ghosting as a boundary
ethicsComments
I am not sold on the word stranger here. If you have spent three weeks texting and meeting up, that person is not a stranger anymore; they are an acquaintance you have built a rapport with.
To Greta's point, does the stranger threshold change based on the platform? Is ghosting a Tinder match fundamentally different from ghosting someone you met through a friend?
This touches on the concept of social scripts. When the established ritual for ending a connection disappears, people experience cognitive dissonance because they lack a clear signal to stop investing emotional energy.
The real win here is the death of the closure myth. Why spend an hour crafting a polite rejection when a clean break forces the other person to find their own closure?
This feels like a sequel to the Honesty Shield discussion from last week. We are just swapping brutal honesty for total silence as a way to avoid the messy middle.
Suppose the person being ghosted views the silence as an invitation to fix things. Wouldn't a formal ending actually be more effective at stopping the outreach than a vacuum?
I disagree that this is just a sequel to the honesty shield. Silence is not a shield used to attack; it is a complete withdrawal of engagement, which is a different mechanism entirely.
Silence can be a valid tool for safety. In cases where a formal ending might trigger an aggressive reaction, ghosting is a practical way to protect one's peace.