And then, quite suddenly, they vanish. The last email or message you sent just sits there, unacknowledged, unreplied to. You wait, but nothing comes. You keep waiting, telling yourself that eventually, surely, eventually, they’ll have to respond. But they don’t.
After waiting what you consider to be a reasonable and respectful time, you might quite naturally try again, popping up with a little reminder, especially if the thing you’ve been discussing is time-sensitive or money-sensitive for you. You might mention that time sensitivity or that money sensitivity, hoping that they’ll get the note within the note — that you can’t afford to wait much longer, that you need an answer because something important to you depends on it.
So you send this off, convincing yourself deep down that surely they’ll reply now. At this point, two things might happen.
The much less likely option is that they do finally get back to you and behave as though no time has elapsed at all, either ignoring the length of time they’ve ignored you, or hinting at some great all-consuming busyness at their end that sounds like a veiled rebuke at your audacity for having expected to hear from them any sooner.
And the period of waiting and anticipation just gets longer and longer, weeks teasing out into months. And in all likelihood,
Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t be using the word “ghosting” to describe what’s happening here. The existence of ghosts is still not indubitably proven (despite what some people would have you believe), so a lack of communication from ghosts is not just understandable, but is to be expected. But we KNOW that the people we’re trying to correspond with are real; they have not ceased to exist, but they seem to be trying to behave as though that’s exactly what has happened.
