Ghosting and orbiting: ending relationships in the age of hyper-connection

It was the late 1980s, and Sally—in the famous Rob Reiner film—wanting to show how much she wanted to end a relationship, kept ignoring Harry’s recurring, insistent phone calls… only to later change her mind. It’s a “boomer” story: disappearing from someone’s life and cutting off all communication used to mean simply avoiding answering the phone and not opening the door when the doorbell rang.

Today, things are a bit different, and in the age of hypervisibility and hyper-connection, disappearing from someone’s life, as paradoxical as it may seem, is becoming an increasingly common practice, not just for ending romantic relationships but also for walking away from a friendship and professional relationships as well. This phenomenon has two names: ghosting and orbiting.

What is ghosting, and why is it hurtful?

Ghosting is when a person disappears without giving the other person an explanation. Ghosting literally means “disappearing like a ghost” – deleting, blocking, and cutting off all interaction. The word “ghost” evokes the sensation of still feeling someone’s presence in one’s life that no longer exists. It’s a sudden, one-sided decision that leaves the person who is ghosted feeling stunned. It’s tough to predict if the people we care about will ghost us or not. Both men and women do it: they stop answering messages, ignore calls, and block the other person online. Unfortunately, ghosting has become an increasingly common phenomenon in recent years.

Orbiting

A second increasingly common phenomenon is orbiting. This happens when, despite cutting off all contact with someone, a person continues to hover around online, checking messages, viewing your stories, and sometimes even liking posts. Orbiting, therefore, lies in that gray area between constant presence and total absence, creating a sense of uncertainty and, often, frustration. If ghosting is a form of implicit rejection, orbiting can be seen as an attempt to maintain a subtle and ambiguous connection with the other person, often as a form of control and narcissism. How should one deal with someone who orbits? The solution is simple: ignore them.

The damage caused

Ghosting and orbiting are practices of “moral disengagement” that reflect the “fluidity” characterizing certain relationships. How many relationships start and end online, without ever meeting in person? The effects of these behaviors can be very negative. A study on the emotional consequences of ghosting, both for the “ghoster” and the “ghosted,” found that 64.5% of participants admitted to ghosting someone, while 72% reported having been ghosted at least once. Numerous studies highlight how the pain felt by the victims of ghosting and orbiting is real and can have complex consequences. What impacts people’s lives is not only the rejection but the sudden, unjustified rejection. Ghosting doesn’t allow the person left behind to understand what happened, often triggering questions that can become obsessive; while “hovering” around the person abandoned, as in orbiting, fuels false hope, preventing them from moving on. For these reasons, many consider these two phenomena to be forms of psychological violence, extreme consequences of toxic relationships.

A challenge of media education

The fact that ghosting and orbiting are becoming increasingly common ways of ending relationships, including friendships and professional relationships, could have a “social” consequence: the spread of moral disengagement becomes normalized over time. The risk is that people will get used to this sort of behavior and indifference. They will become unfazed by people running away from situations, by subtle control, by ignoring others’ feelings, and by avoiding taking responsibility. What can education do to combat these phenomena?

A recent study –analyzing all linguistic aspects, representations, production, and audiences of dating apps – finds it essential to promote a digital culture that begins with an ethical reflection on users’ emotional responsibility and correct information about these phenomena and their effects.

The educational goals, especially in cases like this, have various aspects to them, because the media influences various aspects of society. “A complex phenomenon – such as online relationships that can lead to ghosting – requires educational interventions of equal complexity, addressing the individual, the community of reference, and the platform industry,” the research concludes. It is a question, therefore, that challenges us all as educators, and it’s not one we can just ignore.