I’ll be the first to say that ghosting sucks. It’s happened to me, and not even during times when I’m looking for a relationship. Sometimes, I’ll just be talking to someone that I intend on being friends with, and they dip out of a conversation, leaving me wondering where I went wrong. As a victim, it’s not great. However, I don’t find it to be abusive. This will be a response piece to “Ghosting Is Emotional Abuse And Our Generation Needs To Stop Doing It.” I am probably not the first to disagree, but here is my reasoning for why ghosting is not emotional abuse.

Calling ghosting emotional abuse narrows the act of ghosting down to the act of controlling someone. Sorry to burst the bubbles of those who think anything remotely mean is inherently “abusive,” but calling every mean thing “abusive” takes away from what abusive actually means: doing something repeatedly to control someone. In some cases, bullying is also synonymous with abusive. However, if the intent to control someone is not present, then it doesn’t matter if someone “ghosts” you: they are not abusing you.

There are many abusive things in this world. There are child molesters. There are spouse beaters. There are raging bullies. There are psychopaths and sociopaths. There are people out there who are doing genuinely abusive things and need psychological help, but instead, we are wasting our time calling people who ghost “abusive” because we feel like resorting to strong language is the only way that bad people will stop being bad. That is unfortunately not how things work. Calling someone “abusive” brings the “ghoster” up to the level of the spouse-beater, and that is not okay.

Ghosting can be done for many reasons: maybe someone just doesn’t have interest in you. Maybe you’re coming on too strong and the other person thinks the safest way out is to ignore you, like you don’t exist. Maybe they really are just a mean person and don’t care too much for the feelings of others. All of those do not feel good no matter what, but they are not abuse.

Ghosting is only abuse when someone does it for the purpose of controlling another human being or knowingly and repeatedly hurting the feelings of someone they already have an established relationship with. Abusive ghosting only makes sense in the context of defined relationships, not people who are just “talking.”

It’s true that our generation seems to have lost its sense of accountability. I do agree that ghosting isn’t cool and that we need to learn to take responsibility for our actions. We like to pretend that we don’t owe other people anything, but we really do owe other human beings decency, even if we feel that they don’t deserve it for whatever reason. However, just because ghosting is wrong does not mean it is abusive. Calling it abusive is not going to stop people from doing it. It just downplays when people use the word “abuse” for things that are actually abusive.