A while ago a client told me she felt trapped in the same scene. She had been dating a man for a couple of months; they met during the week, there were daily chats and constant messaging throughout the day, and they had even planned a trip together. Everything seemed to progress naturally until, from one day to the next, he stopped replying. There was no argument, no gradual drifting apart, no goodbye message. He simply disappeared.
What wore her down the most was not his absence, but the absolute lack of explanation. She spent her days going over every conversation, reviewing what he had said in the last meeting or whether his last messages had been “too much” (she looked at herself mercilessly in that search for reasons). Her mind was exhausted from trying to reconstruct a story whose ending had been left blank.
Ghosting: why we obsess over looking for answers when someone disappears without explanations
That scene accurately summarizes the true impact of ghosting. Far from being a modern rarity, the Forbes Health surveys on digital connections clearly reflect the magnitude of the phenomenon:
- General frequency: Between 65% and 76% of adults who use digital means to connect report having been ghosted at least once.
- Reciprocity: About 50% to 60% admit to having done it at least once, which confirms that it is not a marginal behavior, but an entrenched dynamic that moves us away from the comfortable victim role to confront our own responsibility.
- Context: Although it is often associated with younger people, studies show that among adults aged 35 to 55+ the phenomenon grew strongly with the digitization of dating and everyday communication.
When a relationship ends with words — no matter how hard or disappointing they may be—, our mind receives a concrete datum to process the closure and move on. In contrast, when someone disappears without a trace, they do not leave certainty: they leave a void. And since our mind does not tolerate gaps without answers, it begins to fill that space with hypotheses and questions that can stretch on for months.
However, when we turn our gaze toward the one who disappears, the panorama has multiple facets, although none justify the weariness of trying to decipher it. And even though we feel tempted to analyze what happened to them, the reality is that there is no way to know. The person who engages in ghosting may simply be fleeing from the discomfort of having to give an explanation or sustain a difficult conversation, choosing the most primitive escape route enabled by technology: disconnecting and moving on.
The variants behind that escape can be thousands —because although today we give it an English name, disappearing without explanations is not a modern invention; it is a form of evasion as old as relationships themselves—: from the incapacity to say outright “I’m not interested in continuing,” to someone who perhaps wanted to move forward but didn’t dare, or someone who doesn’t even register that they owed a conversation. In any of those scenarios, the result is the same: there is no point in stopping there or looking for answers in our heads.
Many times, the person who disappears operates from a basic instinct of this era, where the other ceases to exist the exact moment the screen goes dark. With the proliferation of thousands of digital channels, this disconnection has intensified exponentially. We live in a hyper-connected era and, at the same time, deeply disconnected from the human register. We have permanent availability to start a contact in seconds, but an almost zero tolerance for enduring two minutes of discomfort face to face.
I work daily with these dynamics in my training spaces, and the result is always the same: exhausted minds trying to decipher a riddle that belongs to someone else.
Understanding this brings us back to the center: in relationships, commitment is demonstrated through actions and not words. Silence is also a behavior; lingering on hypotheses in the face of that absence only holds us back. If the other left without a word, the only objective data is already on the table; there is no need to translate it or try to make sense of it. Let it go; that may not be the right path.
Source: Patricia Benedit- Ontological Coach, Mediator, creator of the Route of Self-Mastery, a guiding process for spaces of personal development and conscious relationships (@patricia.benedit).
