He Stopped Replying and Somehow You Are Still on the Line

Being ghosted creates a peculiar problem: the man has stopped having the conversation, but nobody has informed the conversation.

His last message is sitting there looking perfectly ordinary.

Had a great time too. Talk soon.

Lovely.

Then Tuesday passes. Wednesday wanders through. By Thursday evening, talk soon has begun to look like a phrase requiring further study.

So you wait.

Not desperately, of course. You are simply allowing a reasonable amount of time for a grown man to complete whatever enormous task has prevented him from touching his phone for seventy-two hours.

You give it a little room because work could be busy, his family may need him or his phone may genuinely be broken. By Day 5, though, you are still holding the line and generously inventing circumstances on his behalf.

Perhaps the phone fell into a lake.

One must keep an open mind.

The Possible Explanations Become Very Generous

Ghosting is strange because the entire event is made of nothing happening. There is no argument, no goodbye, not even an unfortunate little speech about timing; the conversation simply walks into another room and never comes back.

Naturally, your mind follows it.

You reread the last exchange looking for the moment when everything went wrong, but unfortunately it contains nothing more alarming than a discussion about Thai food and a laughing emoji.

Could it have been the emoji?

Surely not.

Still, by the fourth reading, the emoji does begin to look rather pleased with itself.

Then comes the question of whether you should text him. Maybe something light. Nothing demanding. Something that says you have barely noticed his disappearance while also checking whether he has died.

Hey! Hope your week is going well 🙂

Very casual.

Practically indifferent.

You type it, remove the exclamation point because it seems too enthusiastic, put the exclamation point back because without it you sound annoyed, then suddenly realize you are editing punctuation for a man who has not spoken to you in six days.

At this point, the punctuation has somehow become more active than the man.

And this is how ghosting quietly takes up far more space than it deserves. Nothing is happening, yet somehow you have spent days thinking about the nothing.

He has gone silent, and you are now doing both sides of the conversation for him.

At Some Point His Phone Survives the Accident

The longer he stays quiet, the more generous the explanations become, mostly because the obvious one is not much fun.

Maybe nothing happened to him at all; maybe he simply stopped replying. This possibility feels terribly rude because it is terribly rude, so your mind keeps trying to improve it. He could be overwhelmed, unsure what to say or planning to reply properly when he has more time.

By Day 8, this man has been given more understanding than some small countries.

Meanwhile, he may be going to work, buying groceries, watching television and using his phone for all sorts of fascinating activities that somehow do not include answering you.

The imaginary lake begins to look less convincing.

And after a while, the whole scene begins to look almost funny. He has quietly wandered off, while you are still standing there explaining why he probably has a perfectly good reason for being gone.

You are not even waiting for a wonderful explanation anymore. At this point, Sorry, I was trapped under a bookcase would be rather refreshing. At least we would know where he had been.

But eventually even the explanation starts to matter less than the fact that he never came back to finish the conversation.

You Are Allowed to Put the Phone Down

Ghosting leaves you with one particularly annoying loose end: nobody actually says it is over.

No I don’t think this is going anywhere.

No I enjoyed meeting you, but...

Not even one of those painfully polite messages that somehow uses the word connection three times.

So part of you keeps waiting because the sentence still feels unfinished.

Surely he has to come back and put a period on it.

Except days pass, and eventually the silence starts doing quite a lot of talking on its own.

The silence still does not tell you why he disappeared. Maybe he lost interest, maybe somebody else appeared, or maybe vanishing is simply what he does when things become uncomfortable. You may never get the answer.

The explanation may simply never turn up. Annoying, yes. But you do not have to spend another week standing at the door waiting for it.

And somewhere around here, you may notice that you have been holding the line for a man who is no longer on it.

That is a rather important detail.

You do not have to work out what happened to his phone, what he was doing all week or which perfectly innocent message supposedly made him disappear. At some point, you can simply notice that the conversation now contains only you.

He stopped replying.

You kept waiting.

And then, one perfectly ordinary day, you put the phone down.

Not because he finally explained himself.

Because if he leaves you holding the conversation alone long enough, you are allowed to be the one who finally hangs up.