecting your boundaries and leaving someone behind after they’ve trusted you with their time and feelings.
Someone you were texting for three weeks just stopped answering, and now you’re doing the group chat forensics. Was it a joke about his ex? Was it the fact that you double-texted only hours after the date ended? You’ll never know, because he has evaporated into the algorithmic ether. And this evaporation (what the kids call “ghosting”) seems to be the standard going rate for exiting a relationship in 2026.
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Is Ghosting A New Dating Trend, Or Just Old Behavior With Better Technology?
Ghosting gets treated like some Gen Z innovation cooked up alongside talking stages, red flags, and situationships, but people have been disappearing on each other long before read receipts existed. What’s changed is the infrastructure. Now you can vanish with a single unanswered text instead of, say, moving to another town and changing your Instagram handle.
Everyone has a story where they were on the receiving end, and everyone also has a story where they were the one who went quiet. Ask a person why they ghosted someone, and you’ll get a tidy little defense ready to go. He got weird. It was only two dates. I didn’t owe her anything. It’s not that deep. Ask that same person how it felt to be ghosted themselves, and the vocabulary switches up fast. Suddenly it’s cruel. Suddenly it’s cowardly. Suddenly silence isn’t such a neutral little freeway exit after all.
Funny How That Works.
I started thinking about this seriously after a professor of mine, who taught environmental art of all things, made an offhand comment that stuck with me. She was talking about the Anthropocene, about how humans tend to lavish attention on a place, drain it of everything useful, and then leave without so much as a note. Colonization does this. Strip mining does this. She said, almost as an aside, that this was basically ghosting on a planetary scale, and I’ve never been able to unhear it. Show up, take what you want, disappear before the sheer idea of commitment can become a suggestion. It turns out this isn’t just a dating problem, but a whole species problem.
Which brings us to writer and social critic Gloria Jean Watkins, best known by her pseudonym “bell hooks,” who didn’t live to see the word “ghosting” enter common usage, but spent her decades-long career writing about the exact behavior underneath it. In her 1999 book All About Love, she argues that real love depends on truth-telling, and that when we punish honesty by making it costly, we teach each other that lying is the safer bet. “When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better,” she writes. “To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
Ghosting is basically that theory in action.
How Ghosting Shows Bell Hooks’ Theory In Action
Ghosting treats disappearing as an easier move than a slightly awkward conversation. Most people will choose easy nine times out of 10. hooks would probably say the problem isn’t that the ghost doesn’t care. It’s that caring, done properly, requires being willing to be the person who said the hard thing out loud, and almost nobody wants that job.
That said, let’s not pretend every unanswered text is a moral failing. Ghosting someone after one lukewarm date where you both already knew it was going nowhere isn’t a crime against humanity. No, you don’t owe a stranger a formal exit interview. And if the person you’re ghosting has shown you any sign of being controlling, volatile, or unsafe, silence is a boundary, and probably the smartest one available to you.
The ethics start to shift once real human time and real human trust enter the picture. Vanishing on someone after a few casual dates is a different act entirely from vanishing on someone you’ve been seeing for eight months, who met your friends and thought you were building something. That’s an extraction. You took the emotional labor, the version of intimacy that comes with being known by someone, then left without paying any of it back.
So Can Ghosting Be Ethical?
Sometimes, honestly, yes. Early on, when nothing much has been invested, or when someone’s safety is genuinely on the line, disappearing is a reasonable and even smart choice. Yet the deeper someone has let you in, the less you get to hide behind the excuse that a text felt like too much effort.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Ghosting can be reasonable when little has been invested in a relationship or when someone’s safety is at risk. In those situations, disappearing can be a smart way to protect yourself.
Ghosting may be acceptable after a lukewarm first date or a few casual dates when both people have little emotional investment. It can also be justified when someone is controlling, volatile or unsafe.
Ghosting becomes harder to justify as a relationship grows deeper. Disappearing after months of dating, shared intimacy and meaningful trust can be cruel because the other person has invested significant time and emotional energy.
Ghosting can hurt because it replaces an honest explanation with silence. When people have shared emotional intimacy and the experience of being known, suddenly disappearing can leave the other person without closure.
It depends on the relationship. Someone you have barely dated may not be owed a formal explanation, while a person you have built significant trust and intimacy with deserves more honesty.
