In defense of ghosting: It's nothing personal
Ghosting is everywhere, and dating apps are desperate to put an end to this disappearing act. But ghosting doesn't need a solution — it is the solution.
If you didn’t already know before plunging into the deep, dark depths that is online dating, you certainly learned quickly thereafter: dating is a numbers game. And when you’re messaging with what turns out to be your third lamest match of the day, ghosting becomes a necessary tool to manage the exhaustion that is mining through the hundreds of (probably boring) people at your fingertips.
For the record: This isn’t the nicest way of looking at people. But neither is the meat-market display of the swiping mechanism employed by the most popular apps. It is, as they say, what it is. If you’re going to partake, this objectification is an inherent and unavoidable aspect of dating app culture.
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There are a literal million reasons why a match can flop. You can chalk most failed conversations up to lack of spark — you either have a connection or you don’t. Not everyone wants to partake in games of witty one-upmanship (*raises hand*) or blatant innuendo (*puts hand down*). You might just be on completely different pages right off the bat.
Some people are lazy swipers. They’ll casually swipe right before really analyzing your profile only to later discover — oh, wait — they actually really hate people with cats and ew that’s a cat in your last picture and they missed it the first time. It happens.
Other people are coming off their last breakup sore and just looking for the validation, comfort and ego boost that newcomers tend to feel from the matching experience — they were never there to meet up anyway.
See: a literal million reasons.
So when someone doesn’t chat you back, the rejection isn’t necessarily personal. It’s cheesy but it’s true: It’s not you, it’s them. You’re not a fit, and that’s okay.
Ghosting isn’t unique to the online world. We’ve done it countless times in person, it just doesn’t seem as pointed. “If you were at a party full of single people and chatted briefly to someone before pausing to chat to another, and then turned back to discover the first person had disappeared, you probably wouldn't think too much of it — after all, it's a big party and you're all there to mingle,” a 45-year-old single writer who uses a combination of Tinder, Happn and Bumble told me.
Speaking briefly with someone in person does not imply an investment, and neither does an online greeting. You haven’t met, you can barely remember this person’s name without going back to check their profile, and you’ve made no promises or commitments.
As a 32-year-old single software developer said, “I think that's why people feel okay ghosting. ‘I hardly know this person. Do I really have to go through the exercise of telling them why I'm not interested?’” And that’s the main issue: formally cutting off every conversation you might have with a stranger online would be exhausting.
Even as someone who only casually flips through dating apps, I have 200+ matches that I do not speak with, either ever or any longer. Some I stopped replying to, some stopped replying to me. That’s online dating.
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“I have so many conversations going on at the same time that don't result in actual dates that I can't actually reject all of them. So I ghost,” a 29-year-old investment professional told me. “I don't think the person really devoted any resources to chat me along with other multiple people at the same time online.”
Ghosting is easy. Sitting down to explain why you aren’t interested in continuing a conversation with someone you barely know is not.
And what good would come of it anyway? As much as some people might feel like understanding why the other person disappeared would be helpful, there are too many variables.
Even with the best intentions, some criticism might read as offensive. Or they might just not know what the hell they’re talking about. (They don’t actually know anything about you, after all.) Or it might be one of those incredibly personal literal million reasons that would have no impact on your future involvements.
As the 29-year-old investment professional put it, “How would the other person possibly benefit by an internet stranger saying he or she doesn't wanna meet up because ‘I find you boring.’” The 45-year-old writer said something similar: “If I hardly know a person, I think I have little right to judge their behavior. It'd be massively egotistical of me to judge them after so little interaction.”
Online dating moves quickly. One day you’re all about one or two threads of interaction, and the next it’s an entirely different set of people. It’s just not feasible for every match to answer your requests for feedback.
“I think it's slightly unrealistic to expect people to pour their hearts out to you when you hardly know them,” the 45-year-old writer said. “The problem is that one person might just not be into it (call it chemistry, call it feeling, call it vibe, whatever) while the other person is projecting all sorts of stuff on the other person and building up the proto-relationship in their mind.”
The only effort we can reasonably expect from a match is to take a stab at an honest-to-goodness conversation. If it doesn’t pass the initial chemistry test, anything else is unnecessary.
There are, of course, scenarios where ghosting is bad. If you’ve been dating someone — even casually — for a chunk of time, for instance. But when you’re just chatting, gauging who the hell this person even is? When you haven’t even committed to a first date? It’s not rude — it’s just part of the process. It’s “expected,” as the 29-year-old said.
Dating apps like The League and others are rushing to try to "solve" the problem of ghosting. They’re offering features like read receipts or expiring messages that feel more like shaming. Those “features,” along with other attempts to engineer social interactions between matches (like limiting how many people you see, especially with The League’s penalization of people who dip into any kind of inactivity) are manipulating your behaviors by controlling your experience.
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So why are these apps even bothering? Ghosting is always going to be a part of online dating, as long as it’s a numbers game. But neither of those things are inherently bad. Dating apps, as abhorrent as they can be, are at least convenient and manageable. You can gauge a potential match from a safe and fairly anonymous distance, and you can decide when to pull the plug without the risk of them continuing to have unfettered access to you.
The fact that online dating is on your terms is one of the few things it has going for it. The best feature these apps introduced was making communication gated rather than leaving it open to a wild west world of negging and sexually-charged commentary. That’s done. But there’s certainly still room for features that would minimize the need for ghosting.
The most cumbersome part of all this is swiping through the piles of profiles — some of which are joke accounts or spam — to get to someone you could see yourself liking. Anything that would help that experience — vague and magical algorithms, for instance — would be more effective than these features that feel like yet another opportunity for a cash grab (with paid-for member accounts nabbing extra flexibility) rather than a service to the user.
If, one day, apps were able to accurately detect and record your most personal-interest swiping habits to better predict who you would like — as in, be an actual matchmaker — we’d probably spend less time swiping and ghosting in favor of more time actually dating.
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Most of the current algorithmic qualifiers don’t have much of a bearing on what kinds of people — personality, look, style, character — you’re looking at. Tinder’s voting-as-ranking system, based on what we know about it, seems far too much like a Black Mirror Season 3, episode 1 popularity contest than a personalized matching system.
For now, we’re left with an imperfect system. There’s plenty about the culture of online dating that would deter any number of people. Ghosting, I would argue, is one of the less offensive ones — a tool of efficiency rather than rejection. But it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the hassle.
