How ghosting affects people who feel the need for closure

Ghosting – ending a relationship with no explanation, and through a sudden lack of replying – is often cited as a scourge of modern dating. Many of us have been ghosted (or, as much as we are loath to admit it, ghosted someone ourselves). Most would say it can be a fairly unpleasant experience, leaving us feeling a need for closure that just doesn’t come.

A new study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships finds that being ghosted affects those with an aversion to ambiguity particularly hard. However, the same people are not opposed to ghosting others – and in fact may even be more prone to doing so.

While most of us dislike uncertainty to some degree, we also vary in just how much we need firm, unambiguous answers, or a “need for closure”. So Christina Leckfor at the University of Georgia and colleagues wondered whether people with a greater need for closure would tend to avoid ghosting others.

The first study involved more than 550 young adults, who rated statements measuring their dispositional need for closure (e.g. “I don’t like situations that are uncertain”), and indicated how likely they were to use ghosting in a number of different situations, including in a relationship of one date or less, with someone they had had a longer relationship with, and with someone they had mutual friends with. They also indicated whether they had used, or been the victim of, ghosting in the past.

Surprisingly, participants who had a greater need for closure were more likely to use ghosting. This association held for both romantic relationships and friendships, although participants were more likely to use ghosting to end a friendship. Having ghosted someone or having been ghosted in the past did not have any effect on the relationship between the need for closure and intentions to ghost.

A second study found that participants were generally more willing to use direct rejection than ghosting to end a relationship. However, this study found no link between need for closure and ghosting or direct rejection. Still, the team point out that this is still contrary to their predictions that a need for closure would be related to reduced use of ghosting. They suggest that these findings might be because the “initiator of ghosting may not experience uncertainty and ambiguity” when they ghost someone: instead, the ambiguity might be experienced by the person being ghosted.

The final study thus looked at the psychological impact of ghosting for those on the receiving end of it. First, participants rated their own need for closure. They then reflected on and wrote about a situation from their own life: either a time when someone had expressed that they wanted to continue a relationship of some kind, a time when someone had ended a relationship by ghosting, or a time when someone had directly rejected them. Finally, participants completed a scale that measured their satisfaction in their basic psychological needs during that experience (e.g. feelings of belonging and control).

Participants who remembered a time they were ghosted reported lower needs satisfaction than those who remembered a time they had been rejected, suggesting that being ghosted can lead to poorer wellbeing. Among people who wrote about being ghosted, those with a higher need for closure reported lower needs satisfaction – though this was also the case among those who wrote about being directly rejected. That is, a need for closure seemed to be related to worse outcomes not only after being ghosted, but also after being directly rejected.

Overall, the results suggest that being ghosted has more of a negative effect for people who need closure. However, if you are the one initiating ghosting, your personal need for closure may be less relevant, as you may have already experienced closure: you are the one making the decision to end the relationship, after all.

It’s worth pointing out that in the final study, participants were only asked about their feelings during the experience of a break-up rather than after. And considering that those with a high need for closure may find themselves ruminating about the experience long afterwards, looking at the longer-term impact of ghosting on mental wellbeing could give further insight into the psychological ramifications of the sudden stopping of contact.