Why do I ghost people I actually like?

There’s a message on my phone that I’ve been not-answering for eleven days.

It’s from someone I really like. A nice person. A fun person. She sent me a voice note, a whole lovely three-minute voice note, asking how I am and if I want to grab dinner next week.

And I listened to it straight away. Smiled. Thought “aw, I’ll reply properly later, when I have the energy to be a whole human about it.”

That was eleven days ago.

Now “next week” has come and gone. Replying with just “yes dinner!” would be insane, so I’d have to explain why I disappeared. But I don’t have a reason. There is no reason. I was just… watching TV. So now I’d have to invent a reason, which feels even worse than the disappearing. So I don’t reply. And every day I don’t reply, replying gets harder. It’s like a snowball, except the snowball is made of shame and it’s rolling around inside my chest.

And here’s the bit that makes no sense: I like her. I’m not ghosting her because she’s boring or weird or mean. If she were, I’d just leave it. No, I ghost the people I actually want in my life. Which is basically like locking the door on a guest you invited.

So why do I do this?

Okay, so the first person who helped me was a Roman. A very rich, very anxious Roman called Seneca.

Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, a senator, and for a while the advisor to the emperor Nero, which, if you know anything about Nero, was the most stressful job in the ancient world. So this man knew anxiety. Towards the end of his life he wrote a series of letters to a younger friend called Lucilius, basically a self-help newsletter in letter form. The original Substack.

In one of them, Letter 13, he says this:

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

I read that and felt seen. Because that’s the whole ghosting spiral. The actual reply would take forty seconds. “Hey! I’m so sorry, I’ve been terrible with my phone, I’d love to see you.” Done. She’d probably say “haha same!!” and we’d book dinner.

But in my imagination, replying is a whole drama. She’s hurt. She’s annoyed. She’s told everyone I’m a flake. She’s going to read my message out loud to her friends in a sarcastic voice. None of this has happened. All of it is happening in my head, every day, in HD.

Seneca goes on to say that some things torment us more than they should, some torment us before they should, and some torment us when they shouldn’t at all. Ghosting manages all three at once. Honestly, impressive.

So, Seneca’s answer: I’m not avoiding her. I’m avoiding a movie I made up about her.

And the movie is so much scarier than the real thing.

Which makes sense. But it doesn’t explain why the movie is always about awkwardness. Why is “this might be a bit awkward” enough to make me disappear from someone’s life? For that, I needed a guy who spent his whole career studying awkwardness. Like, professionally.

His name was Erving Goffman, and he might be my favourite person in this whole essay.

Goffman was a sociologist in the 1950s and 60s, and he basically spent his career taking notes on all the stuff everyone does but nobody talks about. How we act in lifts. Why we pretend not to hear someone’s stomach rumble. What we do with our faces when we trip on the pavement and look around to check nobody saw. He’s the guy who made awkwardness a science.

His big idea is that everyday life is a performance. In his most famous book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he says we’re all basically actors. We have a “front stage,” where we perform for other people (polite, put together, “oh I’m great, thanks!”), and a “backstage,” where we drop the act, eat crisps over the sink, and don’t answer messages.

And then there’s his essay on something he called “face.” Your face, for Goffman, isn’t your actual face. It’s the image of yourself you’re trying to keep up in front of others: I’m a good friend, I’m reliable, I have my life together. And he says that in every single interaction, we’re quietly working to protect it. Not just our own face, but the other person’s too. Nobody wants anyone to look bad. That’s why we laugh at the boss’s terrible joke and say “no worries!” when someone’s twenty minutes late.

And here’s the bit that made me gasp a little. Goffman says one of the most basic ways we protect face is simple avoidance. If an interaction might make someone look bad, we just… don’t have it. We change the subject, cross the street, take the long way round.

Hi. It’s me. I’m crossing the street.

Because think about it. When I don’t reply for eleven days, replying now threatens my face (I look like a flake), and maybe hers too (it might feel like she wasn’t a priority). So the “safest” move, face-wise, is to never have that conversation at all. I stay backstage. Forever. Eating crisps over the sink.

The problem is that every day of silence makes the scene more awkward, which makes the face-saving move even more tempting, which makes the silence longer. It’s an awkwardness loop with no exit.

But Goffman has a plot twist, and it’s actually comforting. He says other people are also working to save your face. That’s what tact is. When you finally send the “sorry I’m terrible at my phone” message, the other person almost always helps you out. “Omg don’t worry, me too!!” “Haha I’m the worst too!” They want the scene to go smoothly just as much as you do. You’re not walking on stage alone. There’s a whole cast ready to cover for you.

Which means the awkward conversation I’ve been avoiding for eleven days is probably going to last about four messages and end with a heart emoji.

Great. Very reassuring. So why haven’t I sent it yet?

Honestly? Because I needed someone stricter. Someone who’d tell me to get off the sofa. I needed a German.

Immanuel Kant. Possibly the strictest man who ever lived.

He spent basically his whole life in one city, Königsberg, and was so famously regular that, supposedly, his neighbours could set their clocks by his afternoon walk. Same time, same route, every day. Nobody has ever left Immanuel Kant on read for eleven days, because Immanuel Kant replied to everything immediately, probably in alphabetical order.

And he has one idea that, honestly, stung a bit when I read it with my eleven-day-old voice note in mind.

In 1785, he wrote that you should always treat people “never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” In normal words: people aren’t tools. They’re not obstacles, or problems to manage, or things you use to make your own life easier. Every person has their own dignity, their own inner world, and you have to treat them like that’s real.

And then I thought about my ghosting.

Because when I don’t reply, what am I actually doing? I’m protecting my own comfort. I’m saving myself from forty seconds of awkwardness. And the price of that comfort is her: sitting there wondering if she said something wrong, if I’m upset, if she should message again or if that would be “too much.” I’ve turned a real person, with real feelings, into a little problem I’m managing by pretending it doesn’t exist.

Kant would not be impressed. Kant would be standing in my living room, checking his pocket watch.

But here’s what I actually find comforting about Kant, weirdly. He doesn’t care how I feel. He’s not asking me to feel ready, or confident, or in the mood. For Kant, doing the right thing when you don’t feel like it counts even more. So I don’t have to wait for the perfect energy to reply. The perfect energy is never coming. That’s the whole point. You just do it.

And he’s not even saying I have to go to the dinner. I can say no! I can say “I’m a bit overwhelmed right now, can we do next month?” What I can’t do, according to Kant, is just disappear on a person like she’s a notification I swiped away.

So. Why do I ghost people I actually like?

Here’s where I’ve landed. Seneca says it’s because I’m terrified of a scene that only exists in my head, and the real one would be way smaller. Goffman says it’s because I’m trying to save face, mine and hers, and the easiest way to avoid an awkward scene is to never walk on stage. And Kant says that’s all very understandable, but she’s a person, not a problem, so get off the sofa.

And honestly, the thing that got me is how backwards it all is. I ghost people because I like them. Because their opinion of me matters, so the awkwardness feels huge. Nobody agonises for eleven days over a reply to someone they don’t care about.

So the fear is kind of a compliment. But she doesn’t know that. From where she’s sitting, it just looks like silence.

So I did it. I opened the chat, ignored the giant wall of shame, and typed. Forty seconds. Maybe less. She replied in two minutes:

Seneca was right. Goffman was right. Kant was checking his watch.

Thursday it is.

“Nobody agonises for eleven days over a reply to someone they don’t care about.”