You had three good dates, the texts were easy, and then nothing. No fight and no explanation, only a thread that stops. Ghosting has become so familiar that it barely needs defining, but the reasons behind it are still widely misunderstood, and recent research suggests that the silent party is often having a harder time than the person left wondering.

How common is it

Estimates vary with who is asked. In US survey research led by psychologist Gili Freedman and published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, about one in four participants said a partner had ghosted them, and about one in five admitted doing it themselves. Studies of younger adults, who tend to date through apps, have found substantially higher numbers.

Those surveys focus on romance, but the habit is not limited to dating. Friends and job recruiters can vanish in the same way.

Why people do it

Monica Ricci, a relationship coach in Georgia who uses the Gottman Method, a research-based style of couples counseling focused on how partners talk and argue, told Fox News that ghosting is a classic avoidance behavior, comparable to procrastination. Someone senses that a conversation will be uncomfortable, puts it off, and then finds that the longer it has been the harder it is to send anything at all.

Common reasons include:

  • Fear of an awkward conversation and of how the other person will react.
  • Not wanting to disappoint someone, which can feel like kindness to the person doing it.
  • Low investment. After a date or two, some people simply do not think a formal ending is warranted.

Dating apps have made all of this easier. When two people share no friends, no workplace and no neighborhood, there is little social cost to disappearing.

The surprise in the research

A recent set of experiments published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, by researchers Sophia Li, Coral Zheng and Juliana Schroeder, examined how people on each side of a dropped conversation see things. In the first study, of 195 adults recalling real experiences, those who had stopped replying reported more distress than people who had been ignored predicted they felt. Those who went silent, meanwhile, were accurate about how bad the ignored person felt. The gap was widest when the silence was not deliberate, as when someone simply forgot to answer.

A second study, with 601 people imagining these scenarios, pointed in the same direction, and it found that a very short reply, even “Sorry, but I can’t talk right now,” narrowed the gap and reduced self-blame among those on the receiving end.

The evidence is not airtight. In a third experiment using live online chats, the main effect did not replicate, and only a later, unplanned analysis pointed the same way. All participants were from the United States. Still, the broad idea that silence does not feel as painless to the sender as it looks is consistent with what Ricci sees in practice. Someone may feel relieved at first, she says, and later feel guilty about what they left undone, because it raises questions about the kind of person they want to be.

If it happens to you

The urge to go back over every message is normal. The brain goes looking for a pattern, and a sudden silence offers none. Ricci’s advice is to make peace with never hearing why, and to avoid treating the silence as a judgment of your value. Ghosting, she says, reveals more about how the other person handles discomfort than about you.

It can help to send one clear, final message if you need to, then stop. Setting a limit on how long you will think about it, talking it through with a friend, and muting the thread are small steps that often work better than waiting for a reply.

What to send instead

Ending things honestly can be done in two sentences. Ricci suggests being direct and brief, and not framing it as the other person’s fault. Something along these lines is enough:

“I enjoyed getting to know you, but I’m not feeling the connection I’m looking for. I wish you the best.”

You cannot control how someone takes it, but you can make sure they are not left guessing.

There is one important exception. If someone is harassing, stalking or abusing you, Ricci says cutting off all contact is the safest and smartest choice. No one owes a polite goodbye to a person who makes them feel unsafe, and those worried about their safety can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.