If you’re unfamiliar with the term ghosting, you’re lucky.

According to Urban Dictionary, "ghosting" is “When a person cuts off all communication with their friends or the person they're dating, with zero warning or notice beforehand.” In other words, its when a person just leaves you hanging without any reason why. I think it’s one of the worst things that has happened to socialization.

Unfortunately, living in the age where everyone communicates through short, mostly meaningless conversations, people tend to do this often and don’t typically have a good reason for doing it. Maybe it’s because people are scared to get too close to someone else, or maybe it’s because the conversation just isn’t clicking.

I get that and I don’t have any issues with that. But at least say you have to go, or come up with an excuse. Instead, people just end conversations and leave you “on read."

I understand a lot of these terms may not always be clear, but the moral of the story is that it’s rude to leave a conversation by just ignoring someone for a long period of time. I can’t even list how many times I’ve been in the middle of what I thought was a good conversation with potential for more conversation in the future, only for the other person to leave the message, without any say or comment as to why.

Things like this can be painful for a conversationalist like myself because then I’m stuck wondering which parts of the conversation didn’t go well. I'm stuck wondering why they wouldn’t at least tell me what wasn’t working, and why they suddenly wanted to leave me hanging in the dust. Unfortunately, I always overthink things and being ghosted makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me, or I did something to bother the person.

Ghosting someone is an unnecessary way of ending a conversation, or avoiding a conversation that needs to be had.

Ghosting can harm connections between people, and it can make people question the content of the conversations they’re having. It’s almost like there’s a test period when getting to know someone, and if you don’t prove yourself precisely worthy while getting through that brief period, its game over. They stop giving you the time of day, and make you feel like you’re the one who messed up.

But don’t feel discouraged when this happens to you.

Odds are you just weren’t compatible for a conversation, and there wasn’t really much you could do to make it better. It’s hard to get to know a person and it’s hard to prove yourself worthy enough for them to call you a friend. I get that, I still don’t really know what it takes to make a friend since the real friends I have are friends that I’ve known for a large part of my life.

Making friendships is hard, and keeping conversations is hard. I get that. I get why people ghost someone most of the time, maybe their annoyed or bored, or maybe the person said something they didn’t agree with. But I think it’s time that we as a generation stop hiding behind our fear of honesty, and start allowing ourselves to open up to someone enough to at least tell them why the conversation didn’t work out.

I admit that I myself have been guilty of ghosting too, but I always think about it and I think it’s about time we start addressing the real issues.