Unghosting

The thrill, ache, and strangeness of modern love

It is 2015. I am 24. I live in Mumbai. Tinder has arrived in India, a land rife with arranged marriages. I’m an early adopter. My thumb moves fast:

Creepy – Left

Gym bro – Left

Gun tattoo – Left, quickly.

Then comes Sunflower. Bearded and happy. His photo feels like a friend took it after dinner - lamplit smile, Sufi music in the background.

I swipe right.

We match the next morning. It begins simply, and then speeds up. He calls me Aap and drafts texts that make my face buzz. Replies with big Hahahas to all my attempts at being funny.

We decide to meet. We watch Killa, a Marathi film. I wear a white top and kalamkari skirt. Sunflower is in a printed yellow shirt. There is awkward rambling. I love how Sunflower hates noisy nacho eaters.

When I return home, I think, Nah! This won’t go anywhere.

An hour later, he texts - eager to keep our text relationship alive.

We meet one evening after work. He invites me over that weekend. Then another weekend.

He orders fish for me. Oils my hair. Plus my phone so that it is charged for the next day. One day I arrive wearing a sari. He’s wearing the red kurta I’d left behind.

From the seventeenth floor, the city glitters, when Sunflower kisses the bee. Finally, Mumbai doesn’t feel heavy and lonely.

Next month, when he leaves for a work trip, I don’t hear from him for three days. I hate opening my WhatsApp 43 times an hour. I watch TV shows and sleep too much.

Then he texts: lost track of time. coming back tomorrow.

I let out a sigh and a smile. We resume our long conversation on text and in person.

A month after that, he leaves for a 10 day assignment. The texts dry up. The assignment kept me busy, he says. I forgot your birthday, he says.

I recover from one of the loneliest birthdays I’ve ever had. I watch all three seasons of Jane the Virgin over the next few days, checking WhatsApp after every episode, switching Wi-Fi off and on again. As if his beautiful texts were stuck somewhere in the wires that connect our world.

I send an SMS too. Then an email. Maybe he’s exhausted, too tired to frame a sentence. Maybe his phone was stolen. Maybe it’s the thief who had ‘last seen’ at 11 am today.

Desperate, I call him. When the final ring fades into silence, I know something is off. I wonder if he really exists, or did I make him up in my head.

Rhea Mack via Collosal

When two weeks have passed, my best friend helps me accept that maybe I will never hear from him again. Ever. I didn’t know this is possible. That a person can be deleted from your life. A younger friend asks, ‘OMG he ghosted you?’

Ghosted?

Ghost-ed?

So there is a word for what I just went through? And there are many more people facing it? Naming my experience brought both relief and disgust. Without a name, being ghosted felt like drowning in the dark. With the name, it felt like a normal part of our lives now - discarding each other quicker than we discard Amazon boxes. The emotional horror of it continues to spook me.

Many years later, while watching the show Ted Lasso for the second time, I pause at this joke:

“But more importantly, I believe they need to believe in themselves.”

I am reminded of my dear ghost, Sunflower. Of what it must have been like to not know how to end a relationship. Of the poverty of self-belief or courage, to stop recognizing a human instead of breaking up. It is easy to forgive a person when you realize they are already suffering, for only a suffering person can behave this way.

Many therapy sessions help me to make sense of it. I write about this experience at the Memoir workshop. Forgiving and forgetting has happened.

In 2025, ten years later, I get an email. Dear ghost has subscribed to my newsletter. What in the modern love dystopia is this? The person who didn’t want to hear from me has volunteered to hear from me regularly?

So if you’re reading this: Hi! Long time no see. To me, you’re still human. A flawed human, but not a ghost. I hereby unghost you. 💌

Have you been ghosted? How did you wrap your head around the bewilderment?

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