Hi!
I just want to give you a heads up that I’m about to ghost you.
You may think this is unconventional. I want you to know that this is me trying to do right by you. We’ve all been ghosted by someone who stopped responding out of the blue, and that just sucks.
This was engineered to suck strictly less.
You won’t be needing to go back and reread our message history, so that you could identify exactly when my responses to you became more superficial and less, you know, like I’m actually into talking to you.
You won’t be feeling stupid for realising that you may have been subjected to a soft-ghosting phase (we all know the soft-ghosting phase), where I still sporadically respond, and leave you stuck thinking that I just like, haven’t been on my phone for the last week or two.
All of this was a risk with traditional, “quiet” ghosting, but we’ll be avoiding it because I’ll just tell you now, upfront.
Here is what being ghosted means:
I’m no longer going to be replying to you. I won’t be giving you a reason, because to give you one, I’d need to send you a message, and not doing that is kind of the whole thing. On your end, there will just be indefinite, impersonal, closureless silence. It’s the least I can do.
I might never know. One possible explanation is that I am conflict-avoidant (though evidence is mixed), and I’d initially thought that maybe if I went along and replied to you for a while, without obvious enthusiasm, you’d subconsciously pick up on that, and our interaction would gently end in some mildly non-confrontational way. Anyway, that’ll be for me to introspect and feel vaguely bad about. You won’t get to know.
I will almost certainly be receiving all your messages — after all, I’m not blocking you, because, like, it’s not that big a deal. (also, blocking is covered separately anyway; see “Notice of being blocked.”)
This means anything you send will show up as delivered (though not “read,” I’m neither an amateur nor a pathological sociopath).
Historically, in the latter stages of soft-ghosting, I’d pull back on sending real messages, but might still occasionally respond with an emoji (like a heart, or maybe the crying laughing one if you say something that is socially understood to be funny).
I know it causes confusion, so I’m working on removing this stage from the process.
This can happen due to a genuine error on my part. If it does, I might follow up with “oops, wrong chat haha.” That is just a common courtesy, and is not in any way an indication of me unghosting you. If you so choose, feel free to follow up with “lol no worries! how have you been?”, but note that I won’t be answering.
This is not considered a risk for all classes of relationships, but I’ll cover it just in case:
If I’m high, or had some of my special tea (shoutout to Vic for the recipe), I might send you a weird message out of the blue. Just, like, do me a favour and fully ignore that one. We will never talk about it (or anything else), but I’ll quietly owe you.
So, that’s about it. A part of me almost wants to say sorry, but that’s not what this is about.
Please let me know how I did! It will help me provide a better experience to the next person I ghost.
lake
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big thanks to Hera for inspiration and feedback