There are men I stood beside for years at my kids’ Saturday sport who never heard from me again after my separation. I didn’t ring them. They didn’t ring me either, and a whole layer of my life dissolved without any of us ever saying a word about it, which is a strange thing to admit given how much of my week those men once filled. I have written before about that silence in The Silent Drift. This time I want to come at it from the other side. Because if one of those blokes ever wondered why I went quiet, the answer had almost nothing to do with him.
Let’s start with the fact that I never really learnt how to make friends. I don’t think I ever really had a role model for forming connections. And due to my peripatetic life - moving schools and countries - even if a childhood friendship was created, it wouldn’t have lasted; no WhatsApp or FaceTime when I was young, no Facebook or Instagram that could help at least maintain a low level of connection and communication.
I can now understand why many of the sports Dads might not have reached out; they likely felt uncomfortable injecting themselves into the breakup of a long-term relationship. The research on friend ghosting mostly points away from blame. Psychologist Susan Albers puts it plainly:
“The overarching reason many people ghost is to avoid conflict.”
In more recent times I have learnt to move on from people who don’t respond to messages, or prove flaky in their commitments, not turning up to pre-arranged meetings. Originally I was a little obsessive - what did I say? Was it the last message I sent? I’d scroll back through the chat history searching for signs or clues. Why someone has ghosted me is a pretty lonely question - and one that is impossible for the recipient to answer. The one person who knows is the one who stopped replying, and for some reason they are not saying.
Perhaps - and this has happened recently - they were in a car accident. But maybe actually the friendship wasn’t as strong as I thought; maybe they were just going through the motions, almost as an obligation. So I am left with a few cheery messages, then nothing.
There’s no handbook for ending a friendship. Many of us grew up in households where hard conversations didn’t happen, where conflict was discouraged. Add onto that the pressures of everyday life - house moves, divorce, mental health - and maybe ending a friendship turns into something they cannot find words for. I don’t think ghosting a friend is usually a verdict on the friend. I perhaps originally thought of this in terms of ‘courage’, not having the courage to end a friendship, but I’m not so sure now.
Courage is the word that I landed on from my side when pondering the silent sports Dads. I definitely lacked the courage and the tools to pick up the phone and send a message. Honestly, I had no idea what to say. Silence was easier. I now know that friendships can have a shelf life.
“Most friendships don’t end in a screaming match, stomping of feet, and the protagonist striding away. More likely the opposite, there’s no great climax, no cinematic denouement, just a slow, silent receding of the friendship tide.
Sociologists study this as friendship dissolution. In everyday terms, it feels more like friendship drift, the slow loss of the shared structures that once held the relationship in place. The connective tissue of a shared life gradually dissolves, the text messages, drinks after work and birthday wishes dissipate.”
A lot of friendships only exist because you keep turning up at the same oval or the same office, and when that stops, there’s no scaffolding to hold the thing up. Your friend’s silence might be the same. Maybe it’s grief, or overwhelm, or a new partner who takes up all the oxygen, or an avoidance habit far older than your friendship. None of it means you did anything wrong. As Albers says:
“Ghosting says more about the person doing it than it does about you.”
Psychologists call an ending like this an ambiguous loss: no explanation, no ritual, which is partly why a friend who faded can ache for longer than one who said goodbye. I explored the wider pattern in Ghosting, Fading, and the Unfinished Endings of Modern Friendship. You’re allowed to mourn a friend who is still alive. You can write the ending yourself, on paper if that helps. A poor substitute for a real answer, I know. But it beats staying stuck in the question.
I’d like to think that if one of those sports dads rang me tomorrow and asked why I disappeared, I’d tell him the truth - but even seven years later I don’t assume I’d find it easy. That truth is what I’d offer you about your own vanished friend too: they went quiet because vanishing felt easier than explaining, and they probably couldn’t put the reason into words, even to themselves.
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Ghosting, Fading, and the Unfinished Endings of Modern Friendship
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The same thing happens in new connections, or the potential beginnings of new relationships. It is for some people to drift away without explanation, which might bring conflict.