What it Means to be "Ghosted" Before, During, and After V-Day-

A few years ago, I was watching the 4th hour of the TODAY show recorded on DVR. Co-anchors, Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford, were participating in a segment that enraptured me. Instead of having their chatter weave in and out of earshot, using selective hearing when deciding to finally glance up and see what was in front of me, I made sure to pay attention to this particular segment. During the segment, the producers flashed a combination of acronyms, social media-speak, and Generation Z vernacular on the screen where one would usually find school closings due to inclement weather. One word continues to stick out in my memory until this day. That one word stuck out to me back then, and does so now: Ghosted.

I grew up during the the transition from typewriter-I used my mother’s electronic one for a first grade project that trumped everyone else’s handwritten content – to desktop, and from dial-up to DSL. Instant messaging was a novelty that I was not so quick to catch on to. Sure, it was interesting to communicate in real-time with friends from school, but I much preferred chatting with my fellow Girl Scouts in a Lutheran Church basement, playing on the block with my childhood neighbors, and coming of age during dance lessons where the stage called for dabbling in makeup and the choreography called for conjuring up emotions that were less than innocent. Perhaps this desire for human interaction is what drove my journalistic ambitions.

Which all leads to the word that I still cringe upon hearing: Ghosted. I had no idea what that word was referring to. When people would type “BRB,” I thought they were eating and this was their attempt at transliterating the sound of belching. Ghosting refers to a complete social disconnect – cleansing or a detox of a particular person. I find the act degrading if there is no reason aside from simply not wanting to be in that person’s company. Perhaps the scenario is such that someone has fallen sick, had a difficult day, or just needs some lone time. Hell, I was a serial ghoster in college, always foregoing eminent plans to instead head to the library where I would study, catch a glimpse of a crush, sip on a soy latte, indulge in walks around campus to unwind before dance practice, or stick to my regimented disordered eating patterns that included munching on the free butter and soup oyster crackers all day long.

While in college, I remember learning of a colloquial label for someone who ghosted: a flake. To flake was to opt out of previously agreed upon plans at a moment’s notice. Instead of spontaneity, however, this decision was finalized internally, or intentionally, at the moment that plans were being parlayed. It’s as if you were, for whatever reason, placating the other party when flippantly asserting that you would in fact attend an event that you had no intention of actually showing up to. Flaking was not something I aspired to. Whenever I didn’t have any intention of actually following up with a plan, I let it be known at the outset. I didn’t want to be known as disingenuous. I don’t want to be known as inauthentic.

As I continue to age, I am noticing how finite life is and how despite needing my lone time, and not being a party-goer, I am an extroverted-introvert. I need to be around life. In spite of the most recent findings attesting to the power of succulents and verdant vineyards helping to conjure happiness, I’m not talking about plant life. I need to be around other people. I enjoy working in cafes. I can only seem to focus when there is a buzz around me. I like the morning radio show in my car, and listen to the traffic as if I were en route to a high-demand job over the 59th Street bridge or on a weekend trip to the city for a day of bamboozling with family: brunching, bakery-hopping, and more. The truth is, I don’t drive on the highways just yet, and local driving is slowed down as it is with most routes in the area being one lane in either direction so that if you’re stuck behind a slow car, well, then there’s really no way of circumventing the circumstances. All that said, I have realized the power of intentional socializing. It’s something that entails my blessing-and-a-curse penchant for planning.

I have found myself reaching out to people I have met in every circumstance of my life, using social media and web-interfaced keeping up not as a shield, but instead, as a conduit for engaging in in-person meetings. I have “hit up,” acquaintances of acquaintances, and suggested chilling at some point in time when they would be in my neighborhood, which never was actually in my Long Island haunt but instead in the city of my birth, ironically, the one that they all live in. It is the city that never sleeps even when I do, or at least, when I attempt to. Even so, I am a creature of the daylight hours and once the clock strikes 5 pm, I feel my natural circadian rhythm start to undulate in the direction of wind-down.

Those who I have reached out to are conveniently traveling, but will be back soon. Sometimes, if the person lives internationally and I don’t know them well whatsoever, I could understandably fathom that they would be preoccupied making rare visits to those with whom they are closest. I let that college buddy who lives in Europe slide when she said she would be free to meet on a certain day but never followed through. Her Instagram stories showed her in the place we were to meet.

I had made solid plans with a high school friend who no sooner had made the plan before she cancelled a few hours later. Apparently, a holiday she celebrated that entailed fasting was in the cards and it would make no sense to meet up because what would a social gathering be without food consumption, right? There is my dose of dark humor. But in the same vein, when suffering from an eating disorder, one tends to isolate because meals are so central to the social pursuit.

I made plans to meet with a new relative to join the family who, unbeknownst to me, had invited the link between she and I, my blood relative. Was he a buffer? Did she feel so out of place as to not avoid socializing with me alone? At least she showed up, but with a chaperone or a getaway car.

I always longed to be part of a Friendsgiving and more recently, a Galentine’s Day celebration. While growing up, I always discounted any female friends who had sisters as possible best friends. If I had a sister, I’m positive she would be my best friend and I would have no need for anyone else to place convictions into. It is no wonder then that I was fascinated with that Password Journal I purchased from Toys “R” Us. It was a Barney majestic purple-colored rectangular box that was battery-operated and opened specifically to the sound of my voice and choice of password. Inside, I placed my diary.

As an adult, the phenomenon of making friends is not so much difficult as it is less obvious than when a school-going child, adolescent, and young university-goer is in search of being part of a friend group. Sometimes, the lines are blurred and some may say, crossed, because those who are hired are close in age and become more friends than they are professionals. Sometimes, bosses and superiors at work – something I have not been given the opportunity to experience – are less LinkedIn connections and more Instagram confidantes.

And with that, I know that I do not want to be alone, despite also not wanting to stay out late into the night. I know that I want to host brunches, go on hikes, have a chance at glamping, and cycling around vineyards with a bunch of friends despite not drinking. I know that I want a significant other as well. People tell me to get out there, to not expect that my hand would fall beneath a single guy’s masculine hand when we both reach for the very trendy, seasonal Sumo Orange at Whole Foods Market. And yet how is me getting out there any different? How is it that women who say that once they first met the person that they eventually wed, they had immediately knew that person to be their future spouse? What if that person was in a relationship? How does one know if their own feelings would be reciprocated?

I don’t hate on Valentine’s Day and in fact, I was up to the chapter in Untethered Soul where one is told that being deeply seated in one’s conciseness is to have the heart open to all at all times. And so I kept my heart open. I longed for the long-stem roses my father gifted me, and I derailed the guilt that dwelled in my heart upon its habitual inclination to close when my mother gifted me perfume. I’m a romantic who is deeply afraid of the inexperience of physical romance, the extroverted introvert who cannot fathom not putting her family first but wants to have a person who becomes as close to her as her own parents. 

I’m an adult. I’m an adult and ghosting is juvenile. It has no rhyme or reason. It dwells in an a urban dictionary that is relegated to a web platform. Its pixelated combination of letters doing nothing but hurting true animate beings. Valentine’s Day just passed and even the completely distinct noun used for the supernatural ghost, is a word I don’t care for hearing until Pumpkin Spice season comes around again.