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When You've Been Ghosted: What the Research Actually Shows
Being ghosted can hurt out of proportion to how long you knew someone. Research on being ignored helps explain why: a major review describes being ignored, excluded or rejected as something that signals a threat, with even brief episodes producing sadness and anger. Studies of ghosting itself are newer. Across three studies with 1,275 participants, people who had been ghosted reported higher attachment anxiety, and people who had ghosted a partner reported more avoidance. We could not find a study that tested journaling or voice recording after being ghosted, so this page sticks to what the research does show.
On this page
What researchers mean by ghosting
In a 2021 paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Darcey N. Powell, Gili Freedman, Kipling D. Williams, Benjamin Le and Hayley Green define ghosting as a dissolution strategy in which the person ending the relationship cuts off all communication and ignores attempts to reconnect. That definition matters, because it places ghosting inside a much older body of research: the study of what happens when people are ignored.
Why being ignored hurts
In a 2007 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, Kipling D. Williams describes ostracism as being ignored, excluded and/or rejected, and says it signals a threat. In the research he reviews, even brief episodes produced sadness and anger and threatened fundamental needs. The review describes what tends to come next: people act to fortify or replenish the needs that were thwarted. It also reports that chronic exposure to ostracism appears to deplete coping resources.
What three ghosting studies found
Powell and colleagues ran three studies, with 165, 247 and 863 participants. Study 1 was exploratory, Study 2 was a pre-registered replication, and Study 3 used a substantially larger sample. In Study 1, people who had previously been ghosted by a romantic partner reported higher attachment anxiety, and people who had ghosted a partner reported more avoidance. In Study 3, people who had been ghosted reported significantly higher anxiety than those who had ghosted or had no prior ghosting experience. People who had ghosted someone, or had both ghosted and been ghosted, reported significantly higher avoidance than those with no experience of ghosting, and significantly higher destiny beliefs than those who had only been ghosted or had no experience of it.
What this does not show
The ghosting studies are correlational. They show that being ghosted and attachment anxiety tend to go together, not that ghosting causes anxiety, or that anxious people get ghosted more. We read both papers through their indexed summaries, not the full texts, so we have left out the Study 2 results and the effect sizes from the authors' meta-analysis, which the summary does not report. The review on being ignored covers ostracism in general, not ghosting specifically. We could not find a study that tested journaling or voice recording after being ghosted.
What that means if you want to try it
If the research is right that being ignored registers as a threat, part of what keeps the hurt going is that the silence leaves nothing to respond to. Saying the question you never got answered, out loud and somewhere other than a message thread, is one way to give it a place to land. Phi's 60-second voice entries are one place to do that. That is a format, not a tested treatment: neither study above tested voice journaling.
Sources
Powell, D. N., Freedman, G., Williams, K. D., Le, B., & Green, H. (2021). A multi-study examination of attachment and implicit theories of relationships in ghosting experiences. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 38(7), 2225–2248.Williams, K. D. (2007). Ostracism. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 425–452.Say it out loud instead.
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